This post congratulates Roz Li, Zach Rice and Li/Saltzman Architects, PC for their beautiful restoration work of the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn NY.

Li/Saltzman has been working with this church since 2001. They started with the restoration of the exterior - restoring the brick, replacing the roof, recreating the missing stone turrets and the structural stabilization of the roof trusses. Once the exterior envelope was stable and watertight, the restoration of the sanctuary interior began.

Included in the ‘The Song of the Land’  Exhibition is a framed print from my
‘Bet Hayyim - House of Life’ series:

Title: Hands of the Kohan, Medzhybizh, Ukraine 2008
Medium: Fine Art Digital Inkjet Paper with Archival Pigmented Inks
Size:  10 inches x 15 inches
Framed: $700.00 – 16 inches x 20 inches
Edition 4/10

I viewed the thousands of stones in the Jewish cemeteries throughout the Ukraine as artistic treasures of iconographic beauty and mystery. The headstones of the Kohanim, descendants of the Biblical priests, had hands joined in a gesture of blessing. The carved gravestones depict a visual history of the once vast community of Eastern European Jews, and serve as reminders of the people who lived in this place and died.

Title: Essex County Penitentiary, New Wing Corridor. North Caldwell, New Jersey.
Medium: Fine Art Digital Inkjet Paper with Archival Pigmented Inks
Size:  10 inches x 15 inches
Framed: $700.00 – 16 inches x 20 inches

As both a historic-preservation and fine-art photographer, I am drawn to the timeless nature of a historic site; it is a repository of collective memories like those etched and concealed within the interior walls of this rusting prison ruin.

It was a cold December day in 2007 when I first walked through the Essex County Penitentiary. My assignment was to photograph the 32-acre jail complex as part of a required HABS (Historic American Buildings Survey) documentation before the institutional structures and outbuildings, built between 1872 and 1929, could be demolished to make way for luxury condominiums. Photographing the “New Wing Corridor” was not part of the job, but the gritty prison hallway pulled me into an evocative still life of decaying iron bars and unhinged doors that allowed the silent voices of those once incarcerated to escape.

With a Special Performance by LADY JOI-ELLE
Hudson Pride Connections Center
32 Jones St., Jersey City, NJ 07306

Please join me, and the participants of the INSIGHT OUT! PRIDE Digital Storytelling Workshop for an Artist Talk and Panel Discussion about our photographs currently on view in “BECOMING WHO WE ARE,” a photo/video group exhibition curated by Ricardo Francis at Gallery 32, in Jersey City NJ.

The show features the work of Jasmin Brown, V. Michael Lazar, Natasha Phoenix Russell, Joi-Elle White, and Esteets Wright, students of the INSIGHT OUT! PRIDE Workshop along with guest international artists, Nadine Hutton (South Africa), and Fréd Koenig (France).

I will also present a short, historic retrospective of images that represent my GLBTQ social advocacy photography work from the ‘70’s and images depicting gender ambiguity and transformation. This visual memoir includes studio portraits of my female friends exploring erotic pleasure, role-playing and butch/femme identity.

Included will be pictures from recent photography exhibitions documenting my artistic collaboration with gender performance artist and videographer, Frédéric Koenig.

The INSIGHT OUT! PRIDE Digital Storytelling Workshop recently completed an eight-week pilot program at Hudson Pride Connections Center. The workshop is tailored to LGBTQ participants, and gives a visual voice to participants affected by growing up in environments of uncertainty, discrimination, fear and violence, and guides them to explore their creative vision. Each artist poignantly depicts images that mirror their personal views about masculinity, femininity and their LGBTQ identity. As they learn to document their own lives through photography, they grow in confidence and leadership skills, empower themselves and heal.

The workshops at the The Hudson Pride Connections Center were developed and adapted from my experiences as senior trainer, editor and advisor to the international InSIGHT Out! Photography and Creative Exchange Project, based in Bangkok, Thailand.

“This exhibit marks an important development in feminist art” writes Brenda Oelbaum in the introduction because “… it comments on the prevelance of the male gaze in art and of the continued domination of male artists exhibiting in galleries and museums. My goal is to turn the tables and exhibit works that put the male in the position of subject and spectacle.”

Janice Nesser-Chu, the President of the National Women’s Caucus for Art, also wrote in the catalogue, “… women artists reverse the gaze and look back at man as object or desire and in doing so they assert their own power and control, not only over their subject but also over their own image and identity. The exhibition is not only about the work on the walls but is about empowerment.”

The description of my work is quoted on page 157:
“These images are part of an ongoing series of portraits that document my collaboration with Frédéric Koenig, who can so naturally appear both handsome and beautiful, both masculine and feminine. Wearing nothing more than spike heels, he provocatively poses in a gritty, industrial environment that reinforces a traditional male landscape. While his upper body exudes a masculine power, his raw and curvaceous physicality and his archetypal pin-up girl shoes challenge the viewer to explore how we perceive masculinity, sexuality and gender identity.”

