Washington, DC

Artist Statement

Through the nature of knowing someone personally, I find myself able to make my most compelling photographs. My friends and family are my favorite subjects. For this project, I follow the four-generation Shearer family celebrating Christmas, documenting their family on 35mm color-positive and black and white film. While they are not my family, they are a family I have spent a good amount of time getting to know. Their multi-generational connection to Greene, New York, lends itself to an abundance of storied traditions.

The tactile process of advancing a slide projector may feel familiar to some and novel to others. I hope it evokes a sense of nostalgia for looking through old family albums or playing home videos on your tv. The slides tell the story of my journey through Western New York and through a family dynamic other than my own. I hope to bring a sense of place and history through intimate portraits and comfortable scenes.

Going home to my own family for the holidays is something I have opted out of for several years now, but the holidays remain an idealized concept in my head. The Shearers provide an abundance of Christmas traditions to satiate the part of me that wants one big happy family Christmas cheer. This project combines elements of my family’s tradition of viewing old slide film photographs on a projector while documenting another family’s holiday traditions. I act as documentarian and tourist in someone else’s family.

Artist Biography

AB Corson is a Washington, D.C. based photographer and local arts professional with almost a decade of experience photographing people’s everyday lives and biggest moments. When she’s not photographing weddings, portraits, and events, AB runs the only community darkroom in the city at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. After several years of strictly digital image-making, film photography reignited her love for the medium. AB is never caught without a point-and-shoot 35mm film camera. She is dedicated to telling anyone who will listen about the vibrant and historic local arts scene in D.C.

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Washington, DC

Artist Statement

My grandfather was a keeper. More accurately, you could call him a hoarder: his home and land serve as a postmortem testimony to who he was, how he lived, how he spent his money, what he believed. My mother and her siblings have spent the past four years sorting through every individual possession as they attempt to prepare the property to sell. They weigh each item and determine its fate; a physical reality that mirrors how my generation is tasked with approaching our family’s beliefs. With love and sensitivity, I weigh each ideological heirloom and try to sort out what I can adopt as my own, and what I will reject. These works seek to balance compassion towards my family with the conviction that I will live and believe differently, that it’s critical to honestly confront the fruits of our belief systems.

Artist Bio

Holly Harris is an artist from North Carolina, currently based in Washington, D.C. She primarily works in printmaking and oil painting, with occasional ventures into other mediums. Much of Harris’ work illustrates her own grappling with the tensions of relationship: how we relate to self, to others interpersonally, and to one another in a complex, globalized world.

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Washington, DC

Artist Bio

Born in Detroit and based in DC, Amari Hemmings is a self-taught photographer and the founder of Studio Appoline, a creative agency named for the street where his grandmother lived in Detroit. A place Amari grew up coming 'home' to.

While Amari’s client work consists mainly of product and architectural photography, his art also expands to capture people — portraits and candid moments of family and friends.

Artist Statement

As a Jamaican-American born in the States who spent my first 18 years overseas, my life has been a tapestry of diverse experiences shaped by time spent living in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This state of constant upheaval and motion instilled in me a deep appreciation for the concept of 'home' as more than just a physical place. Instead, I find 'home' in the familiar feelings shared with family and friends -- and friends who have become family -- in the places and spaces I explore through the lens.

This project is a visual ode to change, capturing the dynamic interplay between people and their environments. My photography is not just about images; it's about stories. Each photograph is a snapshot of a moment, encapsulating the essence of change and the beauty of the transient. I hope my art challenges people to see beyond the surface and appreciate the deeper connections that bind us to our surroundings and to each other, regardless of where we find ourselves in the world.

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Washington, DC

Artist Statement

My art practice encourages a tactile, textural relationship with 35mm film photography. Treating glossy, reflective film prints like mosaic tiles, my photo collages work to abstract portrait and landscape images of home. While not explicitly depicted in my source images, the images that compose these collages are tied to mothers, what Patricia Hill Collins calls “other mothers,” and matrilineal relationships with nature. As a researcher of 20th-century black and mixed-race family portraiture, I have always been drawn to how domestic intimacies can be represented beyond the body and onto material culture - in the circulation of heirloom objects, land, and photo albums. This new photo collage series looks to my personal and familial connection to plants and bodies of water that mediate my relationship to home and family. Abstracted through collage, these scenes are

Simultaneously aloof and alluring. While “Unmothered” (2024) identifies the spaces that we open ourselves to when self-soothing, dissociating, and/or healing, “Other Mothers” (2024) ties the maternal to plants and flowers that hold positive meaning in my life. Here, an image of my mother’s favorite cone flowers anchor the piece, and an image of the fig tree that lives in my home in DC reminds me of the plants that root me to new home spaces of my own making.

