Berette Macaulay cited in Seattle Times’ list of hottest events for January 2020

Image (detail): © Courtney Morris, Colored Swimming Pool, 2019

Berette Macaulay, second-year Cultural Studies candidate, recently collaborated with the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Frye Art Museum, and the Photographic Center of the Northwest to bring “MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora” to Seattle, introducing public audiences to “the broad yet nuanced creative, cultural, and interventionist visions offered by black women photographers both internationally as well as in the Pacific Northwest.”

Her upcoming curated exhibition, “Exploring Passages Within the Black Diaspora,” showing Jan. 16-March 22 at the Photographic Center Northwest, was cited in the Seattle Times’ “Look Ahead: The hottest Seattle events for January 2020” column. The Seattle Times quotes her curatorial statement, which draws directly from her Cultural Studies capstone research.

Exploring Passages Within the Black Diaspora

This promising-sounding show, curated by artist and scholar Berette Macaulay, shines a light on female-identifying photographers of the Black diaspora, including Nadia Alexis, Zoraida Lopez, Abigail Hadeed and others. In a description of her graduate work in cultural studies at the University of Washington, which helps inform “Passages,” Macaulay wrote that her research maps bodily expression of identity among Westernized Black cultures spread around the world: “This project is a collective-memory ethnography documenting oral soundings, facial expressions, and pedestrian gestures as vocabularies common to my homelands of Jamaica and Sierra Leone.” Sounds fascinating. This exhibition is one in a group of linked events involving the journal MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Frye Art Museum and Jacob Lawrence Gallery.

Jan. 16-March 22; Photographic Center Northwest, 900 12th Ave., Seattle; free; 206-720-7222, pcnw.org