Beyond XY: Inside the Abandoned Falstaff Brewery #2, 2010
20 x 30 inches, Archival Pigment Print.  Edition of 5.

“BECOMING WHO WE ARE”
November 17 – December 19 2011
Opening Thursday November 17, 2011
6 PM – 9 PM, Gallery 32
Hudson Pride Connections Center
32 Jones St., Jersey City, NJ 07306
Gallery hours by appointment only

Trix Rosen, Project Director and Insight Out! Pride Workshop Participants
ARTIST TALK, Friday December 2, 2011
6 pm – 9 PM, Gallery 32
Hudson Pride Connections Center
32 Jones St., Jersey City, NJ 07306

You are cordially invited to “BECOMING WHO WE ARE,” a photo/video group exhibition featuring the work of Jasmin Brown, V. Michael Lazar, Nastasha Phoenix Russell, Joi-Elle White and Esteets Wright, participants in the InSIGHT OUT! Pride Digital Storytelling Workshop based at the Hudson Pride Connections Center. Their work is exhibited along with my own photos and those of my colleagues, international guest photography instructors Nadine Hutton (South Africa), and Frédéric Koenig (France).

The InSIGHT OUT! Digital Storytelling Workshops give a visual voice to participants growing up in environments of uncertainty, discrimination, fear and violence, and guide them to explore their creative vision. As they learn to document their own lives through photography, they grow in confidence and leadership skills, empower themselves and heal. This pilot workshop was tailored to LGBTQ participants and also designed to be a visual advocacy project.

The workshops at the Next Generation Center, Bronx, NY and NJ were developed and adapted from my experiences as senior trainer, editor and advisor to the international InSIGHT Out! Photography and Creative Exchange Project, based in Bangkok, Thailand.

SUPPORT THE ARTS IN JERSEY CITY

Come on by and visit my studio during the Jersey City Artists Studio Tour
Saturday and Sunday – October 1st and 2nd
12 noon to 6 pm

Location:
Trix Rosen Photography Studio
124 Sherman Place (between Sanford Place and John F. Kennedy Blvd)
Jersey City, NJ 07307

While gender ambiguity and transformation have been the focus of my fine art photography, my career has also embraced the fields of photojournalism, portraiture and historic preservation architecture.

Exhibit dates: September 14 – November 23, 2011
Hours: Best viewed in daylight.
Location: Ernest Rubenstein Gallery Windows
Jefferson Street near East Broadway, New York, NY 10002. F-train to East Broadway; MTA buses: M9, M15, M22

Jewish Art Salon members have created “memory blocks”, with drawings, paintings or inscriptions that evoke their memory of the day.

On September 13th, 6pm these blocks will be brought to the gallery, where Tobi Kahn is exhibiting “Embodied Light: 9-11 in 2011″. Artists and writers will share their block and/or their memories of 9-11 and Kahn will discuss his exhibit. After the session, at 8pm, the blocks will be gathered and the next day they will be installed as “towers” in the windows.

Kahn’s exhibit will feature 220 memory blocks, handed out by him to various New Yorkers and returned to him with markings that commemorate the day. These blocks will be continually rearranged over the length of the exhibition. The Jewish Art Salon’s blocks will be displayed as a separate exhibit.

The Main building of the Essex County Penitentiary stood alone on the hilltop, her battered façade illuminated by the setting sun. Five years earlier I had spent more than a month

The meeting is scheduled at the Verona Community Center, 880 Bloomfield Ave., at 7:30 p.m. For more information you can email the Society at twoJVO@yahoo.com or call (973) 857-1968.

You will not want to miss this event–everyone is promised to leave with something to remember this important landmark and fully understand the contribution it made to our history.

We started the morning taking family photos in their Chelsea apartment with Lucy, their Shiba Inu, and assembling all the legal documentation required for obtaining the license. Along with Denise, their best friend and witness, we headed downtown to City Hall to what would become four hours of cheering and heart-felt congratulations. The raucous outdoor line was snaking at a snail’s-pace in the summer heat while wedding vendors of every sort passed out cards, banners, flags, buttons and goody bags. There was a jubilant anticipation as we inched closer to City Hall and then into the greater mayhem inside the building where we waited for Dave and Paul’s number to be displayed.

I marveled at the extraordinarily diverse community of gays and lesbians of every age, from 20+ to 90+, representing a myriad of ethnicities, wearing unique costumes and combinations of formal and informal, masculine and feminine attire. All of us were gathered to participate and celebrate a momentous day in the history of civil rights in America, when it finally became legal for gays and lesbians in New York State to have the equal right to exchange life vows of love and commitment, witnessed by family and friends. My favorite poster… “26 years engaged. Married today. PROMISE KEPT.”