The Banner Project: Sheida Soleimani at the MFA

Providence, RI-based artist Sheida Soleimani “constructs elaborate and surreal tableaux in her studio. She then photographs these meticulously prepared sets, which incorporate mixed-media backdrops, props, and symbols. Models are central to each scene, but their faces are always hidden, providing an air of anonymity, if not universality, and shifting focus to their gestures” (https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/the-banner-project-sheida-soleimani). The exhibit runs through June 23rd.

Elle Perez: Intimacies at MASS MoCA

Another ongoing exhibit at MASS MoCA features the images of Elle Perez. The award-winning Bronxborn Puerto Rican photographer, who has had solo exhibitions at major museums world-wide, is “known for photographs that capture with a unique sense of ease the intimacy between friends, lovers, bodies, and nature—as well as the intimate relationship between photographer and subject” (https://massmoca.org/event/elle-perez-intimacies/).

Deep Water at MASS MoCA

An ongoing exhibit at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, with no current end date, “is the third of a series of rotating exhibitions drawn from a single private collection of music photography. The photographs here bear witness to a wellspring period in modern jazz and blues, and celebrate Black musicians from the 1950s-‘60s” (https://massmoca.org/event/deep-water/).

Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant

The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, located in Boston, is exhibiting the work of SMFA alumnus Christian Walker who “was a path-making gay Black photographer active in Boston and Atlanta. Walker made compelling and experimental work about queer sexuality, race, and their intersections from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. In the mid-1980s, his artistic practice shifted from documentary photography and portraiture to alternative photographic processes involving multiple exposures, archival appropriation, and the integration of . . . nontraditional materials” (https://artgalleries.tufts.edu/exhibitions/179-christian-walker-the-profane-and-the-poignant).

The exhibit ran through April 21st along with a companion exhibit, As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston.

Breaking the Silence: Nineteenth-Century Indian Delegations in Washington, D.C.

This online exhibition from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard features images of Native American visits

to the U.S. government. It looks at “the context for these visits, the identities of the individuals portrayed, and the use of this type of photography in fashioning an iconic image of the Native American, an image that persisted well into the twentieth century and, in some ways, still survives” (source and additional details here).

Fitchburg You R Beautiful

Photographer Ruben Natal-San Miguel is known for “unconventional and unique” portraits of ordinary people. This online exhibit “is Natal-San Miguel’s tribute to the city and its people” (https://fitchburgartmuseum.org/fitchburg-you-r-beautiful/). The portraits, taken by Natal-San Miguel outside of the Fitchburg Art Museum in 2021, “are a celebration and permanent record of the people that make up the museum’s community.”