Patricia Silva

Catalogue essay for the Joan Mitchell Foundation's 2016 Emerging Artists Grant catalogue.

This spring, the ICP Library launched a collaborative exhibition series co-curated with Brett Suemnicht of the GenderFail Archive. In addition to organizing a variety of curatorial perspectives to investigate gender through archives, Suemnicht invited participating artists Hallie McNeill, Evan Galbicka, and Colin Klockner to reimagine how printed media can experienced experienced in mobile reading rooms.

In and out of the photographs, Nona Faustine’s work is about living: Black life, Black nurture, and the restoration of self and legacy that motherhood bestows. Of all obstacles to raising black and mixed race children in America, the inescapable jurisdiction...

Taking on race, sexuality and body politics at a time when such conversations are completely of the moment, the curators created a dynamic context for multiple concerns to investigate each other.

When prolific photographers turn to words, a particular alchemy is released. Visual tendencies have been flexing, so the expressive spaces balancing on words can unleash a surge of consciousness that visual language can picture, but not always re-create. Is it immediacy that makes writing feel so close to thought, or is it the manner with which we absorb words?

The way we talk, discuss, and value how visual language permeates our society is a dialogue that moves through many variants and referents. Are we reviewing this language through a discourse of aesthetics? Or through a lens of political efficacy, within contexts of art practices, or even through an economic matrix? Can we even discuss contemporary art through only one of these avenues for analysis?

Whether you are considered beautiful or gender transgressive, being female means being automatically met with a variety of challenges magnified by race, class, education, and especially, body type.

An award-winning photographer and 2016 recipient of ICP’s Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism, Muholi presented several portraits from her recent book, Faces and Phases, a clip from Zanele Muholi, Visual Activist co-produced with Human Rights Watch, and a selection of recent self-portraits. Working with and within the communities she belongs to, Muholi situates her work as visual activism out of necessity.

In the afterword for Question Bridge: Black Males in America, Hank Willis Thomas notes that “generations of politicians, activists, and academics…have investigated the ‘plight’ of the African American male, yet far too little is known about the range of internal values and dynamics contained within this group.”

Erika Stone doesn’t remember the exact day but in 1951 the adventurous photographer spent a day at Ellis Island. A German immigrant who entered Ellis Island in 1936 with her parents at twelve years old, Stone didn’t photograph Ellis Island with the gaze of a passerby, but with the awareness of a passer-through.

In Barbara Hammer’s first film, Schizy, 1968, a split lens is used to present a double image from multiple points of view. Multiple vantage points are common occurrences in Hammer’s films, the camera is never relegated the role of a static observer. Wonderfully difficult to describe, Hammer’s films do share this common trait: onscreen and offscreen it’s Hammer’s own physicality that activates visual space.

A list of the top 10 photographs to see in NYC in September 2015, for Baxter Street/Camera Club of NY.

A list of the top 10 photographs to see in NYC in August 2015, for Baxter Street/Camera Club of NY.

A list of the top 10 photographs to see in NYC in July 2015, for Baxter Street/Camera Club of NY.

As matter refined by human thought and shaped by the hand, materials carry meanings, histories, metaphors, and various units of social measurement. Leonor Antunes’ current installation at the Lobby Gallery of the New Museum of Contemporary Art — I stand like a mirror before you — invites us to consider spatial and social interplay among materials.