In Conversation and Reception—Melissa Ann Pinney: "What’s Ms. Pinney Doing Here?"

Celebrate the opening of "What’s Ms. Pinney Doing Here? " with a conversation between Melissa Ann Pinney, and photographer Alice Proujansky, moderated by Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions, focused on Pinney’s decade long project documenting Chicago Public School students. Join the artist in the Incubator Space after the program for a special opening reception.

"What’s Ms. Pinney Doing Here?" Is on view beginning October 22 in ICP’s free ground floor Incubator Space. The space is free and open to the public during café and museum hours.

About the Exhibition

Since 2018, photographer Melissa Ann Pinney has documented Chicago Public School students as part of an artist residency. As the students began to invite her into their world, the project became a document of identity, community and urgent social issues. Pinney’s thoughtful portraits of young people navigating the transformations of adolescence contain all of the triumph, grief, humor, and tenderness of growing up.

About the Artist 

Melissa Ann Pinney’s work first garnered attention in the Museum of Modern Art’s major 1991 exhibition, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. Her studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American adolescents have earned her many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Midwest Regional Fellowship. Pinney was selected for three documentary projects that were exhibited, published, and archived in Chicago: Changing Chicago (1987), City (2000), and most recently in the Chicago Public Schools. Pinney’s first monograph, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls (2003) was followed by Girl Ascending (2010), TWO (2015), and In Their Own Light: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools was published in 2023.

Alice Proujansky is a photographer looking at family labor: birth, work, motherhood and identity. Her photobook, Hard Times are Fighting Times (Gnomic Book, 2023), uses archival and documentary images to look at the legacy of radical activism in her family. It was shortlisted for a 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award and the Rencontres d'Arles Author Book Award, and was selected for exhibition through Baxter St's Mid-Career Artists Initiative. She is currently working on Birth Work, a photobook about culturally-responsive birth work, Transmission, an installation about diasporic Judaism and cultural inheritance and Containment, a photography and quilting project about psychological formation, motherhood and play. Alice has taught photography since 2002, most recently for Aperture, who also published her book Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids. A member of Women Photograph, Alice grew up in Greenfield, MA. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Sara Ickow is the Associate Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography and Managing Director of Women Photograph. Previously, she worked as a curatorial assistant and collections manager with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. She holds an MA in art history from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

About the ICP Incubator Space

ICP’s Incubator Space is a new exhibition program designed to highlight the work of emerging photographers who are responding in real time to the world around us. ICP will present a rotating selection of projects by imagemakers experimenting with and pushing boundaries around the documentary tradition. ICP’s Incubator Space is curated by Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions at ICP.

Special Thanks

This exhibition is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF). The opinions and views of the authors do not necessarily state or reflect those of the RBF.  

Exhibitions at ICP are supported, in part, by Michael Clinton, Caryl Englander, Renee Harbers Liddell, Almudena Legorreta, Jessica Nagle, Ken Nicholson, Jeffrey Rosen, the ICP Board of Trustees, the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. 

Melissa Ann Pinney, Zydrea, Brooklyn, Akylah and Friends, Ogden-Jenner Middle School, 2019