Culture Crops: Ohio’s Hidden Gardens and Secret Food Histories

Caroline Gray: Dancing Deeply, Dream is presented from February 24 through March 30, 2026 at Skidmore Contemporary Art. The exhibition gathers a recent body of work devoted to underwater dancers, images that blur the boundary between choreography and current. Within the gallery, viewers encounter photographs that seem to hover between stillness and motion, where bodies drift in luminous suspension and the surface of the water becomes a shifting mirror. California-based photographer Caroline Gray approaches her subjects with a painter’s sensitivity to light, color, and atmosphere. Beneath the surface, gravity relinquishes its authority. Fabric billows, limbs arc and recoil, hair traces calligraphic lines through the water. The dancers’ gestures expand and contract in response to unseen tides, creating compositions that feel both spontaneous and carefully resolved. Gray describes a fascination with the sensuousness of the human body in water, and her images convey that captivation through soft tonal gradations and radiant highlights. The work resonates with the dreamlike experimentation associated with photographers such as André Kertész, while also recalling the theatrical aquatic tableaux of contemporary artists like Christy Lee Rogers. Yet Gray maintains a distinct visual language. Her underwater realm does not function as spectacle alone; it becomes a contemplative space where human presence meets the immensity of the natural world. The figures appear at once powerful and vulnerable, enveloped by a medium that both supports and obscures them. Exhibited in California and the United Kingdom, Gray’s photographs reflect an ongoing dialogue between body and environment. In Dancing Deeply, Dream, water serves as collaborator rather than backdrop. The resulting images suggest that identity, like motion beneath the surface, remains fluid—shaped by light, breath, and the quiet pull of unseen currents. Image: Caroline Gray, Dancing With Light 63 x 57 inches, 2014 photograph © Caroline Gray

The exhibition Alvin Lester: Portraits of Jackson Ward and Beyond presents twenty compelling portraits taken by photographer Alvin Lester in the late 1980s and early 1990s, capturing the heart and humanity of Richmond’s historic neighborhoods. With a keen eye for character and community, Lester turned his lens toward the people and businesses that defined Jackson Ward—once known as the “Harlem of the South”—as well as the surrounding areas of Northside and Church Hill. Through his portraits, Lester documented beauticians, bakers, real estate brokers, and journalists—individuals whose daily work sustained Richmond’s Black business and cultural life. His images reveal the vibrancy and resilience of the city’s Second Street business district, a place that, in the decades following the Civil War, became a cornerstone of Black entrepreneurship and civic pride. Lester’s approach was both personal and historical: he understood that a city’s essence is reflected in those who build, serve, and nurture it. Each portrait is more than a likeness; it is an act of preservation. Lester’s work honors not only the individuals he photographed but also the collective memory of a community that has faced—and transcended—economic, political, and social challenges. His subjects are presented with dignity and intimacy, standing as symbols of endurance and continuity within Richmond’s evolving landscape. Now part of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection, these photographs form a visual archive of a crucial period in the city’s history. Curated by Dr. Sarah Kennel, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on how photography can both record and celebrate cultural heritage. In capturing the soul of Jackson Ward and beyond, Alvin Lester leaves a lasting tribute to the spirit of Black Richmond—a reminder that community, rooted in history, continues to define the life of a city. Image: Robert Wagstaff, Shoe Cobbler (detail), 1989–91, Alvin Lester (American, born 1947), gelatin silver print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts Fund, 2025.96. © Alvin Lester

Now or Never by Josephine Sacabo invites viewers into a realm where memory, longing, and poetic reverie meet the tactile richness of the photogravure process. The exhibition presents twenty new photogravures — including a quartet of hand-colored works — each one a delicate convergence of light, texture, and emotional depth. On view from December 13, 2025 through March 30, 2026, the show also marks the release of Sacabo’s latest book, TAGGED, available in both trade and collector’s editions. Sacabo divides her time between New Orleans and Mexico, two places that deeply inform her visual sensibility. Born in Laredo, Texas and educated at Bard College, she spent years living and working in France and England before settling in New Orleans. Over time, her artistic path shifted: from a more documentary-influenced origin to a deeply personal, introspective style rooted in poetry and metaphor. The landscapes, light, and atmosphere of her homes dissolve into dreamlike visions that feel both intimate and universal. Her work often begins with words. Inspired by poets such as Rilke, Baudelaire, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Juan Rulfo, Sacabo crafts images that serve as visual poems — meditations on identity, memory, and presence. Each photograph becomes a translation of language into light and shadow, where reality is filtered through dream, memory, and longing. This gives her images a suspended quality: familiar, yet removed, real yet uncanny. The photogravure medium — with its rich tonal range, deep blacks, and subtle gradients — lends itself to this sense of inner depth. Hand-colored pieces add another layer of nuance, suggesting emotion, loss, and hope beyond the black-and-white register. In the gallery, the prints appear as fragile relics from an inner world, inviting viewers to step quietly between memory and imagination. For nearly fifty years, Sacabo has built a body of work that transcends traditional photographic boundaries. Her photographs are not mere representations but meditations — beautiful, haunting, and soulful. Now or Never is more than an exhibition: it is an invitation to dwell in silence, to reflect on what lies beyond visible surface, and to discover the poetry inherent in light, shadow, and time. Image: Sacabo: "Eve,” 2025 - © Josephine Sacabo

