Above left: Lola Flash, Steps (Pride); Above right: Naima Green, Pur·suit, 2019
Shared Curiosities: Lola Flash & Naima Green in Conversation
Monday, May 23, 2022
7:00–8:00 EST
The Robert Giard Foundation presents a virtual conversation between photographers Lola Flash and Naima Green. Inspired by a shared curiosity about each other’s work, Flash and Green explore how their photographic practices are grounded in questions of identity and queer visibility. Their conversation will be moderated by writer and artist, Ariel Goldberg.
This online event is free with registration. Donations will support the annual Robert Giard Grant for emerging LGBTQ+ photographers.
(photo credit: Ryan Pfluger)
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 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 MoMA, the Whitney, Brooklyn Museum and the National African American Museum of History and Culture. They are currently a proud member of the Kamoinge Collective, an Advisory Board of the Robert Giard Foundation and on the board at QueerIArt.
(photo credit: Rowan Renee)
Naima Green is an artist, photographer, and educator from New York. Her work is an invitation to participate, witness, and reckon with ways of being that are safe, utopic, and intimate. Green has been featured in exhibitions at Fotografiska NY, Smart Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, ICP, Houston Center for Photography, Bronx Museum, BRIC, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Arsenal Gallery. Her works are in the collections of Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Fleet Library at RISD, ICP Library, MoMA Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art, Olin Library, Smart Museum of Art, Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the Harnish Visiting Artist and Lecturer in Photography at Smith College.
(Photo credit: Diana Solís)
Ariel Goldberg‘s publications include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). They are a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for their book in progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late 20th century. Goldberg’s writing has most recently appeared in Jewish Currents, Afterimage, e-flux, Artforum, and Art in America. Goldberg has been a curator at The Poetry Project, The Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Their exhibition on photography’s relationship to spaces for learning, Images on which to build, opens at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial in September 2022.