Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York inaugurates its new location at 154 Ludlow Street with The Reinforcements, a solo exhibition by 2024 Baxter St. Resident Artist and writer Qiana Mestrich.
On view until August 16, 2025, this presentation marks a significant opening chapter in the organization’s new home. Here is the gallery s text on the show.
Begun in 2023, The Reinforcements is a series of photo collages that visualize the labor histories of Black and immigrant women of color in the American corporate workplace that are often untold.
Drawing from archival imagery—including photographs of Mestrich’s own mother, who worked in sales at Rugol Trading Corporation in New York City in the late 1960s—the series examines the everyday realities and systemic inequities that have long defined professional life for women of color.
In response to the lack of robust archives addressing the key roles women of color played in the American workforce, Mestrich uses The Reinforcements to construct speculative visual narratives, collaging images from vintage fashion and office supply magazines to reimagine the histories that have been excluded or erased.
The resulting works are poignant interventions—at once archival and imagined—that challenge viewers to consider whose stories (and roles in important history) get preserved and whose are omitted.
The Reinforcements not only center the lives and labor of its subject, but also insist on the visibility and value of women of color within broader corporate and institutional histories and narratives about who is valued at work and in corporate America.
The Reinforcements stems from Mestrich’s broader, ongoing research initiative, @WorkingWOC: Towards a History of Women of Color in the Workplace, an independent digital archive dedicated to documenting the role of women of color in the U.S. labor force from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the early 2000s. Despite the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965, Black and other women of color continue to face racial and gender discrimination, barriers to leadership, and persistent wage inequality.
Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York
154 Ludlow St.
New York, NY 10002
www.baxterst.org
