Online
On “As We Rise” — Care
Saturday, April 15
2:00 p.m. PDT
Join The Polygon Gallery for an online conversation with Dr. Zun Lee, Kennedi Carter, and Texas Isaiah as they discuss their works currently on view in As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic. Organized by Aperture as a traveling exhibition to accompany the 2021 book of the same title, As We Rise features over 100 photographs from African diasporic culture drawn from the Wedge Collection, which was established by Dr. Kenneth Montague in commitment to championing Black artists.
Advance registration is required.
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Dr. Zun Lee is a Black queer visual artist, physician and educator. Born and raised in Germany, he currently divides his time between Canada and the US. Through lens-based storytelling, archival and socially engaged practice, Lee investigates Black everyday life and family spaces as sites of intimacy, belonging and insurgent sociality against cultural displacement and erasure. Lee is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and has exhibited and spoken at numerous institutions in North America and Europe. His works are widely published and represented in public and private collections around the world.
A Durham, North Carolina native by way of Dallas Texas, Kennedi Carter is a photographer with a primary focus on Black subjects. Her work highlights the aesthetics & sociopolitical aspects of Black life as well as the overlooked beauties of the Black experience: skin, texture, trauma, peace, love and community. Her work aims to reinvent notions of creativity and confidence in the realm of Blackness.
Texas Isaiah is a first-generation visual narrator born in East New York, Brooklyn, and currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. He focuses on developing an ethos that considers how a sitter should be cared for and protected as they find themselves within a visual archive. Texas Isaiah believes it’s a beautiful way to be reminded of the possibility of what’s attainable within ourselves. Despite the medium’s historical violence inflicted on Black communities and communities of color, Texas Isaiah believes photography can be a healing mechanism while allowing others to self-actualize their pleasures. Though he has worked in studios and various indoor settings, his interest in imaging individuals outdoors comes from a personal curiosity about nature and the quotidian.
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Image: Texas Isaiah, My Name Is My Name I, 2016, © Texas Isaiah. From As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021).
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