The Center for Photography at Woodstock is pleased to announce the jury for its 2023 Woodstock AIR program. The jurors will be Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums at Harvard University; Samantha Box, artist (Woodstock AIR 2019); Candice Hopkins, Executive Director, Forge Project; and Lola Flash, artist (Woodstock AIR 2019). Together, these accomplished and brilliant individuals bring breadth, rigor, and refinement to our review process. We welcome Makeda, Samantha, Candice, and Lola!
Woodstock AIR is the oldest lens-based artist-in-residency for artists of color working with photography. The program aims to expand the critical dialogue around diversity, race, and identity in the context of social justice. Further information about Woodstock AIR 2023 and details about submission guidelines are available here. The final submission deadline is Tuesday, January 31, 2023.
Woodstock AIR 2023 jurors:
Makeda Best is a curator, writer, and historian of American photography. Since 2017, she has served as the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums at Harvard University. Her exhibitions have focused on American documentary practices and themes such as migration and displacement. She is co-editor of Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art (2016). Her book on photography and the Civil War era was published in 2020, and her writing – on various topics ranging from Imogen Cunningham to camera design to Vietnam war era prints – has appeared in numerous journals and exhibition catalogs. Her fall 2021 exhibition was Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography. The exhibition catalogue was awarded the 2022 Paris Photo – Aperture Photography Catalogue of the Year.
Previous exhibitions include Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America and Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art. The late experimental mixed media artist Darrell Ellis is the subject of her upcoming exhibition in Spring 2023. At the University, she also serves as a lecturer for the Department of Art and Visual Studies, where she teaches courses in the photographic history and practice. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a MFA in studio photography from CalArts. @makeda_best
Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. She holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies from the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited, most notably, at the Houston Center of Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Light Work, the Open Society Foundation and the ICP Museum, and is in the collections of En Foco, the Open Society Foundation, Light Work and the Museum of Fine Art Houston. Box has been an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2020/2021) and Light Work, and was a Bronx Museum AIM fellow. She has been awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Photography twice: in 2010 and in 2022. @samantha.box
Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project @forgeprojectny, Taghkanic, NY, and Senior Curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. She was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma; and co-curator of notable exhibitions including the national traveling survey Art for New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now; SITElines.2018: Casa Tomada, SITE Santa Fe; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
She is the recipient of the 2022 Independent Curators International’s Leo Award and will co-curate the 2023 edition of the Armory Show in New York. Notable essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” in the documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life,” in South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020). @candicebhopkins
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 included in important collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA, the Whitney, the National African American Museum of History and Culture, in DC and the Brooklyn Museum. They currently are a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective and on the board of Queer Art. They were an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2019.
Flash received their bachelor’s degree from Maryland Institute and master’s from London College of Printing, in the UK. Flash works primarily in portraiture, often with a 4×5 film camera, engaging those who are deemed invisible. Flash’s practice is firmly rooted in social justice advocacy around sexual, racial, and cultural difference. @flashnine9