And Is: The Black Florida Project

Elizabeth Alexander argues that "Black creativity emerges from a long series of innovative responses to the death and violence that afflict our communities." And Is: The Black Florida Project by Johanne Rahman traces this evolution in a documentary focusing on Black communities in Florida.

And Is explores the shifting urban and rural landscapes occupied by Black communities throughout the State of Florida. Rahman underscores the urgency and importance of recording neighborhoods in a shifting dynamic flux through environmental, landscape portraits, and architectural images. Paralleling her hometown--- the often-stigmatized Laventille Hills neighborhood of Trinidad and Tobago, the artist articulates a "practice of Diaspora," understanding and documenting these communities that echoes in a call and response to offer an alternative view of working-class Black neighborhoods as a sense of place. The works in this exhibition illustrate the artist’s creative uses of photography to resist colonization, inequality, disenfranchisement, and brutality.

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