As a child, every visit to my Grandmother Velvia’s home included a deep dive into her trove of family photographs.
I’d open a brown wooden cabinet with an iron handle attached and pull out dozens of photo albums, an action that would prompt a bevy of stories from my father, aunties, and cousins, in which there were always discoveries and tiny slivers of insight into family lore. These images from my grandmother’s visual archive, and stories attached to them, are cherished memories of her home that I hold dear.
Two current exhibitions in Raleigh and Durham, Potluck and Portraits and (biān) / (bǐ àn), present tender offerings of love and gathering: one rooted in vernacular photography, the other in portrait photography, each presenting powerful meditations on memory that ask us to pause and reflect on our own familial journeys and how we continue to forge new bonds under the shelter of community.
Photographer Jamaica Gilmer presents a series of large-scale portraits of women creating cherished bonds, breaking bread, and engaging in thoughtful storytelling in this pop-up exhibition on view through September 30. Gilmer’s subjects are Black women and women of color, whom she brought together to photograph in gatherings that revolve around a shared meal.
The exhibition is located in a renovated mixed-use office building originally built in the early 1900s. Over the years, the site was a single-family home, an apartment building, and the Durham Crisis Response Center. In the foyer of the Neoclassical Revival building, visitors are greeted by a grand staircase with text printed on each riser that reads: “and yet, we are still here.”
They always knew how
to provide relief with
recognition and a plate.”
The show is Gilmer’s homage to her great-grandmother, affectionately known as MaSadie, and decorative elements throughout the space evoke the feeling of her home, from the large wooden buffet table standing at the entrance, to candy dishes filled with strawberry, butterscotch and peppermint treats, to vintage cameras that nod to the matrilineal practice of image making that sparked Gilmer’s foray into photography, to the fine china that she inherited from MaSadie.
Throughout the exhibit, portraits and objects are combined to conjure the safety, comfort, and restorative power of a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother’s love.
“They always knew how to provide relief with recognition and a plate,” says Gilmer.
The exhibition of photographs, ephemera, and film footage is part of a larger series of gatherings that Gilmer, the former director and original founder of the Durham-based Black-women arts collective, The Beautiful Project, created in response to her own growing sense of artistic agita.
“I had all this nervous energy that can make an artist feel really sad and scared,” she says. “I realized over time that with this nervous energy, there’s good stuff in there; I just needed a container.”
Potluck and Portraits was born out of this nervous energy.
“I call it my forever series,” she says. Gilmer holds gatherings that are called “episodes,” where the artist brings together a dozen women; each guest brings a favorite dish or a cherished memento that provides comfort and joy. Gilmer photographs them as they forgo small talk and delve deeply into an earnest dialogue guided by prompts on rest, joy, healing, and care.
Throughout the show, a series of large black and white portraits from her first gathering, “episode one,” are featured in a room adorned with blue damask wallpaper. One of Gilmer’s prompts is printed on a window screen in the room: “What makes you feel hopeful?” Visitors are encouraged to record their responses while reading some of the responses that portrait subjects shared.
Across the foyer, another room filled with color portraits taken during Gilmer’s second episode features subjects surrounded by a lush green landscape that almost beckons a deep breath. In this room, Gilmer asks, “How do you show up in the world as a healer?” One answer to this question came from Gilmer herself.
“This was a center for women who experienced domestic violence,” Gilmer says of the house the exhibit is located in. “When we were done with the installation, I walked this whole floor and prayed; I thanked them and the women who crossed this threshold. I felt my mother, my great-grandmother, and my grandmother saying, ‘and yet we are still here, you are ok.’”
Gilmer is currently planning the next presentation of Potluck and Portraits, “episode three,” featuring members of the African American Quilt Circle of Durham (AAQC). Gilmer’s photography is also featured in a reissue of Deborah Willis’s groundbreaking, canonical anthology of Black photographers, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present.
