TLC at the Griffin Museum turns a familiar acronym into a method for making photographs. On view from September 12 through October 25, 2026, the exhibition brings together Alanna Airitam, Harlan Bozeman, Charles H. Lee and Star Montana, each of whom has spent years building relationships with the people they photograph. Curated by Dr. Delphine Sims, the show is part of State of Our Union, a four-part series that examines the United States in its 250th year through landscape, labor and, here, community.
The work moves between family archives and contemporary portraiture, treating care as an ethical stance rather than a sentimental mood. For Star Montana, TLC means piecing together the lives of Chicana matriarchs in her family, balancing tenderness with the weight of trauma and migration. Charles H. Lee photographs Black cowboys and their horses in California and Louisiana, offering quiet images that disrupt the white cowboy myth and the assumption that Black life belongs only to cities.
Harlan Bozeman returns each summer to Elaine, Arkansas, a place marked by the 1919 massacre of Black sharecroppers and by decades of silence. His photographs grow out of listening and repeated presence, not quick access. Alanna Airitam’s formal portraits of members of the Chosen Few motorcycle club emerge from long engagement with a multiracial community whose history intersects with the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panther Party. Her images use dramatic light and richly toned surfaces to place Black riders within a lineage of classical portraiture.
Harsh realities press on all of these lives: patriarchy, family conflict, societal neglect and violence. Yet the photographers do not stage suffering as spectacle. Instead, they create a kind of TLC visibility, a space in which people can appear as complicated, flawed and unresolved without losing their claim to tenderness. The exhibition does not offer a single story of community. It presents four sustained practices in which care shapes how the camera approaches Black people and people of color, both in front of and behind the lens.
Image: Untitled © Harlan Bozeman
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