Deana Lawson, Binky & Tony Forever, 2009
Deana Lawson
Various, 2022–2023
ICA / MOMA
Boston, New York, Atlanta / USA

This exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson, a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of Black life through a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images. Engaging acquaintances as well as strangers she meets on the street, Lawson meticulously poses her subjects in highly staged photographs that picture narratives of family, love, and desire, and create what the artist describes as “a mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen. It’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent.”

This survey exhibition will include a selection of photographs from 2004 to the present, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalogue, featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, historians, and writers.

“I photograph family, friends, and strangers, and I operate on the belief that my own being is found in union with those I take pictures of.” –Deana Lawson

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS
  • Jyll Bradley / Within a Budding Grove
    Sep 21–30, 2023
    Pi Artworks
    London, UK

    Within a Budding Grove takes its title from the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which follows the protagonist’s adolescence and his increasing sense of self-awareness. As a teenager, Jyll Bradley spent a lot of time sitting in her family’s greenhouse in rural Kent observing the play between sunlight and glass, a visual language that has remained integral to her work since the 1980s. (more…)