tied some ribbon & a pretty bow around another project today 🤞🏽💜
these are a few images from a series i called BODY/LINE, captured at the 51st International African Arts Festival over the summer. you can read about what this moment meant to me personally on the website in my bio (i’d be eternally grateful if you did)!!
HARLEM!!!
y’all, i am so excited to share that i have my first solo presentation of photographs in New York, opening October 27th. we’ve been running around like crazy for the past few weeks preparing, and i can’t believe it’s only a week and some change out. THE (B)COMING features works from 2019 to today and really documents my ongoing practice of imaging the world through analogue processes.
this comes as part of my residency with Art on the Block NYC, a new organization dedicated to bridging the arts and the people. it will be up for three weeks in Harlem and will be accompanied by a range of programming.
it was an absolute gift to work with @omarjasonfarah to bring this to life. your curatorial eye will always amaze me. i love how moments like these are a direct product of all the late-night conversations we had during summer 2022 when we were living together, tryna make things happen.
and it’s another gift to be able to present this work alongside photographs from the village i see myself working alongside. some are students from IMAG(in)E, others are folks i’ve looked up to for a years, but they all constitute the love i bring to the camera and the many thoughts i be having.
to rsvp for the opening, just click the link in my bio. if you have issues, text/dm me 🫂
opening reception for Edges of Ailey last week. a gift of an exhibition. thank you @joshbegley for letting me experience some of the magic these past few months 🫂 thinking through the Ailey archive will forever be a core memory
time is such a gift. and it’s often hard to come by. that is why we want to extend a huge thank you to Dawoud Bey for joining us for week three of IMAG(in)E. for 50 years, Bey has been confronting pressing questions through photography, paving the way for a visual language that expresses our depth and interiority. in many ways, he’s a poet. and a foundational one at that. students not only got to see prints from his Harlem Redux project in the flesh, but they also received timely feedback on their own photographs. per usual, their work was incredible. and urgent, too.
Portraits of the Department of African American Studies’ graduating cohort, taken one month before four members were banned from @Princeton University and Morrison Hall was shut down in response to their sit-in. Steeped in the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic traditions of movements like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and beyond, @PrincetonAAS students understand that the African American struggle is a global struggle. They understand this has always been the case. See for instance, an archival 1967 SNCC newsletter which links the violent repression of student activists at Texas Southern University to the ongoing struggle in Gaza carried forth by Palestinians.
For those of you who don’t know, this is my Great Grandma Daisy (an absolute queen). One of my favorite memories ever was during freshmen year when we sat together in her basement and talked about her past. After a few hours of jotting down all of the funny, inspiring, and heartbreaking stories, she gave me a FAT stack of papers full of miscellaneous documents from throughout her life. In that was an open letter that she wrote when she was particularly fed up with the trajectory of our country. While I was on the phone with Daisy this morning, I brought up that letter to see how she felt about it all of these years later. What she told me was that despite her words being written during the 1960s, they remain ever so relevant to today. It’s sad to hear someone who grew up under Jim Crow, who overcame a system that was built to oppress, who invested so much effort into the fight for social progress feel as though we are headed backwards. Whether you agree or not, I think that her words are worth hearing. So, I pulled out some of the highlights of her letter for y’all to read and think about while you are (hopefully) doing a lil social distancing!!!
