Austin, 2020

Aperture is pleased to release this limited-edition print by Arielle Bobb-Willis on the occasion of the publication of the artist’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive. Exemplary of Bobb-Willis’s work, Austin (2020) is a vivid statement about color, gesture, and style. Keep the Kid Alive invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaus, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. “I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way,” Bobb-Willis says. “It’s important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.” With a conversation between Bobb-Willis and a dynamic range of artists, stylists, and creatives who speak about keeping their “inner kid” alive, this book captures a definitive young artist’s unconventional worldbuilding.

Austin, 2020
Archival pigment print
16 x 20 in.
Edition of 20
Signed and numbered by the artist

Arielle Bobb-Willis (born in New York, 1994) has published her photography in the New Yorker, I-D, W magazine, British Journal of Photography, L’uomo Vogue, New York magazine’s The Cut, and the New York Times Magazine. Her work is featured in The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019) and an accompanying exhibition, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, Rencontres d’Arles, France, Fotografiska Sweden, and other venues. She is currently based in Los Angeles.