Archive Work: Alanna Fields and Keisha Scarville in Conversation
Please join Aperture and Printed Matter for a conversation between artists Alanna Fields and Keisha Scarville, who will discuss their respective work and Fields’s recent publication Unveiling (Meteoro Editions, 2025). The conversation will center on the artists’ shared interest in notions of memory that survives across generations.
Alanna Fields’s Unveiling is an exploration of Black queer identity from the 1920s through the 1990s. After seven years of searching for herself in Black archives with scant results, Fields created veils out of translucent Japanese kozo paper dipped in colored beeswax—with some placed directly on canvas—to convey the subtleties and erasures of being Black and queer in America. Unfolding in loose chronological order, the veils slowly become more transparent as we approach the present, a reminder of how time can peel back layers of silence and omission. As the veils thin, what was once obscured begins to emerge, charting a path toward visibility, remembrance, and self-recognition.
Unveiling was a shortlisted title from the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, currently on view at Printed Matter. Now in its thirteenth year, the awards recognize excellence in three major categories of photobook publishing: First PhotoBook, PhotoBook of the Year, and Photography Catalog of the Year.
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Images: Alanna Fields, Kiss Me Make My World Fade Away, 2023, from Unveiling (Meteoro Editions, 2025); Keisha Scarville, from lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound (MACK, 2023)
Alanna Fields (born in 1990, Maryland) is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work both deconstructs and reconstructs Black queer memory and history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields received her MFA in photography from the Pratt Institute and is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant recipient. She has participated in residencies at Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, Fountainhead Arts, and TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, among others.
Keisha Scarville weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the International Center of Photography, New York, Studio Museum of Harlem, and Huxley-Parlour in London.
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