Baxter St, in partnership with YoungArts, is proud to present a solo exhibition by Zayira Ray (2018 YoungArts Winner in Photography), featuring portrait photographs that explore notions of belonging, love, and kinship in Brown diasporic communities. The culmination of her 2024 YoungArts Baxter St Residency, this presentation showcases a new iteration of an evolving body of work spanning several years. The exhibition will be on view at Baxter St’s storefront gallery at 126 Baxter St. from March 27-April 24, 2024. The Indian-American artist documents her subjects against hand-painted canvas backdrops, capturing moments of tender intimacy. These constructed canvases act as sanctuaries, in which Ray expands her lens-based practice, envisioning new ways of forging connection. “Here, the photographic backdrop, associated with traditional portraiture, evolves into a vehicle for reconciliation,” she says. “As layers of paint intertwine, so too do the cultural narratives of past, present, and future.” Romantic couples, familial units, tight knit friends – the subjects in Ray’s images span generations, genders, and national origins, and yet they all share the bonds and burdens of global modernity. Ray’s images are both staged and candid. She has trained her lens on the nuanced and layered relations that form in Brown communities spread throughout the world by choice or by force. In doing so, this body of work celebrates Brownness amidst widespread societal narratives of subjugation and fearmongering. In many images, the artist explores in-between moments, capturing rekindled moments of joy and belonging, reconciling with what is lost in migration. As Ray says, “I seek to navigate this duality – acknowledging the shared grief of displacement, while also celebrating the resilience and interconnectedness of our shared experiences.” Ray’s work is a testament to the creative potential of lens-based media in exploring the social and political upheavals that transform relationships within Brown communities across the globe. Demonstrating that collective empowerment can be cultivated in the process of intimate image making, in this vibrant body of work, Ray pulls together the threads that have been frayed by the drift of diasporas across time and space.