KENNEDI CARTER, RIDIN’ SUCKA FREE
Ridin’ Sucka Free is a series that came about during conversations surrounding Black life in relation to horsemanship and agriculture. Pop culture’s interest in Black cowboys quickly rose following the release of Lil Nas X’s song Old Town Road…
MARLON RIGGS, BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, 1995
The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating…
WHITNEY HUBBS, SELECT WORKS
My work is born out of looking and being engaged with both past and contemporary photography. It is also born out of unique, individual experiences. The work I’ve encountered lately has been looking at itself in the mirror, and now I’m looking at myself in the mirror per se. A personal kind of self-reflection…
ANDRES SERRANO, PISS CHRIST, 1987
Andres Serrano's Piss Christ sparked outrage in the United States when it was exhibited in 1989. He immersed a crucifix he bought in an antique shop in his own urine. Up close, the crucifix takes on a monumental air, while the work’s dark, provocative mood evokes the end of an era…
RENEE COX, IT SHALL BE NAMED, 1994
In this 1992 work by Cox, a collage in the shape of a crucifix, is intricately constructed from several manipulated photographic negatives…
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, UNTITLED, 1987
Wojnarowicz was in the hospital room when Peter Hujar died from complications related to AIDS. He asked the others who were there to leave so that he could film and photograph his friend for the last time…
ALANA PERINO, IN A CONDITION OF NO LIGHT
In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma…
KALI SPITZER, AN EXPLORATION OF RESILIENCE
An Exploration of Resilience is about identity, culture, strength, vulnerability, and love - these images are about resilience. This work investigates different facets of people and how they explore themselves…
SARA KATHRYN ARLEDGE, WHAT IS A MAN?, 1958
What Is a Man?, whose bemused shrug at that big question manages to encompass onscreen text, preexisting art, time-lapse and science photography, dance, documentary scenes, advertising satire, rhyme, song, even a game of musical chairs…
SUSAN WORSHAM, BY THE GRACE OF GOD
Growing up in Virginia, my childhood field trips were to cigarette factories and civil war battlegrounds, with a brown bag lunch in tow. As a young girl I could often be found holding a dixie cup full of Kool-Aid powder, with a few drops of water, making a sweet sugary paste for finger dipping…
ANS WESTRA, SELECTED WORKS
Born in 1936 in Leiden, Netherlands, Ans first arrived in Aotearoa in 1957 at the age of twenty-one. From the 1960s onwards, she spent long periods of time travelling around the country as a full-time freelance documentary photographer, working mainly for the Department of Education and Te Ao Hou…
SHIGEKO KUBOTA, DUCHAMPIANA: NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, 1976
Inspired by Duchamp's study of motion in his painting, Nude descending a staircase (1912), Kubota uses video to explore movement and temporality. In this single-channel combination of color video, color-synthesized video, and color Super-8 film transferred to video…
LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON, SEDUCTION OF A CYBORG, 1994
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been exploring the impact and potential of nascent technologies in relation to gender, sexuality, and disembodiment for more than 50 years. Her video Seduction of a Cyborg from 1994 presents technology as an infectious disease women are seduced into: The protagonist, a blind woman, agrees to physical treatment that allows her to see images via computer-screen transmission…
JEFFERY JIN, A PORTAL HOME
A Portal Home is the product of a precarious situation that weaves together pictures taken within a six-month period in China, 2023. Portraits of my grandparents in Hefei
collide with photographs from queer encounters in Shanghai to tell a story of compounded origins, redefining everything I once considered home…
SHEN WEI, THIRTEEN DAYS IN 2004
When I first moved to New York City, I started photographing myself. I wanted to document my footsteps along this journey, like a visual diary: to document my first year of life in the city. But I didn’t show these images until 2017…
QUALEASHA WOOD, SELECTED WORKS
Qualeasha Wood is an interdisciplinary artist whose work contemplates realities around black female ontology that do and might exist. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint and internet avatars Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials…
SUZANNE WRIGHT, SELECT COLLAGES
For Joseph Campbell each person’s life can be seen as a mythical journey into the unknown, to discover the true self. It is about leaving behind the familiar, the comfortable and the safe to embark on a process involving danger, confusion and loss…
BERNICE MULENGA, SELECT SELF PORTRAITS, 2019-2022
Bernice Mulenga is a British-Congolese photographer with a distinct aptitude for archiving, documenting and interrogating the world around them…
GUERRILLA GIRLS, REPUBLICANS DO BELIEVE IN A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CONTROL HER OWN BODY, 1992
In the eighties, the Guerrilla Girls decided to incorporate new strategies to the feminism of the seventies, such as humour and stridence, wit and laughter. Although still influenced by the pioneering work of artists such as Judy Chicago and art critic Lucy Lippard denouncing the invisibility of women in the art world…
ENRIQUE CASTREJON, INTIMATE EMBRACES
I create measured drawings, paintings, sound pieces to investigate, question and describe what I see in varied images of pop-culture, architecture, war, senseless acts of violence, disease, fragmented bodies, and death…