Silver Eye

Fellowship Award winner Samantha Box’s series Caribbean Dreams uses constructed, experimental, and unpredictable compositions to examine structures of exodus and diaspora. Her work embodies an exploration of her multiply-diasporic Caribbean histories and identities. Keystone Award honorable mention Karen Lue is a first-generation Chinese American artist whose photographs explore aspects of identity in relation to concepts of grief, loss, isolation, and displacement. Her series 安詳 (or, when i die i want to die peacefully) relays her grandparent’s apartment in its final days and documents the artist and her family at a transitional moment in her family’s history. Hear both artists discuss their work exhibited in Fellowship 23 and join an open discussion about how photography can be a tool to examine, construct, and affirm multiple identities.

Participating Artists

1. Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. She holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies from the International Center of Photography. Her work has been exhibited, most notably, at the Houston Center of Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Light Work, the Open Society Foundation and the ICP Museum, and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Art Houston. Box has been an artist-in-residence at the Center of Photography at Woodstock and Light Work, and was a Bronx Museum AIM fellow. She was awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Photography in 2010 and 2022.

2. Karen Lue is a first-generation Chinese American artist whose photographs explore aspects of identity in relation to concepts of grief, loss, isolation, and displacement. Chronicling her own construction of identity beginning with the search for “home,” she looks for objects, people, and scenes that objectify feelings of irrelevance in environments that are supposed to function as spaces of shelter and refuge. She also examines her identity through self-portraiture and the body as it is shaped by her race, ethnicity, chronic illness, and mental well-being.