Something in the Water: Expanding the Walls 2024 features work from the 2024 participants of the Studio Museum’s teen photography program Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community. With a camera in hand, the program’s sixteen young photographers move through their city in ways they haven’t before, bringing viewers into the transient nature of their day-to-day lives as they traverse – and consider – the vastness of New York City. The photographs in the online exhibition gesture toward the participants’ relationship with adolescence and place, and how they find themselves in the quiet moments of the city and its outskirts – along the water and on the streets.
Something in the Water: Expanding the Walls 2024 is organized by Jayson Overby, Assistant Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem; with Ally Caple, Expanding the Walls Coordinator, Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Expanding the Walls 2024 participants.
Founded in 2001, Expanding the Walls supports the photographic practices of teenage artists based in New York City through workshops, gallery visits, and discussions led by contemporary artists. For over twenty years, the archive of renowned Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) has been the program’s central inspiration. Over the course of the free eight-month program, the young artists also engage with the work of photographers such as Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Texas Isaiah, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems. These artists, alongside Van Der Zee, provide a rich intergenerational dialogue in which the teens can situate their work and practices.
Something in the Water: Expanding the Walls 2024
Jul 31, 2024 – Jul 30, 2025
Studio Museum in Harlem
New York, USA