As Above So Below brings together the distinct yet resonant practices of Melinda Hurst Frye and Jessica Hays in an exhibition that reflects on ecology, perception, and the emotional landscapes shaped by place. Presented at the Griffin Museum’s satellite gallery in the Lafayette City Center Passageway in downtown Boston, the exhibition unfolds in a transitional urban space—an apt setting for work that considers what lies beneath surfaces and beyond immediate sight. Through photography and alternative processes, both artists invite viewers to slow down and look closely, whether at the forest floor or the inner terrain of human experience. Melinda Hurst Frye’s work centers on the often-overlooked understory of the Pacific Northwest. Using a flatbed scanner as a camera, she embraces a deliberate, contemplative method that allows natural materials to register time, touch, and proximity. Her images reveal mosses, fungi, and regenerative cycles that sustain forest ecosystems, offering a quiet meditation on interdependence and stewardship. Rooted in Cascadia, her practice bridges art and ecology, transforming scientific observation into poetic visual narratives that honor resilience and renewal. Jessica Hays approaches landscape from a more internal perspective, blending personal history with broader environmental and psychological concerns. Grounded in the American West, her work examines how land shapes identity, memory, and mental health. Through pigment prints, handmade books, video, and experimental processes, Hays explores themes of trauma, solastalgia, and climate grief, particularly in relation to wildfires and their lasting impact on communities. Her images move fluidly between the personal and the collective, reflecting shared anxieties while preserving intimate emotional truths. Together, Frye and Hays create a dialogue between what is seen and what is felt, between natural systems and human vulnerability. The exhibition’s title gestures toward this balance, suggesting a mirrored relationship between outer environments and inner states. While their approaches differ in technique and tone, both artists share a commitment to attentiveness, care, and the acknowledgment of cycles—destruction and regeneration, loss and restoration. As Above So Below offers a thoughtful encounter with photography as a tool for witnessing and reflection. In a time of environmental uncertainty and emotional strain, the exhibition reminds us that understanding our surroundings—whether beneath our feet or within ourselves—remains essential to navigating a changing world. Image: © Jessica Hayes

Frederic Weber: Revenants, presented at Klompching Gallery from January 12, 2016 through March 31, 2026, brings newly revealed works from the artist’s archive into the present, offering a contemplative meditation on memory, materiality, and time. Long known for his meticulous table-top still lifes, Weber constructs intimate photographic worlds from fragments—ephemera drawn from magazines, journals, newspapers, and his own personal archive. These carefully assembled sets are then photographed full-frame on medium-format film, preserving a tactile richness that resists the speed and disposability of contemporary image culture. At first glance, the photographs are visually seductive, defined by lush color, layered surfaces, and precise compositional balance. Yet beneath this formal beauty lies a deeper tension. The images feel suspended between documentation and invention, as if each object carries a second life shaped by context, memory, and displacement. By re-photographing photographs and printed matter, Weber collapses distinctions between original and reproduction, presence and trace, turning the still life into a site of quiet psychological inquiry. The genesis of Revenants emerged from an act of rediscovery. While searching his archive for a single negative, Weber encountered images long forgotten—photographs that resurfaced unexpectedly, carrying emotional weight that had gone unrecognized at the time of their making. Digitally scanning these analog negatives years later, he found them transformed by distance, both personal and temporal. They appeared like apparitions, familiar yet estranged, speaking not only of the past but of what remained unseen within it. This body of work unfolds as an exploration of the unconscious, imagined as a darkened house filled with hidden rooms. Each photograph offers a brief illumination—an emotion, a longing, a fleeting thought—before receding again into shadow. Together, these images form a subtle dialogue between who the artist was and who he has become, between loss and recovery, forgetting and recognition. Revenants ultimately invites viewers to reflect on their own archives of memory, and on the quiet power of images to return, transformed, when we least expect them. Image: Revenants, Untitled No. 6 (2025) Archival Pigment Print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag © Frederic Weber

