Modern Families | A Photographic Exhibition

On View: March 5 to May 28, 2019

Opening Reception: March 3, 2019, 2pm – 4pm
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“Modern Families” is a photographic inquiry into who and what constitutes the American family today. Anchored by rarely exhibited work by Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee (1886-1983), it explores the diverse faces and relationships that represent “family” from the points of view of eleven photographers.

The families we are given– blood relations– provide frameworks for the families we choose. Groups united by shared values, lifestyles, or emotional needs – religious associations, sports teams, or community groups, for example – may also be defined and experienced as family. Whether the ones made for us or the ones we make, the families we recognize are networks of support and interaction that contribute to our identities in the larger world.

The works by Van Der Zee, chosen and loaned by Westchester resident Donna Van Der Zee, the photographer’s widow, provide context and vital content for the exhibition. In the 1920s and 1930s, Van Der Zee’s studio was a place where the rising African American middle class in Harlem recorded their lives in carefully composed portraits—photographs which also convey “the connection between self and family, and self and community,” in the words of Deborah Willis.

The contemporary works in the exhibition include both studio-style portraiture and documentary work in which selves and their given or chosen families interact, connect, or disconnect in a variety of encounters between photographer and subject.