Kristen Joy Emack’s Cousins First Thursday Opening to be Held April 6

Kristen Joy Emack's Cousins exhibit's First Thursday opening will be held on April 6, at Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. with an artist talk to be announced. The exhibit runs Apr 6 - 29, 2023.

Kristen Joy Emack’ s ongoing series Cousins chronicles the gorgeous arc of childhood. It captures the tension, beauty, humor, and closeness that exists within familial bonds. Emack has been photographing her daughter and nieces for close to a decade. Between them is an intimate and spiritual knowledge that is both ordinary and extraordinary. As they have matured, they have begun to understand that the lives of Black girls are not well documented, or widely published. While her work is not exclusively about representation, one added intention of this series is to bring forward that perspective. She hopes that when they look back on this work, they see their beauty and devotion to each other, and will find themselves here, in this work they made together, reflected with love.

Kristen Joy Emack (American, she/her/hers) is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow and a Massachusetes Cultural Arts Fellow. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, in galleries and photo festivals. She has been published in several magazines, including Vogue Italia. She has been a guest speaker at multiple universities including Harvard and Hofstra, and her work is in multiple private collections here, and abroad. Kristen is a self taught photographer and works as a public school educator who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is represented by Gallery Kayafas in Boston.

For more information, visit blueskygallery.org/news/2023/april-at-blue-sky.