Winter Group Exhibition, on view from January 15 through March 31, 2026 at C+C Photography Gallery, ushers in the height of the Palm Beach season with a vibrant survey of classic and contemporary photography. Located at 313 1/2 Worth Avenue, the gallery presents a dynamic installation that bridges eras, genres, and perspectives, offering collectors and visitors an opportunity to engage with masterworks alongside compelling new voices in the medium. The exhibition brings together a distinguished roster of artists whose images have shaped the visual language of fashion, portraiture, documentary, and conceptual photography. Iconic works by Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huene evoke the elegance and sculptural refinement of twentieth-century fashion imagery, while photographs by Norman Parkinson capture a spirit of movement and modern glamour. In dialogue with these historic figures, contemporary practitioners such as Steve McCurry and Dean West expand the narrative through richly colored storytelling and meticulously staged scenes. The selection further explores portraiture and constructed identity through the satirical lens of Alison Jackson, as well as evocative landscape and wildlife studies by Guadalupe Laiz. Architectural fantasies by Laurent Chéhère introduce an element of surreal transformation, while documentary and street perspectives add immediacy and human connection. Together, these works reveal photography’s enduring capacity to oscillate between observation and invention. Installed with an eye toward visual rhythm and thematic resonance, the Winter Group Exhibition celebrates photography as both historical record and evolving art form. By presenting a range of styles—from silver gelatin prints to bold contemporary color compositions—the exhibition reflects the gallery’s commitment to honoring tradition while embracing innovation. In the refined setting of Worth Avenue, this seasonal presentation offers a compelling reminder of photography’s power to define cultural memory and contemporary vision alike. Image: Nathan Coe, Breaking the Rules Again, 2019 © Nathan Coe, courtesy of the C+C Photography Gallery

Evidence II is presented from February 27 through April 2, 2026 at Gail Severn Gallery, bringing together large-format photographs by Laura McPhee and Luis González Palma. Though distinct in subject and atmosphere, their works share a quiet investigation of the traces left by human presence. Landscapes, portraits, and fragments of everyday life reveal how memory, history, and environment intertwine, creating images that invite contemplation rather than quick conclusions. McPhee’s photographs consider the land as a layered record of time. Working primarily in the deserts and remote regions of the American West, she documents environments where geological processes and human intervention intersect. Rivers carve slow pathways through ancient rock while mines, roads, and scattered objects testify to more recent histories. With the clarity of large-format photography, her images reveal minute details: rusted machinery, fragments of glass, discarded toys, and other remnants that quietly narrate stories of labor, settlement, and abandonment. These scenes function as visual chronicles of how landscapes absorb and reflect human ambition, resilience, and ecological consequence. In contrast, González Palma turns his attention toward the human face. His portraits, often rooted in the cultural history of Guatemala, possess a meditative stillness that emphasizes gaze and presence. Faces appear luminous against darkened backgrounds, suggesting both intimacy and mystery. For the artist, the act of looking becomes a psychological exchange in which viewer and subject confront one another across time and experience. Through subtle tonal variations and carefully constructed compositions, the photographs explore themes of identity, memory, and the enduring weight of social and political histories. Seen together, the works in Evidence II form a dialogue between place and person. McPhee’s landscapes reveal environments marked by human action, while González Palma’s portraits reflect the inner worlds shaped by culture and history. Both approaches consider what photographs hold beyond the visible surface: gestures, absences, and unresolved narratives that linger long after the shutter closes. Image: Laura McPhee Evening (Bent Lodgepole), Fourth of July Creek Canyon, Custer County, Idaho, 2011 1/5 Archival pigment print © Laura McPhee

