The Sarr Collection

Angèle Etoundi Essamba
Vintage Prints, 1985–2006
Collection of the Sarr Collection

This week, the Sarr Collection highlights a selection of vintage silver gelatin prints by renowned Cameroonian photographer Angèle Etoundi Essamba.

Born in Douala in 1962 and based in Amsterdam, Essamba has spent more than four decades redefining the representation of Black femininity through photography. Working almost exclusively in black and white, her images explore identity, memory, beauty, spirituality, and cultural inheritance through striking compositions centered on gesture, texture, hair, and the body.

The works featured here, all hand-developed by the artist between 1985 and 2006, belong to her celebrated Vintage Prints series and include: Le Café, Tresses, Double Héritage, Kiwi, Présence, and Fragments de Mémoire.

Essamba’s photographs are held in major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

At once intimate and monumental, her work reminds us that portraiture can be both aesthetic and deeply political: an affirmation of presence, dignity, and memory.

Angèle Etoundi Essamba (b. 1962, Douala, Cameroon) is one of the leading figures in contemporary African photography. Based in Amsterdam, her work explores Black femininity, identity, spirituality, and cultural memory through powerful black-and-white portraiture.

Over a career spanning more than four decades, Essamba has developed a distinctive visual language centered on gesture, texture, and the sculptural presence of the body. Her photographs challenge historical representations of African women while affirming dignity, strength, sensuality, and self-possession.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Dak’Art, and the Havana Biennial, and is held in major institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

Germane Barnes .barnes
Migration Column III (detail), 2024
Designed by Germane Barnes, fabricated by Navillus Woodworks
Courtesy of the artist
Image credit: Germane Barnes / Art Institute of Chicago

In Migration Column III, Germane Barnes transforms wood into movement, rhythm, and structure.

Carved from poplar with extraordinary precision, the work merges sculptural form with architectural language. Its deeply contoured surfaces evoke erosion, topography, and the natural flow of material over time, while the split composition introduces a subtle tension between continuity and fragmentation.

As in much of Barnes’s practice, the work exists at the intersection of architecture, memory, and the body. The title Migration suggests movement and transition, while the carved grain of the wood preserves traces of natural history within an intensely contemporary form.

Designed by Barnes and fabricated in collaboration with Navillus Woodworks, the piece reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in craft, material intelligence, and spatial storytelling.

Germane Barnes (b. 1982, Chicago) .barnes is an American architect, designer, and researcher whose work explores the relationship between architecture, identity, memory, and Black domestic life.

Raised in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, Barnes attended Walter Payton College Preparatory High School before earning a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2008 and a Master of Architecture from Woodbury University in 2012. At Woodbury, he received the Thesis Prize for Symbiotic Territories: Architectural Investigations of Race, Identity, and Community.

He is the founder of Studio Barnes and director of the Community Housing Identity Lab at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Working across architecture, furniture, installation, and research, Barnes examines how space can preserve cultural histories while reimagining the future of Black life and community.

Barnes is the recipient of the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize, the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, the Architectural League Prize, and a United States Artists Fellowship.

His work is held in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and has been exhibited internationally at institutions including MoMA, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

© Germane Barnes

Germane Barnes .barnes

Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown (10), 2022
Metal, rope, wood, putty
© Germane Barnes

Germane Barnes builds spaces that remember.

Born and raised in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood on the city’s far west side, Barnes is an architect, designer, and researcher whose work examines how design carries cultural memory and how Black life shapes, and is shaped by, the architecture around it.

He attended Walter Payton College Preparatory High School and earned a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2008, followed by a Master of Architecture from Woodbury University in 2012, where he received the Thesis Prize for Symbiotic Territories: Architectural Investigations of Race, Identity, and Community.

Barnes founded Studio Barnes and directs the Community Housing Identity Lab at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Working across furniture, installation, and spatial research, his practice bridges architecture, sculpture, and social history with remarkable clarity and sensitivity.

That commitment runs through one of his most significant commissions to date: leading the architectural and curatorial vision for the transformation of Emmett Till’s childhood home in Chicago into the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum, where his work shapes the furnishing, signage, programming, and sustainability of the building.

Barnes is the recipient of the Wheelwright Prize from Harvard GSD, the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, the Architectural League Prize, and a United States Artists Fellowship. His work is held in major public collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and has been exhibited at MoMA, SFMOMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

We are proud to live with one of his chairs in the : a work that holds sculpture, architecture, and memory within the same frame.


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La Chute (2005-2006) is the series that brought Denis Darzacq international recognition. Made in the months following the 2005 banlieue riots, the work places young hip-hop dancers from Paris’s working-class neighborhoods in mid-fall against the modernist concrete of the 19th arrondissement and the city’s outskirts. The leaps are real. The bodies are real. There are no digital manipulations, no harnesses, no collage, only a young person suspended for a single second between gravity and refusal. What looks like a fall is also a flight. What looks like helplessness is also defiance. By stripping away narrative and isolating one charged instant, Darzacq turned the post-riot question of who is permitted to occupy public space into a body that, however briefly, does so on its own terms. La Chute won the 1st prize in the Stories category at the 2007 World Press Photo Awards and was central to his receiving the Niépce Prize in 2012. Photographs from the series are held at the Centre Pompidou and other major institutions.

