Women of the African Diaspora: Identity, Place, Migration, Immigration
curated by Aaron Turner, featuring photography by
Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Nadiya I. Nacorda

December 3, 2020–January 30, 2021*

Women of the African Diaspora Panel Discussion
Wednesday, January 6, 3:00 PM PST via Zoom (RSVP link)

Free and open to the public.

*To do our part to help our community in fighting the growing COVID-19 impact, we will close Blue Sky to the public on November 29. Our December/January shows will go up as planned, and while we will remain closed until the freeze in Multnomah County is lifted, we ensure there will be many ways for you to enjoy the new exhibitions virtually. Stay tuned and please, please stay safe!

Blue Sky is pleased to present Women of the African Diaspora: Identity, Place, Migration, and Immigration, an exhibition curated by Aaron Turner and featuring photographic work by Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Nadiya I. Nacorda. Through photography, these three artists reflect upon their experiences navigating contemporary life in the United States and beyond as women of the African Diaspora, while also contributing to the larger conversation surrounding inclusion and exclusion within the visual narrative of art history.

About the artists and curator:

Widline Cadet is a Haitian-born artist. Her practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, immigration, and Haitian cultural identity from within the United States. She uses photography, video, and installations to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hyper-visibility, black feminine interiority, and selfhood. Cadet is a recipient of a 2013 Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, a 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist-in-residence, a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellow, a 2019 Syracuse University VPA Turner artist-in-residence, a 2020 Lit List finalist, the 2020 Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize winner, and a recipient of a 2020 NYFA / JGS Fellowship in photography. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, TIME, and Wallpaper*, among others. Cadet earned a BA in studio art from The City College of New York and an MFA from Syracuse University. She is currently based in New York City as a 2020-21 artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Jasmine Clarke is a photographer from Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by the historical links between nature and mysticism, her images focus on the surreal qualities of our waking world. She is interested in dreams and magical realism, and likes to play with the tension between fiction and reality to create ethereal and alluring images. She graduated from Bard College in 2018 with a BA in photography. Clarke’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she was recently selected for the 2020 Lit List and was a 2020 Critical Mass Top 200 finalist.

Nadiya Imani Loyisa Ntlabati Nacorda is a Blasian artist, photographer and Taurus currently living and working in Syracuse, New York. She was born in Detroit, Michigan to a Filipinx immigrant father and a Xhosa mother. Throughout the year, she travels around the country photographing her immediate family. Her work focuses on notions of intimacy, affection, displacement, secrecy, and generational trauma within the context of Black and POC immigrant-American family life. Nacorda received her BFA in Photography & Film from VCU Arts in Richmond, Virginia. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Art Photography at Syracuse University’s School of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Midwest Center for Photography, the Detroit Public Library art gallery, RISD’s Red Eye Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island, and Candela Books + Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. She is also a 2019 finalist of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward competition and was selected for the 2020 Lit List.

Aaron Turner (b.1990) is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. Aaron also uses the view camera to create still life studies on the topics of race, history, blackness as material, and the role of the black artist. Aaron founded a curatorial project titled Photographers of Color in 2014 to aggregate the historical and contemporary work made by artists of color working in lens-based media. Aaron is currently developing the beginning stages of the Center for Photographers of Color within the School of Art at the University of Arkansas in the form of a Research Fellowship appointment with teaching duties. His awards include 2018 Light Work Artist-in-Residence, 2019 En Foco Photography Fellow, and 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space artist-in-residence. He is also the host of The Photographers of Color Podcast.