SABELO MLANGENI, COUNTRY GIRLS, 2003-2009
Glamour and grittiness combine in Sabelo Mlangeni's Country Girls series, an intimate portrait of gay life in the countryside. Mlangeni took the photographs in small towns and rural areas in the Mpumalanga province. Driefontein, Ermelo, Bethal, Piet Retief, Standerton and Sekunda - nodes of mining, agriculture, forestry, and coal-fed power stations….
NONA FAUSTINE, MY COUNTRY
In “My Country,” Faustine confronts and interrogates iconic American monuments, such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty, using her camera to reframe conventional, colonialist perspectives, and reinserting some of the truth and trauma behind these memorialized spaces…
MICHÈLE PEARSON CLARKE, SUCK TEETH COMPOSITIONS, 2018
This three-channel video and sound installation presents a choral symphony structured around the everyday Caribbean oral gesture of sucking teeth. Referred to variously as kiss teeth, steups, chups, and stchoops, to suck teeth is to produce a sound by sucking in air through the teeth, while pressing the tongue against the upper or lower teeth, with the lips pursed or slightly flattened…
LEROY JOHNSON, HOUSE SCULPTURES
A collection of the artist’s house sculptures made “with a documentarian’s eye but a poet’s gaze,” says a gallery statement. His pieces capture a city in transition, peering into its past to underscore the myriad experiences of its present…
KHADIJA SAYE, DWELLING: IN THIS SPACE WE BREATHE
The series was created out of the artist’s personal need for spiritual grounding after experiencing trauma. This work is based on the search for what gives meaning to our lives and what we hold onto in times of despair and life changing challenges. We exist in the marriage of physical and spiritual remembrance...
CARLOS MARTIEL, SEDIMENTO, 2024
I lay on the floor of the gallery with my body near a mound of fertile soil. My mother grabs small handfuls of soil and places them on my body until I am buried. Then she leaves…
SADIE BARNETTE, THE FBI PROJECT, 2016-ONGOING
The FBI Project (2016 — ongoing) employs a variety of material interventions engaging the FBI’s 500-page surveillance file amassed on my father, Rodney Barnette, during his time organizing with the Black Panther Party and helping Angela Davis in her fight for exoneration…
ERIC HART JR, MISTER MISTER, 2023
It was based on the Shakespeare quote, ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ I challenged that in my artist statement and followed up by asking- if all the world’s a stage, for whom is the show?…
NICK DRAIN, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? ON BLACKNESS, IMAGES AND (IN)VISIBILITY, 2020
Nick Drain writes from a theoretical and historical lens on how the imaging of black people has served as a tool of white supremacy and oppression through modern history. Finally, he introduces the concept of selective visibility and "dark sousveillance" as an alternative strategy for black individuals in projected futures…
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, PIER 54: A HUMAN RIGHT TO PASSAGE, 2014
In Pier 54: A Human Right to Passage, Frazier pays homage to her predecessors, documentary photographers of the late 19th century in which she shares the desire to comment on social, political, and economic conditions…
RASHOD TAYLOR, MY AMERICA
My America is an examination of what it's like to live in America as a Black man. The wet plate collodion process was first introduced in the 1850’s. I use this process to connect the past to the present, and to explore the atrocities of slavery, Jim Crow and the institutional and systematic racism that remains so tightly woven into the fabric of American society…
ASIA STEWART, LA NÉGRESSE BLANCHE
La Négresse blanche is a six hour performance that marks the beginning of Stewart's Graft series. The piece is titled after Mayotte Capecia’s book of the same name and draws off of selections from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks…
KWAME BRATHWAITE, SELECTED WORKS
Inspired in part by the writings of Marcus Garvey and the teachings of Carlos Cooks, Kwame Brathwaite's photography created the visual overture for the Black is Beautiful Movement in the late 50's and early 60’s…
MALCOLM PEACOCK, FIVE OF THEM WERE HERS AND SHE CARVED SHELTERS WITH WINDOWS INTO THE BACKS OF THEIR SKULLS, 2024
The central work of Peacock’s exhibition is a sculptural interpretation of a redwood tree trunk with synthetic hair braids forming its bark. It is so realistic in size that it appears as if it was freshly cut and placed in the gallery…
AWOL ERIZKU, SELECTED WORKS
Los Angeles-based artist Awol Erizku’s multi-disciplinary practice encompasses photography, sculpture, painting, installation, film, and sound to shape an artistic language that exists at the intersection of image making and language…
VANESSA CHARLOT, BLACK WOMAN'S SHADOW
In America, she lives in a perpetual state of trauma. To survive, she moves performatively through life, without processing her anguish. She symbolizes what has become the American norm—grieving, coping and healing in the shadows while carrying the burden that is one’s Blackness…
ARTHUR JAFA, APEX, 2013
Jafa has asked, at what scale should we consider the lives of Black Americans? For over thirty years—starting while he worked as a cinematographer—Jafa has compiled notebooks with clippings from a broad array of sources. His notebooks, facsimiles of which are on view nearby, are repositories of references and ideas that serve as reminders of the depth and beauty of Black life in America…
RAHIM FORTUNE, HARDTACK, LOOSE JOINTS, 2024
In the follow-up to his breakout monograph I can't stand to see you cry, Fortune borrows from the language of vernacular and archival photography to interrogate the historical relationship of his community to photography; rooted in the landscape…
AMBER N. FORD, MISTAKEN IDENTITY, 2018
The series, Mistaken Identity, shown in the group exhibition A Color Removed, tackles the question, “Who has the right to safety?” by presenting a collection of images of everyday objects that have been mistaken as weapons and led to the deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement officers…
SANDRA BREWSTER, ROOTS, 2021-2022
In her outdoor photographic installation, Roots, Toronto-based artist Sandra Brewster explores the long history of Black presence in the urban wilderness. Developed during her tenure as Koerner Artist in Residence at Evergreen Brick Works, the photographs document the area’s plant life, greeting visitors as they explore the valley…