Trust Me
Aug 19, 2023–Feb 25, 2024
D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Elysian, 2018. Inkjet print: sheet (sight): 44 9/16 × 29 1/2in. (113.2 × 74.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee 2020.129. © D'Angelo Lovell Williams
Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Trust Me brings together photographic works that invite shared emotional experience. The artists in the exhibition embrace intuition and indeterminacy as part of their creative process and recognize that vulnerability, usually associated with powerlessness and exposure, can play a role in forging connection. Depicting familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and other networks of influence and exchange, these photographs make such connection visible—in the image and often beyond it—by evoking the overlapping lives and loves of the works’ creators, viewers, and caretakers.
The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Many of their images do not include people but instead offer reflections on everyday surroundings and experiences, with objects often representing intimate aspects of the artists’ lives. Precisely staged or in response to chance encounters, these images encourage careful attention. As artist and writer Lydia Okrent has said about Manning’s photographs, such work “emboldens available tenderness,” kindling through the image something already present in the viewer.
In addition to taking up themes of vulnerability, the artists in the exhibition have chosen a precarious medium. Photographs emerge through combinations of light, chemicals, time, and chance, and yet these same elements can also push an image past legibility. Many of the artists draw parallels between material and emotional contingency, and welcome accidents, imperfections, and the unexpected. Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning.
The exhibition is organized by Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
En español
Seleccionadas de la colección del Whitney, Confía en mí reúne obras fotográficas que invitan a una experiencia emocional compartida. Los artistas en esta exposición adoptan la intuición y la indeterminación como parte de su proceso creativo y reconocen que la vulnerabilidad, usualmente asociada a la impotencia y a la susceptibilidad, puede desempeñar un papel en la creación de conexiones. Estas fotografías, que representan lazos familiares y ancestrales, de amistad, relaciones románticas y otras redes de influencia e intercambio, hacen visibles estas conexiones, en la imagen y con frecuencia más allá de ella, evocando las vidas y los afectos superpuestos de sus creadores, espectadores y cuidadores.
La exposición presenta un grupo intergeneracional de artistas: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Mary Manning y D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Muchas de sus imágenes no incluyen personas, sino que ofrecen reflexiones sobre el entorno y las experiencias cotidianas con objetos que frecuentemente representan aspectos íntimos de la vida de los artistas. Escenificadas con precisión o como respuesta a encuentros casuales, estas imágenes invitan a una mirada atenta. Como dijo la artista y escritora Lydia Okrent sobre las fotografías de Manning, este trabajo “realza la ternura existente”, despertando con la imagen algo ya presente en el espectador.
Además de retomar temas sobre la vulnerabilidad, los artistas de esta exhibición eligieron un medio precario. Las fotografías emergen a través de una combinación de luz, sustancias químicas, tiempo y azar, elementos que pueden hacer que una imagen pierda legibilidad. Muchos de los artistas establecen paralelismos entre la contingencia material y emocional, y le dan la bienvenida a los accidentes, las imperfecciones y a lo inesperado. Apostando por el poder de las imágenes para transmitir sentimientos profundos, las obras de Confía en mí en última instancia ofrecen un espacio para expandir la capacidad, la reciprocidad y el aprendizaje.
Dakota Mace, Béésh Łigaii II, 2022
10
As a teenager, Dakota Mace discovered that an allergy to silver not only would prevent her from practicing her family’s trade (silversmithing) but also from adopting the artistic technique of gelatin silver printing, the process used for most black-and-white photography. This sensitivity led her to the experimental approach to artmaking that she is known for: combining beadwork, embroidery, and other craft traditions with alternative photographic processes like the chemigram—in which images are made without the use of a camera by painting chemicals directly onto light-sensitive paper. In the Béésh Łigaii series, the artist pays homage to the significance of the number four in Diné culture as a symbol for the interconnectedness of all things, and to the silversmithing designs passed down through generations of her family. In this particular work, Mace abstracts those designs to honor bonds of kinship and ancestry, while also making her own unique contribution to this lineage as a visual artist.
Essay
Audio guides
D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Elysian, 2018. Inkjet print: sheet (sight): 44 9/16 × 29 1/2in. (113.2 × 74.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee 2020.129. © D'Angelo Lovell Williams
Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from the exhibition.
View guideInstallation Photography
Installation view of Trust Me (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, August 19, 2023-February 2024). From left to right: Moyra Davey, Trust Me, 2011; Lola Flash, 4 ray, 1991; Muriel Hasbun, X post facto (6.7), 2009-13, printed 2009-13; Muriel Hasbun, ¿Sólo una sombra? (Ester III), 1993-94, printed 1994. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of Trust Me (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, August 19, 2023-February 2024). From left to right: Moyra Davey, Trust Me, 2011; Dakota Mace, Béésh Łigaii II, 2022; Genesis Báez, Crossing Time, 2022; Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (collapsed architecture, couple buttfucking), 1979; Barbara Hammer, Barbara & Terry, 1972; Laura Aguilar, Plush Pony #2, 1992; Lola Flash, Untitled, Provincetown, MA, 1990; D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Elysian, 2018; Mary Manning, His Estate, 2022; Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #12, 2021; Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #16, 2021; Genesis Báez, The Sound of a Circle, 2018. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of Trust Me (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, August 19, 2023-February 2024). From left to right: Lola Flash, 4 ray, 1991; Muriel Hasbun, X post facto (6.7), 2009-13, printed 2009-13; Dakota Mace, Béésh Łigaii II, 2022; Genesis Báez, Crossing Time, 2022. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of Trust Me (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, August 19, 2023-February 2024). From left to right: Moyra Davey, Trust Me, 2011; Laura Aguilar, Nature Self Portrait #6, 1996; Dakota Mace, Béésh Łigaii II, 2022; Genesis Báez, Crossing Time, 2022; Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (collapsed architecture, couple buttfucking), 1979; Barbara Hammer, Barbara & Terry, 1972; Laura Aguilar, Plush Pony #2, 1992; Lola Flash, Untitled, Provincetown, MA, 1990; D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Elysian, 2018; Mary Manning, His Estate, 2022; Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #12, 2021; Jenny Calivas, Self-Portrait While Buried #16, 2021; Genesis Báez, The Sound of a Circle, 2018. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
In the News
“This exhibition is breathtakingly intimate.” —Conde Nast Traveler
“Trust Me does an impressive job of showing audiences the true diversity and range of the photographic medium.” —The Guardian
“Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning.” —Juxtapoz
“While many of the works included in “Trust Me” individually and overtly comment on themes of intimacy…Long’s depiction of relationality extends more broadly through the lines one can draw between the 11 artists included in the exhibition.” —The Williams Record
“La exposición se desmarca de la fotografía convencional, haciendo hincapié en la intuición y la vulnerabilidad como modos de expresión creativa.” —Telemundo
“…this fiercely tender grouping holds its own.” —Art Review
“Depictions of ancestral bonds, friendship and romantic partnership are captured intimately in photographs that could have only been made with vulnerability by the artist.” —SVA Features