2024-2025: Visual AIDS Research Fellowship, Dondi White (1961-1998)
My research fellowship with Visual AIDS explored the life and work of legendary aerosol writer and artist Dondi White (1961–1998). Dondi was known for the subway masterpieces he painted in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on personal and archival interviews, artworks, and photographs, I re-examine Dondi’s work and story through the lens of AIDS cultural histories, attending to themes of visibility, exclusion, and ephemerality.
2018: The Image Centre Doctoral Research Fellowship, Picturing Wild Style: New York City after 1964
My research fellowship at The Image Centre, Picturing Wild Style, was about the role of photography in representing and making visible aesthetic practices in Black life and lives in New York City in the post-Civil Rights era. Referencing a style of graffiti lettering that is deliberately illegible to the public, this project summoned critical inquiry about photography as a cultural platform for aesthetic and community visibility. The Post-Civil Rights generation witnessed a convergence of repressive policies under then-President Ronald Reagan and Mayor Ed Koch. Photojournalism of the city’s street life thus informed its public conception as a site of social and democratic struggle, notable for the structural decay of its built environment and an imbalanced representation of racial politics. Surveying the Black Star agency’s New York pictures of 1977–1984 helped to define what Rachel Malik has described as “horizons of the publishable,” revealing how photojournalists negotiated prevailing modes of representation while striving to make joyous and illicit creative actions seen as something other than an urban problem.
