MUSEUM AUDIO GUIDES

Deana Lawson
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Nov 4, 2021 – Feb 27, 2022

Pizza Shark produced and sound designed a ten-part creative audio (digital) guide featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, artists, and community members like curator Eva Respini, photographer OJ Slaughter and Boston Ujima Project’s Cierra Peters for the ICA’s Deana Lawson exhibition.

This exhibition was the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979 in Rochester, NY), a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of Black life through a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images. Engaging acquaintances as well as strangers she meets on the street, Lawson meticulously poses her subjects in highly staged photographs that picture narratives of family, love, and desire, and create what the artist describes as “a mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen. It’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent.” 

This survey exhibition included a selection of photographs from 2004 to the present.