An exhibition of documentary and studio photography by Bronx-based artist Samantha Box (b. 1977) is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) from November 20, 2024, through March 23, 2025. Box is known for her arresting and nuanced work that shares stories of lives shaped by the intersections of nationality, race, class, gender and sexual orientation. Samantha Box: Confluences presents a survey of photographs from two series spanning 20 years of work, “Invisible” (2005–18) and “Caribbean Dreams” (2018–ongoing). This presentation marks the first time these series will be on view together. Confluences is the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Washington, D.C. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
In her breakthrough series “Invisible,” Box photographed a community of young people living at Sylvia’s Place, an emergency shelter for unhoused queer youth in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. In 2011, Box began documenting at-risk transgender and nonbinary youth participating in Kiki ballroom pageants and performances. The Kiki scene was established as a queer alternative to traditional ballroom, which excluded members of the Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ community. Her images depict grief, joy, inner conflict and resolve, signifying the intense bonds and chosen families built by young people who often lost their homes and faced discrimination after revealing their sexual identities to relatives and loved ones. Box sees the “Invisible” series as an archive for the community and says of her work, “I’m not here to prove or convince anyone of Black humanity.”
In 2018, Box shifted from documentary photography to a studio-based practice in her ongoing series “Caribbean Dreams.” As the child of a Black Jamaican father and Indian Trinidadian mother who grew up in New Jersey, Box explores her own Black, queer, immigrant experience and diasporic cultural identity. Staging color still lifes that recall the lush tableaux of 17th-century Dutch paintings, Box connects imperial expansion and the long-lasting impacts of colonialism through images of sumptuous ripe fruit and vegetables. These images reveal trade route histories and evoke ideas of survival in foreign lands. Her work also includes collaged elements of family heirlooms, self-portraits and vintage photographs, through which she explores gaps in understanding and generational knowledge.
“The works in Samantha Box: Confluences illustrate how photography can become a generative medium for self-exploration, provocative inquiry and creative discovery,” said NMWA Associate Curator Orin Zahra, who organized the exhibition. “In her layered, textured and poetic images, Box examines the ways that identity is formed in transitional spaces, whether turning her lens on the pockets of New York City that become reinscribed as queer sites or the migration of people, food and knowledge across geographic borders.”
The NMWA exhibition is a collaboration with the Des Moines Art Center, whose separate but related exhibition, Samantha Box: Caribbean Dreams, runs from October 11, 2024, to January 19, 2025. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the NMWA exhibition.
Samantha Box: Confluences
November 20, 2024–March 23, 2025
National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)
1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.
www.nmwa.org
