This exhibition brings together artists Nydia Blas, Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Michèle Pearson Clarke, who each explore the complexity of Black girlhood through photography.

Here, girlhood is understood not merely as a temporal encounter, but as a framework through which we, regardless of age and gender, are able to engage with the meanings and lives of Black girls. Girlhood is a liberatory and creative space in which one is continually being and becoming, acquiring knowledge of self, and seeking practical ways of coping with and resisting cultural constraints and expectations. From the mundane to the magnificent, Black girls are responding to representations of and attitudes towards class, gender, race, ability, and sexuality. This exhibition displays those responses–the devices, gestures, and embellishments by which Black girls manifest their ideas and create their own, new images of self.

There are no parts honours the interdependence of the lives of girls and women, while recognizing them as distinct experiences. Historically, the designation of girlhood specifically and childhood in general was a privilege limited to particular social classes, and as such there are many Black girls who have become footnotes or are otherwise absent from images, records, and movements which they created, participated in, or resisted. The images presented here flaunt Black girls and girlhood as playful, powerful, forlorn, and fly, each created by a Black woman summoning her own childhood or someone near to her. The artists as well as their images are diasporically-oriented, gazing beyond a North American context towards the southern Black Atlantic, specifically Senegal, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Haiti. The social and cultural conditions of an intercepted girlhood permeate the work of Widline Cadet, whose images conjure memories through doubling and rearward glimpses, as well as the work of Michèle Pearson Clarke whose self-portraits often make manifest what was unattainable for a queer masculine child growing up in Trinidad. Nydia Blas captures on polaroid, over the span of many years, moments of confrontation and intimacy between girls who she is community with–as their mother, sister, and friend, and the work of Jasmine Clarke regularly features her contemplative younger sister in surreal settings and solemn expressions.