Contributing Artists

Cenìnye Harris

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

“When I first picked up a camera, I pointed it at my family–not to protest, but to document out Liberian traditions. Yet whenever I shared those images, they were seen through a prism of protest. The Black body remained a stance, a rebuttal, a performance.

This exhibition borrows from Frank B. Wilderson III and Audre Lorde to confront that imposed gaze. It presents my series, Self Portrait as an American Optimist, against a single portrait of a nine-year-old boy at Patriot’s Day parade. In the series, I photographed the unconcious image still lingering in white America’s mind: a dark, violent creature, taunting, and out of place. Opposite this is the small, unassuming portrait of a boy–me–disrupting the violence elsewhere in the gallery. In his gaze, a fragile, fleeting hope.

Here: A New Discovery asks you to confront this creature, hold his gaze, understand his origin. Then love him out of that violence. “