The Lens

Call Me When You Get Home is a body of work drawing from Marissa Nicole Stewart's relationships with the women in her family. It explores the place-making practices and generational worldbuilding that occur within a Black matriarchal household while also celebrating self-constructed identity.

The exhibition seizes fleeting moments, brings forward deeply ingrained memories, and challenges photographic tradition with an experiential eye. The exhibition’s rich images of Black women are revealed in black-bordered prints, allowing the work to sink into the space and envelop the viewer. These flow into the matriarch of the family, the... Continue reading Marissa Nicole Stewart: Call Me When You Get Home

In contemporary society, self-portraiture is an act of reclamation and a declaration of selfhood. Through the use of photography, video, and sculpture, four artists find their voices and express the complexities of their life experiences. Their approach to imagining the self is multifaceted and involves more than just depictions of a physical body; their portraits are reflections of the ancestral stories, cultural traditions, and modern realities that shape their identity.

Through the intimate act of turning the camera towards themselves, they invite the viewer to reflect and bear witness to their existence. This exhibition is a mode of self-discovery,... Continue reading as it was meant to be told: AAPI Artists on Selfhood and Belonging

Blank Generation presents a panoramic visual survey of the tectonically shifting arts culture of the 1970s–80s in downtown New York City, and the raw and dynamic new ideas in music, film, art, literature, graffiti, fashion, queer culture, and performance that it spawned. The bleak and bankrupt NYC of Travis Bickle and Ratso Rizzo felt like a city teetering on the verge of collapse, but in the dive bars, abandoned buildings, and squats of the grimiest neighborhoods, a cultural renaissance was taking place. 

The iconoclastic writers, musicians, scenesters, performers, outsiders, and other creators whose life... Continue reading Blank Generation: Downtown New York 1970s–80s

Not so many years ago, people stopped touching photographs. While print media and brick-and-mortar galleries exist, the common, everyday experience with photographs has drastically shifted from handling prints to scrolling through digital images on a screen. These photographs are easily created, manipulated, and shared, but at a cultural level the sense of intimacy and preciousness that comes with holding an image has been lost.

CORPUS reminds us that a photograph exists in the world, accumulating the history that sticks to all things that take up space. It aims to investigate photographs that re-engage the... Continue reading CORPUS: Exploring the Power of the Physical Photograph

Pick It Up, Turn It Over is rooted in the unrealized potential of the back of the traditional photograph. While at times it’s a space for personal notes about enlarger settings, contrast filters, exposure times, or the characters and setting of a cherished family photograph, the back of the photo has the capacity to reshape its story through dialogue with its front image and requires a spatial interaction with its viewers.

Selected photographers create lens-based, light-based works of art that push beyond the ubiquity of screen-based imagery. By exploring the potential of photographic... Continue reading Pick It Up Turn It Over: Exploring the Power of the Physical Photograph