PENUMBRA Members Gallery | Cheryl Miller
If We Stand Tall…Recollections of Spirits Past
My practice exists to document quotidian Black life. I create images of African Americans viewed through a variety of everyday positive, relatable, uplifting, and ordinary experiences. I do not make derogatory images. My perspective is informed by my career in neighborhood revitalization and community development.
This series is entitled If We Stand Tall…Recollections of Spirits Past*, with images made about South Jamaica, Queens, from 1978-1998. Yet its familiarity and emotional sensibilities can extend these sentiments to many other communities.
Utilizing natural light on film, I strive to capture the visual simplicity of my subjects by emphasizing highlights and shadows, texture, and placement. My subjects are always in environments familiar to them, and most often, I have a connection to them as well.
My film archive of nearly 40 years strives to show how the very existence of Black life is an act of resistance, as survivors of the Middle Passage (the kidnapping/trafficking of enslaved Africans from Africa to the Americas). We are descendants of ancestors who lived through that horrific journey destined for an enslaved future, Black Codes, Jim Crow, systemic racism, and countless atrocities designed to destroy Black people on every possible level...for hundreds of years.
We stand on our ancestors’ shoulders as witnesses and recipients of the gifts of strength, resilience, promise, and hope. Honoring and revering our ancestors is what allows us to maintain our joy and channel these gifts.
Nina & The Twins, 1992, 20X30, Silver Gelatin © Cheryl Miller
For me, this is done by capturing rites, rituals, and social norms: how we live, work, play, conduct business, raise children, build families and community, create art, educate, invent, worship, entertain, and experience joy, despite it all. This is the resistance to enslavement, institutional racism, and white supremacy. Hence, only the strong survive!
*Title taken from the Yoruba Proverb-“If we stand tall, it is because we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.”
Images © Cheryl Miller
About the Artist
Cheryl Miller is a self-taught photographer & former City and Regional Planner. Her practice exists to create images of African Americans viewed through a kaleidoscope of everyday experiences. Her focus is on the rich visual development of communities, neighborhoods & the people that make them thrive.
Her 40 year film archive explores resistance and resilience as survivors of the Middle Passage, honoring our ancestors as witnesses, recipients of the gifts of strength, resilience, promise, and hope. Ancestor reverence helps to maintain our joy and channels these gifts. These images are of rites, rituals and social norms, resistance to enslavement, institutional racism and white supremacy.
Miller’s work has been exhibited in local, national and international art institutions, and is in the permanent collections of Brooklyn Museum, Schomburg Center for Black Culture and Research, and the Museum of the City of New York.
In addition, she was an Adjunct Lecturer at The Tisch Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU, City University of NY’s Cooperative Education Department and Massasoit Community College’s Emergent Technologies Department. She also taught photography in the NYC Department of Education.
As an active member of the art community, Miller has sat on the Board of Directors of the Queens Council on the Arts and The Cultural Collaborative of Jamaica. She was ShowUp (formally Beacon Gallery, Boston) 2023 Artist In Residence, the recipient of 2023 Mass Cultural Recovery Grant and awarded the 2023 La Luz Workshop Scholarship-Publish Your Photography Book.
In 2024, Miller was a Light Work Artist In Residence recipient. In 2025 she was invited to lecture and engage in several artist’s talks at Leica Gallery Boston, Boston University, and SUNY Oswego.
Currently, Miller is working on her book project, If We Stand Tall…Recollections of Spirits Past, which was nominated for a Star Photobook Dummy Award in 2024.