Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility, 2022

Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility is an exhibition exploring Black girlhood through the work of more than 85 Black women, girls, and genderqueer artists working in photography and film. On view from February 17 through July 2, 2022, at Express Newark in downtown Newark, Picturing Black Girlhood is co-curated by photographers and activists Scheherazade Tillet and Zoraida Lopez-Diago. 

Bringing together iconic image-makers, emerging artists, and young photographers (the artists range in age from 8 to 94 and over half of them are under the age of 18), Picturing Black Girlhood restages intimate Black girl coming-of-age narratives made through the reifying the lens of Black women and genderqueer artists and the real-time experiences and perspectives of Black girls themselves.

“The exhibition situates images made by iconic photographers such as Lorraine O’Grady, Carrie Mae Weems, and LaToya Ruby Frazier side by side with contemporary counterparts made by Black girl artists during the past ten years,” said curator and photographer Scheherazade Tillet. “We are doing a Black Girl Takeover of Express Newark, The City of Newark, and Photography. We are disrupting traditional art-world hierarchies by centering Black girls as subjects, artists, and agents of their own lives.”

“Our show is in direct contrast to a history of photography and film in which Black girls have routinely been oversexualized or adultified,” said curator Zoraida Lopez-Diago. “And as a result, have become more invisible and vulnerable to violence in our society.”

Ambitious in scale and scope, Picturing Black Girlhood is an urgent response to the crisis of racism and sexism that Black girls continue to face, as well as a radical re-imagining of our world through their gaze and those of the adults that were once Black girls themselves. Half of the artists in the exhibition are Black girls under the age of 18 who were identified for the project from art organizations, including A Long Walk Home, The Beautiful Project, Bronx Documentary Center, International Center of Photography, and Perfect Ten.

The signature images, Doris Derby’s Rural Family Girlhood, Mileston, Mississippi (1968) and Ángelina Cofer’s Nineteen, Chicago (2021), were taken more than 50 years apart by Derby, a civil rights activist, and Cofer, a Black Lives Matter and Me Too movement leader. While both images are invitations into the interior lives of Black girls, their distinctions from subject to self-portrait, rural to urban, and black and white to color do not undermine their shared themes but enable viewers to see what is at stake when the Black girl’s gaze is captured versus self-created.