“Meet the Artist” with Kholood Eid and Arlene Mejorado

On Thursday, September 26, we welcome Kholood Eid and Arlene Mejorado (current Woodstock AIRs) to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Eid will present a blend of autobiographical work and community reporting archiving the Palestinian diaspora’s collective grief, trauma and resistance, presented primarily through photography and interviews. This work stands to challenge the biases of western journalism by reclaiming our narrative, intentionally incorporating our joy and celebrating our beauty, countering the harmful misrepresentation, passive language and overall apathetic nature to the suffering of an entire people. She says, “There’s an urgency driving my desperate need to document our existence in the face of active erasure through preserving personal memories, my family’s history and amplifying individual voices from current and past generations working towards freedom.”

Working in a transborder manner, Mejorado will present imagery from three bodies of work developed in the last 3 years in Los Angeles and Guadalajara where personal, family and community sourced archives function as material that tethers lived experiences and memory to sites of origin and specific landscapes. Her three projects: Breathing Exteriors, Desterrando Archivos, and a landscape holds you still are gestures in repair work, recovering pieces of lost and obscured family stories, reconciling loss, and also playing in the gaps and expanding a new archive through a diasporic experience.

Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

Kholood Eid is a Palestinian American documentary photographer, filmmaker and educator based in New York City. Her work explores the depths of vulnerability, the strength in survival, the beauty in adversity and the intersectionality of identity by blending portraiture, conceptual and reportage practices. In 2020, she (alongside New York Times colleagues) received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for the series “Exploited,” which investigated the explosion of online child sexual assault material. Regular clients include National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME among others and recently, her deep love of dogs lead to the launch of Wet Nose Pawject, a doggy pawtrait business.

Arlene Mejorado is a lens-based artist from Los Angeles working with analog and digital photography, 16mm film, video, archives, zines, and mixed-media installations. Informed by her upbringing in a migrant household, Mejorado is interested in repair work, countering erasure and mending fragments in personal, collective, diasporic, and migration experiences within stories and narratives. Her adolescent experience navigating the San Fernando Valley’s mundane yet spectacularized movie-making landscape as well as her immersion in LA’s subcultural circuits fostered a critical vantage point that continues to influence her practice. Mejorado has been awarded the Center for Photography at Woodstock Artist Residency, Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice fellowship, Aperture Creator’s Lab, DocX fellowship with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Performance Lab at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, New York Portfolio Review, the NALAC artist grant, and the Lucie Foundation Independent Book Award. She holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from The University of California in San Diego.