EventsThe New Social Environment#613

Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility

Featuring Zoraida Lopez-Diago, Lola Flash, Danielle Nolen and Jessica Holmes

Thursday, July 28, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Curator Zoraida Lopez-Diago, photographer Lola Flash, and activist Danielle Nolen join Rail ArTonic Editor Jessica Holmes for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Raevan Aliyah Senior.

Zoraida Lopez-Diago

A photo of Zoraida Lopez-Diago on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Zoraida Lopez-Diago is a photographer, curator, and activist committed to centering the voices and histories of people from the African Diaspora, with a particular focus on gender and intersectional environmental justice. Zoraida has lectured at institutions including Harvard University and the Tate Modern. In 2022, she co-curated Picturing Black Girlhood, an exhibition that included more than 80 Black women, girls, and genderqueer artists. In 2016, Zoraida co-founded Women Picturing Revolution and co-edited Black Matrilineage, Photography and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press). Zoraida is the Vice President of Communications and Development at The Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming and co-founder of Conservationists of Color.

Lola Flash

A photo of Lola Flash on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo by Becci Manson
Working at the forefront of genderqueer visual politics for more than four decades, photographer Lola Flash’s work challenges stereotypes and gender, sexual, and racial preconceptions. An active member of ACT UP during the time of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Flash was notably featured in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster. Their art and activism are profoundly connected, fueling a life-long commitment to visibility and preserving the legacy of LGBTQIA+ and communities of color worldwide. Flash has work in important collections such as MoMA, the Whitney, and The Museum of the African American of History and Culture. They are currently a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective, and on the Board of Queer Art.

Danielle Nolen

A photo of Danielle Nolen on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
A rising senior at DePaul University, Danielle Nolen studies early childhood education and developmental therapy. She has been a youth leader in A Long Walk Home (ALWH) since 2015. With ALWH, Danielle has traveled to New York, DC, and other major cities, to empower women and girls through her voice and art. In 2019, Danielle was selected as a Monument Lab Fellow, and featured in The New York Times as one of the youngest Black woman activists spearheading change in Chicago. Her photographs have been featured in exhibitions around the country including Picturing Black Girlhood at Columbia University (2016) and Express Newark (2022), Re-Imagining Safe Spaces at New York University (2019), and others. Danielle is now the program assistant for ALWH.

Jessica Holmes

A photo of Jessica Holmes on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment

Jessica Holmes, a co-editor of the Artseen section for the Brooklyn Rail, has also contributed to its pages for over a decade. Her writing has also featured in BOMB, Hyperallergic, The New York Observer, Vanity Fair Spain, among many others, and has been included in over two dozen exhibition catalogues and monographs. Previously, Jessica worked for the Calder Foundation for nearly two decades, including six years as its Deputy Director.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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