Artists huiyin zhou and Laura Dudu, co-directors of the Chinese Artists and Organizers Coalition (CAO), a global, volunteer-based organization serving Chinese and Sinophone communities, recently mounted an exhibition at Artspace in Raleigh. “(biān) / (bǐ àn)”
Titled (biān) / (bǐ àn), the late-summer exhibition features photography and prose that foregrounds familial history and the evolution of identity. Dudu, based in Durham and zhou currently living in Los Angeles, are both interdisciplinary artists who present their respective works in film, photography, and text to engage in an artistic dialogue on their respective journeys of “becoming.”
With work rooted in queer feminist activism and mutual aid organizing, the artistic collaborators have presented dozens of workshops, performances, and artistic interventions over the last three years that build community and create space for personal, intimate expressions of healing and survival.
“We wanted to explore our family histories,” says zhou. “We’re also exploring the kinship we have between us and how that also channels into our work with our families. Laura and I were thinking about how we can braid these shared themes of kinship, memory, and healing.”
The opening of (biān) / (bǐ àn) introduces viewers to the work with the opening line of the poem, “Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde,” which is printed under the show’s title: “for those of us who live at the shoreline.” Throughout the exhibition, framed photographs depicting bodies of water float from the gallery walls, detached from their frames and mats, reflecting a sense of temporality and impermanence. Here, the scale of the space and the small photographs create a radical juxtaposition: Images are oftentimes abstracted, yet manage to convey deeply introspective moments through the artist’s textual reflections that frame the images.
In one piece, “tiny garden, from waipo’s hands” (2025), zhou offers a partial glimpse of a photograph of zhou’s grandmother tending to herbs. Her arm is the only part of her revealed through the frayed edges of a torn hole in the veil of rice paper that covers the image. Written on the paper’s surface, zhou muses on the relationship with their grandmother:“I once read that to love someone is to attend to a thousand births of a person.”
“To be looked at is a risk and also, to be looked at and photographed is another layer of trust. In that way, photography for us is a relational act of care.”
Through the images zhou and Dudu share, we see an unfolding of their being as they unpack their family legacies while also constructing powerful bonds within the community and the CAO collective. Two walls of images feature the artists together, and in one pair of photographs, zhou points their camera toward an image of Dudu in a photographic tête-à-tête that highlights their artistic bond.
“To be looked at is a risk,” Dudu says, “and also, to be looked at and photographed is another layer of trust. In that way, photography for us is a relational act of care.”
Throughout the exhibition, zhou incorporated objects from their home, including rugs and comfortable chairs, providing space for viewers to sit and reflect on the work. The pair also provide a series of books, zines, and literature in a small pocket library in the exhibition that further contextualizes the show’s themes around solidarity and community.
“Kinship building is something I’m deeply invested in and engaged with through my personal work and collaboratively,” says Dudu. “It’s generative and unfolds in different formats: sometimes it’s through a collaboration with another person and the scale of intimacy expands into a three-person collective, while other times it’s 127 people punching sticky rice together.”
In programming that concludes the exhibition on September 28th, the CAO collective will host “Ciba Punch” at Dix Park, a participatory performance rooted in “queer feminist ethics of care”. The collective invites community members to punch steamed sticky rice into rice cakes in a gesture that harnesses the power of food to connect, sustain, and bring diverse communities together. The duo will bring the Ciba Punch to New York in December, and recently received a Snapdragon grant for a project called One Thousand and One Nights: A Queer Journey of Dreams and Diaspora, a social practice intervention that involves recording, collecting, and archiving 1,001 dreams and bedtime stories.
Both of these photographic presentations—Potlucks and Portraits as well as (biān) / (bǐ àn)—offer the gift of space and time to reflect in distinct, yet deeply resonant ways rooted in biological and cultivated kinships.
“The world is so hard and terrifying,” says Gilmer, “what if we could just go to grandma’s house, right now, today, and feel a bit of safety and familiarity? I’ve known for a long time that my role in the world is not necessarily to provide solutions but to provide pause–the kind of relief in a moment to take a deep breath before you have to go do the thing that you’re called to do.”
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