"Expanding the Walls 2009: We Come with the Beautiful Things" Exhitbition

The Studio Museum in Harlem

poster for "Expanding the Walls 2009: We Come with the Beautiful Things" Exhitbition

This event has ended.

Expanding the Walls: Making Connections between Photography, History and Community is an annual, seven-month, photography-based program that uses the James VanDerZee (1886–1983) archive—housed at The Studio Museum in Harlem—as a springboard for conversation and art-making. The juxtaposition of the student’s contemporary work with VanDerZee’s timeless photographs in the exhibition illustrates the enduring relationship between photographer and subject.

This year’s exhibition, We Come with the Beautiful Things, is comprised of twelve raw, distinct visual narratives. Using black-and-white photography as a medium, each artist has created a body of work that articulates and documents their surroundings in a cleverly threaded patchwork of unique themes. These young photographers’ themes range from issues rooted in race and sexual identity to abstract perspectives on the body.

You will see black males in knotted and entangled ropes—symbols of bondage and immobility—and a study of the fascination black women have with conceptions of beauty. These images are disturbing in their depiction of issues that persistently and historically affect the black community. Several portrait series exude casual familiarity, revealing the complexities of teenage life and sexuality, or intimacy with close friends and family. Personal, thematic photographs portray the love one feels toward possessions and the anxiety at the inevitability of change. Each photograph is a curious amalgam of the traditional and the modern, giving the show a unique and captivating voice.

The coupling of James VanDerZee’s photographs with the work of these twelve students will provoke interesting dialogues, not only about photographic aesthetics, but also about social and political changes over the course of eighty years. VanDerZee’s photographs embody true documentation, and the intentions of these young artists echo his.

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