French Photographer Denis Darzacq graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in 1986 and joined Agence VU in 1997.

He began his career as a set photographer for Satyajit Ray, Jacques Rivette, and Chantal Akerman, then contributed to Libération and the French national press for two decades. A 1999 Ministry of Culture commission on French youth opened the line of inquiry that runs through his major series: La Chute (2006), Hyper (2007-2010), and Act (2009-2011). The 2010s brought a turn toward abstraction with Recomposition I and II, Contreformes, and Absence, alongside video work including La Ronde, made with choreographer Thierry Thieû Niang.

Darzacq won the Altadis Prize in 2000, the 1st prize in the Stories category at the 2007 World Press Photo Awards for La Chute, and the Niépce Prize in 2012, one of the most prestigious distinctions in French photography. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou (Musée national d’art moderne), the Fonds national d’art contemporain (FNAC), the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Galerie du Château d’Eau in Toulouse, the FRAC Haute-Normandie, the Caldic Collection in the Netherlands, the agnès b. collection, and the Marin Karmitz collection, among others.

Denis Darzacq
Hyper No. 34, from the series Hyper
2007-2009.
C-print, 14 x 9¼ inches


Denis Darzacq’s Hyper No. 34 (2007-2009) belongs to the series that consolidated his international reputation. Photographed in the supermarkets of Paris and Rouen, Hyper places young street dancers, captured mid-jump, against the saturated geometry of consumer aisles. The bodies are real. The leaps are real. What appears as levitation is a single second of physical defiance held still by the camera. As Darzacq has put it: “Hyper means too much product, too much.”

Born in Paris in 1961, Darzacq graduated from the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in 1986. He began his career as a set photographer for Satyajit Ray, Jacques Rivette, and Chantal Akerman, then contributed to Libération and the French national press for two decades. A 1999 Ministry of Culture commission on French youth opened the line of inquiry that runs through his major series: La Chute (2005-2006), Hyper (2007-2009), Act, Recomposition, and Ensemble.

Darzacq received the Altadis Prize in 2000, and in 2007 was awarded the 1st prize in the Arts and Entertainment Stories category at the World Press Photo Awards for La Chute. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou (Musée national d’art moderne), the Fonds national d’art contemporain (FNAC), the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Galerie du Château d’Eau in Toulouse, the FRAC Haute-Normandie, the Caldic Collection in the Netherlands, the agnès b. collection, and the Marin Karmitz collection, among others. He has published monographs including Ensembles (2001), Le ciel étoilé au-dessus de ma tête (2004), Bobigny centre ville (2006), La Chute (2007), Hyper (2009), and Act (2011). He is a longtime member of Agence VU and is represented by RX in Paris and in New York.

Mathias Bensimon

Untitled (Blue Serie), 2023
Mother-of-pearl and aluminum pigments, oil on canvas
70 × 50 cm

Respiration des mondes, 2024
Mineral pigments and oil on canvas
97 × 130 cm

Mathias Bensimon (b. 1996, Paris) is a French artist trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris whose practice positions light as both substance and intelligence, using it as a primary medium to examine perception and its limits. Working across painting and immersive installation, he develops layered, series-based compositions informed by quantum physics and biology, including sustained collaborations with physicists at the Sorbonne.
Shortlisted for the Dior de la Colle Noire Award (2021) and named by Artsy among five artists to watch, his work has been presented internationally alongside artists including Anish Kapoor and James Turrell, with showings at the Musée d’Orsay and Fondation CAB, Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Major projects include Infinitésimal, Autopoiesis (Galerie Loft, Paris), and Jardin Cosmique, a 21-meter commission for the French Ministry of Culture. He lives and works in Paris. Several of his works are held in the Sarr Collection.

Englewood Is Paris (2015)
cut paper
22in. x 30in.

Amanda Williams’ Englewood Is Paris and Paris Is Englewood (2016) are now part of the Sarr Collection. Laser-cut paper. Maps of two places. Each titled as the other.
Williams is an artist and trained architect (Cornell, B.Arch) whose practice explores the intersection of race and the built environment, examining how urban planning, zoning, development, and disinvestment shape the lives of everyday residents, particularly in African American communities. She uses color and architecture to speak about race, society, and the city.
Englewood is the South Side neighborhood where she staged Color(ed) Theory (2014–2016), painting eight condemned houses in monochrome hues named for the Black urban consumer experience: Harold’s Chicken Shack red, Ultrasheen blue, Crown Royal Bag purple, Newport 100s teal, Pink Oil Moisturizer. The New York Times has since named the series among the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture in the world.
Englewood Is Paris and Paris Is Englewood extend that line of inquiry through language. Williams has spoken about her interest in the disorientation that occurs when names and terminology travel between disparate environments. These two works hold that disorientation in their titles.
Williams is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She has also been recognized by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the United States Artists Ford Fellowship, and Public Art Dialogue. Her work lives in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. With Olalekan Jeyifous, she is co-creating the permanent Shirley Chisholm monument for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. amandawilliams