Dean Majd: Hard Feelings, presented at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York from February 4 to April 2, 2026, marks the debut solo exhibition of Queens-based, Palestinian-American artist Dean Majd. Rooted in lived experience and personal loss, the exhibition unfolds as an intimate meditation on friendship, grief, and masculinity. What begins as a response to the sudden death of a childhood friend evolves into a profound visual archive of a tightly knit circle navigating pain, loyalty, and survival within the ever-shifting landscape of New York City. Photographed largely at night using point-and-shoot cameras, Majd’s images move fluidly between moments of tenderness and confrontation. The work captures rituals of belonging alongside flashes of volatility, revealing masculinity not as a fixed posture but as a fragile, emotional state shaped by trauma and love. Majd’s camera does not observe from a distance; it participates. As trust deepens, the boundary between artist, subject, and witness collapses, allowing moments of raw vulnerability to surface without spectacle or judgment. Drawing on the visual gravity of Baroque tenebrism, Majd employs deep shadows and sudden illumination to heighten emotional intensity. This interplay of darkness and light mirrors the psychological terrain of the images themselves, where violence and care coexist. His approach aligns with a diaristic photographic tradition that favors proximity and emotional risk over detached documentation. The result is a body of work that resists romanticization while remaining deeply compassionate, shaped by empathy rather than voyeurism. Created across years marked by personal upheaval and the collective rupture of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hard Feelings mythologizes everyday lives often overlooked or misunderstood. Scars, bruises, and exhaustion become quiet testaments to endurance, while moments of connection suggest the possibility of healing. Majd’s photographs insist on presence—on seeing fully—and offer space for emotions typically suppressed in the name of survival. In doing so, the exhibition becomes both an elegy and an offering: a call to confront pain honestly, and to recognize vulnerability as an essential act of humanity. Image: © Dean Majd

Zainab Aliyu: A litany for past suns, on view at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York from February 4 to April 2, 2026, presents a deeply considered meditation on memory, technology, and the fragile architecture of archives. Through reimagined stereographic images and an immersive installation, Aliyu interrogates how systems designed to preserve knowledge often distort or silence lived experience, particularly within Black communal and familial histories. The exhibition unfolds as both an act of remembrance and a refusal of inherited modes of seeing. Drawing from photographs found in her late grandmother’s home in Nigeria alongside images shared by members of a wider community, Aliyu creates paired works that resist linear narratives. Historically rooted in colonial observation, stereoscopy is reclaimed here as a relational tool, linking images across generations, geographies, and emotional registers. Viewers are asked to lean in, to look slowly and attentively, countering the distant, extractive gaze that has long shaped photographic archives. In this closeness, gaps in memory and meaning become palpable rather than resolved. The exhibition space itself echoes domestic interiors shaped by absence and recollection. Everyday materials—rugs, curtains, fragments of gates, cupboards, and jewelry—appear subtly displaced, their familiar functions interrupted. Earth-toned surfaces and patterned floors evoke kitchens, courtyards, and studio backdrops, while symbolic motifs frame access as something negotiated rather than granted. These spatial gestures extend stereoscopy beyond images, encouraging movement through memory as a layered, bodily experience. Aliyu’s engagement with technology is equally critical and intimate. Early experiments with computational sorting and automated captions revealed the inability of such systems to register emotional depth or historical nuance. Rather than discarding these failures, she incorporates them, allowing misreadings and erasures to surface alongside speculative texts drawn from oral history and personal recollection. This tension stages a dialogue between machine logic and embodied knowledge, underscoring the limits of technological objectivity. Grounded in a lineage of Black feminist archival thought, A litany for past suns offers no definitive record. Instead, it affirms memory as porous, contested, and alive. The exhibition becomes a quiet invocation—honoring what has been lost, questioning how it has been framed, and inviting viewers to imagine futures shaped by care, attention, and shared responsibility. Image: © Zainab Aliyu

Migration Patterns: Brandon Ruffin, presented from January 26 to April 4, 2026 at the Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco, marks Brandon Ruffin’s first solo exhibition at the space. The project unfolds as a quiet yet resonant reflection on the enduring presence of Southern Black culture in Northern California, tracing how histories of movement continue to shape identity, place, and belonging in cities such as Oakland, San Francisco, and Richmond. Rooted in Ruffin’s own family lineage, the work draws from the legacy of the Great Migration, when generations of Black Americans journeyed west carrying language, customs, faith, and memory with them. Rather than presenting a linear historical narrative, Migration Patterns moves poetically, allowing culture to surface through gesture, atmosphere, and lived experience. The exhibition is accompanied by a poem and critical writing that frame the images as a lyrical meditation on home—how it is formed, remembered, and redefined over time. Throughout the series, Ruffin explores a subtle tension between arrival and departure, life and loss. Moments of stillness—both celebratory and mournful—invite viewers to consider migration not only as a physical act, but as a spiritual passage. The photographs linger in spaces where memory resides: in quiet rooms, communal rituals, and fleeting expressions that suggest what endures even as communities evolve. Ruffin’s use of light and color creates an emotional cadence, echoing the rhythms of transition and resilience. Based in Oakland, Brandon Ruffin is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography and film, known for visual storytelling that examines identity and collective experience. His practice bridges personal reflection with communal history, offering images that function as both testimony and mirror. In Migration Patterns, Ruffin contributes a thoughtful voice to contemporary Black photography, honoring lineage while embracing the responsibility of carrying cultural stories forward with care, sensitivity, and imagination. Image: Sunny, 2023 © Brandon Ruffin