Artist Bio

Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., is a DC-based writer and curator. She is also core faculty for Georgetown University’s Masters's program in the Engaged and Public Humanities and is a research affiliate at the National Humanities Alliance. Her scholarly and interpretative work has appeared in The New York Times, American Quarterly, Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack A Black Family Keepsake (2021 winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction), Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors, and exhibitions at The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, The Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard Art Museums, The Carr Center Gallery, and The 2019 Havana Biennial.

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Washington, DC

Artist Statement

In the mesmerizing visual tapestry woven by Bedford, Ohio native and esteemed photographer Stephen Miller, one can trace the indelible threads of influence from his familial roots and the iconic pages of National Geographic. Raised in a household where both his mother and grandfather nurtured their passion for photography, Stephen Miller embarked on a visual journey that later found its academic anchor at Howard University. Drawing inspiration from his extensive travels across New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, Stephen Miller has seamlessly translated his multicultural experiences into a breathtaking portfolio. With an impressive client list featuring Soho House, Apple, and Oscar de la Renta and his work gracing the pages of renowned publications such as The New York Times, Muna Luchie, and ESSENCE, Stephen Miller stands as a testament to the power of an artist's lens in capturing the diverse tapestry of life.

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Artist Statement

Orange Party, Plastic On The Sofa, and Broken Window are three-part expressions of home, exploring topics of patriarchy, cultural identity, and space. Growing up on two continents, home was never a static condition, and as a kid, I constantly felt I was missing something. Stability and the nuclear family were the suburban Texas norms, and with a constantly revolving door of cousins and a seasonally absent father, neither was present in my everyday. Time at home was ultimately full of a gentle love and hospitality but also loud, lacking, frustrating, and lonely. These images are an attempt to wrestle with those ideas.

Artist Bio

OBIEKWE “OBI” OKOLO is a Nigerian American photographer, multimedia artist, and reluctant writer. He's also the Creative Director at BitterSweet Creative, the Arts & Culture Editor for BitterSweet Monthly, and host of Creative Mornings DC. Raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and San Antonio, Texas, his work, from an early career in architecture to his recent explorations in the written word and portraiture, are most concerned with articulating the reconciling of humanity to itself—mirroring the lifelong reconciliation at play within his own identity as a child of two worlds. Obi’s work has been displayed in various mediums, navigating disciplines such as portraiture, documentary photography, product and graphic design, exhibitions, and print.

Washington, DC

Artist Statement

What are the pillars of your identity? What makes you… you?

And what happens when those things start to fade into the shadows of your mind?

Nancy Worcester, my Grandma, was once a vibrant and social personality. She was never without bright lipstick and curled hair and always wore rings on almost every finger.

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting with my Grandma, loose paper and watercolor palettes strewn across the kitchen table. We spent so many afternoons like that, sometimes mixing up the paintbrush glass and the drinking glass. Her house was filled with paintings she made of her family or landscapes and she inspired me to take art classes at the local cultural center. I learned how to knit sitting on her lap- her ring laden fingers guiding my hands.

More often than not, she would have skeins of yarn beside her and a crochet hook in hand, making quick progress on an afghan or baby blanket. She had scores of crochet stitch books and loved to challenge herself with intricate patterns. She would watch basketball games while working, barely looking down at the hook stitching away.

As I grew older, so did she. The crochet projects became smaller. Paint brushes and yarn gathered dust in the basement. Eventually, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and the beautiful skills she developed during her life slipped away completely.

She now lives in a senior care facility in Ohio.

This project aims to honor the creative pillars of her identity and represent the slow, often painful decline of those affected by Alzheimer’s. All of the yarn and crochet tablecloths used here are from her bag of material that was tucked away in her home years ago.

Artist Bio

Deidre Pulley is an artist and photographer based in Washington, D.C. An Ohio native, she graduated from Kent State University with a degree in Photojournalism before exploring more creative frontiers through conceptual photography and self-portraiture. Drawn to the unusual, her work often experiments with the shape of the human body concerning space and nature.

Her work has been shown in RAW Artist Showcase and Hen House DC, and she was a finalist in the 2022 BitterSweet Invitational Story Festival.

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