Guest Room:
Sarah Lewis & Jessica Stark

Each edition of Guest Room creates a dialogue between images and ideas, offering an evolving space for experimentation and reflection within contemporary photography. This Guest Room sees award-wining author and Harvard professor Sarah Lewis and photography historian Jessica Stark exploring the following thread: “When They See Us,” in honor of Ava DuVernay and Koyo Kouoh.

"What does it mean to be seen, and why does it matter? This Guest Room's title honors two artists and thinkers: the acclaimed director, Ava DuVernay, and the late curator, Koyo Kouoh. "When They See Us" remains an open prompt.

The homonymous miniseries, ‘When They See Us,’ co-written and directed by Ava DuVernay, examines the case of the now-exonerated Central Park Five, Black and Latino teenagers who were falsely accused and wrongfully prosecuted for an assault in New York City’s Central Park. The highly politicized case was a reminder of the crisis of regard we are in in the United States. One of the recent exhibitions Koyo Kouoh co-curated, ‘When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,’ looks to DuVernay’s series and offers several perspectival shifts – from ‘they’ to ‘we,’ from a focus on the United States to Africa and its wider diasporas, and from externally imposed narratives to self-definition. Foregrounding leisure, intimacy, peace, and play, the exhibition affirms the power and political agency of Black joy and underscores what becomes possible when one is fully seen.

‘When They See Us’…the sentence is deliberately unfinished. What happens when we truly see one another? This call invites works that exemplify the prompt it contains – the challenge of seeing each other fully.”