Naima Green

Instead, I spin fantasies, an exhibition of new work by Naima Green that grapples with the concept of pregnancy through constructed self-portraits, landscapes and still-lifes—blurring the line between documentary and performance. Green probes the conventional expectations and representational tropes of motherhood, while also creating an expanded space for considering the experience of pregnancy in America. 

Naima Green (b. 1990, New York) is is an artist, photographer, and educator who graduated with an MFA from the ICP-Bard program. Her work blends documentary techniques with more experimental approaches to photography.   

For this exhibition, Green is making a new series of staged self-portraits performing various pregnant characters in a wide range of settings, blurring the line between fact and fiction.  

Her images dramatize everyday moments like taking out the recycling, sitting on the toilet and even injecting medication that, together, provide an unvarnished representation of pregnancy while also constructing the interior worlds of each character. In other scenes, Green challenges the boundaries of ‘respectability’ with regard to what is deemed acceptable—or responsible—behavior from someone pregnant. Her characters openly smoke and drink, acts which question the social expectations placed on pregnant bodies just as they reflect on what kinds of pregnancies are most commonly depicted in media and art. 

This exhibition is curated by Elisabeth Sherman.

About Naima Green 

Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.

Green has had solo exhibitions at Astor Weeks, Baxter St at CCNY, and Fotografiska, all NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at the Getty Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Mass MoCA, BRIC, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Houston Center for Photography, among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Baxter St at CCNY, Bronx Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, MASS MoCA, Penumbra Foundation, Pocoapoco, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography Library, Museum of Modern Art Library, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Green holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and an MFA from ICP-Bard.

About Elisabeth Sherman

Elisabeth Sherman is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of the City of New York. She most recently served as Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections at ICP where she curated numerous exhibitions including Sheida Soleimani: Panjereh, Yto Barrada: Part-Time Abstractionist, David Seidner: Fragments, 1977–99, and Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño. Previously, Elisabeth held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she organized and co-organized many critically acclaimed exhibitions, includin Dawoud Bey: An American Project, Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, and Zoe Leonard: Survey, among others.

Image credit: ©Scott Rudd for ICP