On View January 31 – May 10, 2026
Opening reception: January 31, 2026, 5-8PM
This exhibition features images by Qiana Mestrich, the recipient of the CPW 2025 Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer of the Year. The prestigious distinction was awarded to Mestrich by a jury consisting of Dawoud Bey, Stephen Shore, and Lucy Sante.
CPW’s new exhibition includes works from the artist’s ongoing collage series, The Reinforcements, which Mestrich began in 2023 to address the absence in visual archives of women of color in the 1970s and ‘80s American workplace. Through found and personal images, Mestrich constructs a speculative archive that places women of color at the center of familiar office environments–fax machines, telephones, office furniture–bringing to light the important roles they have held in the workplace while critiquing their erasure from its visual history.
Qiana Mestrich is a photography-focused interdisciplinary artist, photo historian, writer and SEO professional who lives and works between Brooklyn and New York’s Hudson Valley. Mestrich’s autobiographical artwork and research engages issues around Black, mixed-race identity, motherhood/mothering and women’s corporate labor. She published Decolonization and Diversity in Contemporary Photography: The Dodge & Burn Interviews (Routledge, 2025), and exhibited her series “The Reinforcements” at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York in 2025. Mestrich was born and raised in New York City to immigrant parents from Panama and Croatia.
