Photography as an Agent for Change
Photographic Center Northwest (PCNW) is thrilled to announce our 2024 Agent for Change series.
This year we are partnering with local organizations to expand access to arts education, and showcase the transformative power of photography within our communities. Our 2024 partners are Tasveer, Cultivate South Park, and the Frye Art Museum, who are collaborating with us on panel discussions, workshops, and exhibitions. All programming explores the core topics of Agent for Change, including social justice, racial equity, disability and access, environmental justice, visual literacy, and storytelling. These programs are some of the many ways we invest in community and local arts education.
Registration is free.
At PCNW we are committed to providing accessible, inclusive photographic education and that often means through free programs and events. If you appreciate the work we do, please consider supporting us by donating or volunteering.
Still Moving Frameworks: South Asian Creatives Between Aesthetic Expressions and Technical Imperatives
In collaboration with Tasveer Film Festival
Online Panel Discussion
April 25, 2024 | 6-7:30pm (Pacific Time)
This online panel discussion brings together South Asian creatives to talk about their methods and creative approaches to storytelling. Each participant will discuss their work and the influences and inspirations that guide them in telling new stories. Panelists include photographic artists Harini Krishnamurthy and Miraj Patel, along with filmmakers Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Nuhash Humayun. This talented panel will be moderated by Natalia Di Pietrantonio, curator of the Crow Museum of Asian Art. This panel will explore and question existing discourse around visual cultures as it brings together diverse South Asian perspectives. The online discussion will be followed by a Q&A session.
Cultivating Youth Innovators
In collaboration with Cultivate South Park
In-person
July 24-25 & 31, August 7 &14-15, 2024
PCNW and Cultivate South Park are partnering on a workshop to empower Duwamish Valley youth through the medium of photography. This workshop is part of their Cultivating Youth Innovators Program. Students will learn camera basics, and use those skills to photograph their surrounding neighborhood and environment, focusing on subjects that matter to their community like pollution of the Duwamish River, cultural traditions, and residents in their neighborhood. The workshops and images produced are meant to bring a sense of connectivity and awareness to the South Park community.
This workshop is open to youth living in the Duwamish Valley area. More information about the program can be found here.
This series will culminate in a pop-up exhibition of student work in the Cultivate South Park community building, during their SOPASUPA (South Park Summer Party) event on August 17, 2024, and this event is free and open to the public A selection of images will also be displayed at PCNW’s pushpin gallery on August 23, 2024.
In Response: After/Images
In collaboration with Frye Art Museum
In-person
August 10, 2024 | Saturday 12:30-5:30pm
The Frye Art Museum is hosting an exhibition by renowned Filipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco entitled Future/Images, on view June 1 – September 8, 2024. Syjuco’s exhibition centers on the camera as a technology of imperialism that records and creates racialized American histories. Across the exhibition’s photographs, videos, and installations, Syjuco employs visual disruptions, annotations, and other cues of constructed-ness that counter the colonizer’s power to shape the visual record without being seen.
As part of Photographic Center Northwest’s (PCNW) 2024 Agent for Change workshop series and the Frye’s Yes, And series, PCNW and the Frye Art Museum are partnering to offer a workshop that explores Syjuco’s exhibition. Participants enrolled in this one-day workshop will explore Stephanie Syjuco: Future/Images in person at the Frye Art Museum, guided by curator Georgia Erger, then discuss the ideas and themes presented in the work. Returning to PCNW, participants will then work with PCNW teaching artist Elisabeth Vasquez Hein to create photo collage-based works of their own inspired by Syjuco’s exhibition.
This workshop explores the relationship between the visual record and the way we view our ancestral inheritance and cultural identities. We will look at photo-based work that integrates historical and family archives, while considering which voices have been present in (or erased from) photographic histories. How are artists responding to generational/collective trauma and racialized histories? What narratives have been constructed through a dominant culture and what narratives belong to us? How can we reshape and reclaim narratives in our creative processes?
We will reflect on our own photographic voices, identify archives and sources of narrative central to our identities, and experiment with writing and its relationship to our visual expression. The workshop will culminate in participants making and sharing their own photo-based collage.
Participants will need to provide their own transportation to and from PCNW.
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