Seeing/Seen 

Presented by the Womxn of Color Arts Festival and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art  

Curated by Erica Vital-Lazare

Exhibition Dates: Friday, September 24, 2021 - February 26, 2022

Opening Event: Friday, September 24, 2021, 5 - 8 p.m.

Conversation with Faylita Hicks + Erica Vital-Lazare: Friday, December 3, 2021, 7 - 8 p.m.

Closing Event: Friday, February 25, 2022, 5 - 8 p.m.

Museum Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Working with a range of found images, videos, slides, archived studio and performance photos, and professional photographic portraits, the Las Vegas writer and scholar Erica Vital-Lazare invites us to share the company of Black women. Confronting and correcting both hyper- and invisibility, Seeing/Seen explores the contemporary and historical presence of Black women in their joy, leisure, work, resilience, and infinite spaces of memory and possibility.

The exhibition will include photography by veteran Black Newsweek photojournalist Lester Sloan and works by the local photographers A. Moss, Carl Summerlin, and Jeff Scheid. Las Vegas painter Q’Shaundra James will exhibit a new painting created in collaboration with Vital-Lazare’s research. Grounding her presentation against a complex and powerful palette of colors, Vital-Lazare has shaped Seeing/Seen to reflect “the ways in which the lives of Black women can differ in kind and at the same time reflect a potency born of a shared history, majesty, and hard-earned shaping of future selves.”

Further describing the ideas behind her curation, she writes: “I am ever mindful of Paule Marshall’s evocation of ‘the kitchen mothers,’ how the stories, laughter, warnings of our foremothers and sisters as they gathered to cook, to clean, to sew, to lay out a body on its cooling board, to run a hot comb over a tender-head, straightened the hem of a skirt, took in clothes off the line, or sat down to a game of cards were baptismal rite, casual and life-determining instruction. I want this exhibit to offer such teaching and learning in a glance—in the posture of hand tucked beneath the chin, in an open laugh. I want each face, each historical moment to resound as clarion call for some and the tug of a coat-tail for others, that gentle urgency and coded message Black Women detect and share in the presence of one another provides an exhibit within an exhibit—completing the circuit between us.”