Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Brighton Photo Biennial (UK), the Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial, MoMA PS1, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, among others. She was guest curator of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery (now the Alain Locke Gallery) at Harvard University for the 2023–24 academic year. A native of Brooklyn, New York, she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Open Society Foundation, and The International Women’s Media Foundation. She teaches photography at Rutgers University–Newark and at the International Center of Photography, and holds an M.A. from the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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CURATORIAL STATEMENT

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DAY ONE DNA draws from the archives of hip-hop icons and longtime collaborators Ice T and DJ Afrika Islam. With over 400 objects, images, and pieces of ephemera on view, DAY ONE DNA explores artistry, race, masculinity, and reinvention and highlights the cooperative nature of hip hop culture as both an organic and an intentional enterprise. This exhibition shares a story of two Black men and their decades-long friendship that linked two major American cities, New York City and Los Angeles, and expanded the genre through their artistry.

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In the tradition of the Afro-Puerto Rican historian Arturo Schomburg and the African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, Ice T and Afrika Islam understood the power of the archive as a historical record, and took the initiative to preserve materials from a burgeoning culture. All were driven by their understanding of the undeniable impact of storytelling through the collecting and exploring of Black cultures. It has always been a long-standing practice in the Black experience to think beyond the moment and to conserve what is valuable… and even sacred. Preservation work of this kind is often a self-assigned, lifelong appointment. 

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Working with Ice T and DJ Afrika Islam on this project has highlighted what hip hop offers as a multi-generational art form. We each have our own experience, based on where, when, and how we first encountered hip hop. One of my first memories was in 1985, waiting in a long line with my mother in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to see Krush Groove—a film partially based on the emergence of one of the most significant hip-hop record labels. Hip hop has been a culture that is as democratic as it is fluid. Ice T entered the culture as a dancer and emerged as an MC, and Afrika Islam’s roots are in the dance, which evolved in his work as a DJ and producer. 

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DAY ONE DNA recovers a moment prior to the commercialization of the genre and its elements. The exhibition’s title highlights the fact that the objects on view - a set of Technics 1200 turntables, first pressings of albums by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Kraftwerk, a host of party fliers, and the essential b-boy and b-girl sneakers, just to name a few—reflect the DNA of what hip hop has subsequently become. 

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DAY ONE DNA encourages viewers to explore the cultural, political, and economic ideologies and environments that shaped Ice T and DJ Afrika Islam, both as artists and as people. 

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Curated by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn