Fall 2024 Exhibitions Opening Celebration

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1955, Rotimi Fani-Kayode emigrated with his family to London in the 1960s, escaping civil war as political exiles. He relocated to the United States in 1976 to pursue undergraduate art studies at Georgetown University and continued his studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Returning to London in 1983, Fani-Kayode became an active participant in the Black British art scene, exhibiting at London’s Brixton Art Gallery, among other community-oriented spaces, and publishing his photography in magazines such as Ten.8 and Square Peg. In 1988, he became a founding signatory of Autograph (London, UK), a visual arts charity devoted to supporting photographic inquiries into race, rights, and representation.

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Harlem-based, Detroit-born artist Ming Smith attended Howard University in Washington, DC. She was the first female to join Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers in New York in the 1960s and the first black woman photographer included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. She participated in MoMA’s exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography; Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; and The Broad in Los Angeles. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; among other institutions.

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Professor Mark Sealy is Director of Autograph (London, UK) and Professor of Photography, Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London. Author of two celebrated books published by Lawrence Wishart, Photography: Race, Rights and Representation (2022) and Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time(2019), Sealy is interested in the relationship between art, photography, social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has written for many of the world’s leading photographic journals, produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide.

Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anti-colonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. She has participated in public conversations and dialogues with filmmakers. Her curatorial work includes shorts programs at Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry, as well as longer series at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Pan African Film & Arts Festival. Recent writing has appeared in Lux Magazine, The Nation, Artforum, Film Quarterly, and Criterion.