SF Camerawork presents Nasim Moghadam: And Yet, We See, an exhibition that transforms acts of looking into gestures of resistance. Installed as a series of sculptural and photographic environments, the work confronts the mechanisms through which power controls visibility, particularly in relation to women’s bodies and voices. Moghadam does not treat photography as a fixed image but as a material language—one that can be carried, fragmented, and reassembled to challenge erasure and reclaim agency. At the heart of the exhibition is a sustained response to the 2022 Iranian protests and the survivors who were blinded by state violence. In Fallen Eyes, images of their eyes are transferred onto magnolia leaves gathered and prepared by hand. As the leaves dry and curl, they retain these gazes, creating an installation that is both fragile and unyielding. Nature becomes a witness, and the collective field of eyes returns the look, reversing the direction of power and refusing disappearance. Questions of visibility continue in Black Bars, a series of veiled self-portraits in which Moghadam places her own body at stake. Layers of fabric obscure her face, not as an act of concealment imposed from outside, but as a choice that asserts control over what can and cannot be seen. The veil functions as a surface of transformation, complicating assumptions about exposure, legibility, and identity. Looking here becomes an ethical encounter rather than a consumptive act. In Noose, Moghadam confronts the physical and psychological threat of oppression through a fabric-based installation incorporating women’s hair and black textiles. What might read as a symbol of violence is reconfigured into a space of mourning, solidarity, and vigilance. Grief is acknowledged without surrender, and vulnerability is held alongside resilience. Throughout And Yet, We See, Moghadam dismantles the imperial gaze by insisting that vision is reciprocal. Her works occupy the space between refuge and exposure, echoing strategies of survival shaped under surveillance. In returning the gaze, the exhibition affirms that to see—and to insist on being seen—is an enduring act of courage. Image: © Nasim Moghadam

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: Epilogues of the Black Madonna, on view at The Print Center from January 23 to April 4, 2026, marks a significant homecoming for the Philadelphia-based artist. This exhibition extends Baxter’s acclaimed photographic series Consecration to Mary into a richly layered installation that merges photography, sculpture, and devotional architecture. Drawing from Christian ritual objects, medieval Marian imagery, and early photographic practices, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a contemplative space where history, memory, and resistance converge. At the heart of Baxter’s practice is a careful reckoning with the visual legacy of representation and power. Her work responds to 19th-century photographs by Thomas Eakins that depict an unidentified Black girl, images now widely recognized as exploitative and deeply troubling. Baxter intervenes in this historical violence by inserting her own body into the frame, positioning herself as both witness and protector. Through this act, she reframes the narrative, rejecting the harmful mischaracterizations of Black girlhood that have long persisted in Western art and social structures. The exhibition’s physical arrangement reinforces its conceptual intent. Daguerreotypes are displayed within prayer kneelers that double as vitrines, inviting viewers into a posture of reflection rather than passive observation. Nearby, large-scale self-portraits form a triptych reminiscent of medieval altarpieces, aligning personal testimony with sacred tradition. This blending of formats underscores Baxter’s interest in devotion as an ethical stance—one rooted in care, refusal, and endurance rather than sacrifice or martyrdom. Grounded in Black feminist thought and transformative justice, Epilogues of the Black Madonna proposes art-making as a practice of protection and repair. Baxter reimagines the Black Madonna not as a distant symbol, but as an active guardian whose presence challenges inherited narratives of harm. Through reverent gestures and deliberate reconfiguration of history, the exhibition opens space for collective healing, remembrance, and the reclamation of sanctity for Black girlhood. Images: Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Consecration to Mary, from the series of the same name, 2021-present, digital print on metallic paper in a velour, leather and metal frame © Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter