PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | New York City | 2023
Naima Green
– (2023 Jury)
Image © Naima Green. Courtesy of the artist.
““I Keep Missing My Water” is a lens-based series that is rooted in intimate interventions within natural landscapes. It centers figures in lush, drenched, watery environments as sites of leisure, transformation, pleasure, and play. I’m invested in seeing and picturing Black and Queer people commanding waterways and lush landscapes, areas rife with fertile possibilities for revisionings....
I started at the edge of large bodies of water but have moved into thinking about smaller vessels, faucets, urine, carafes, boiling pots of salty water, a bowl on the alter, a glass — places around domestic spaces that are mobile through different homes and thresholds. […] ”
Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures Black and Queer individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. She considers water as fluid and regenerative and presents a window into the relationship between pleasure and the complex experience of the ocean: beauty, leisure, buoyancy, and overwhelm. Oral and written histories, and the archival material essential to uncovering these stories, are critical to her process. By synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames photo-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.
Green has had solo shows at Baxter Street CCNY and Fotografiska, both NY and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; BRIC, Brooklyn; The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, both NY; the Houston Center for Photography; and Gallery Factory, Minneapolis, MN. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Baxter Street CCNY, Bronx Museum, MASS MoCA, Pocoapoco, and Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library, the International Center of Photography Library, the Smart Museum of Art, the Smith College Museum of Art, and the Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Green holds a BA in Urban Studies and Sociology from Barnard College, Columbia University, an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College, and an MA in Art and Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
SPONSORS
This program is supported by Henry Nias Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and Roz Leibowitz.
Thanks to the following artists for their support to Penumbra Foundation and in particular to the 2023 Penumbra Workspace Program:
Cynthia Johnston, Dawn Kim, Donavon Smallwood, Dylan Hausthor, Emiliano Zuñiga, J Carrier, Jenia Fridlyand, Kate Ovaska, Ruth Lauer-Manenti, and Tim Carpenter.