ARTISTS

Qiana Mestrich

Baxter St. Residency (2025)

The Reinforcements

Qiana Mestrich (b. 1977, NYC) is an interdisciplinary artist and photo historian whose work
critically engages with themes of Black and mixed-race identity, motherhood, women’s labor, and
the empowering role of fashion. Informed by her upbringing as the daughter of immigrants from
Panama and Croatia, Mestrich’s artistic practice is complemented by significant contributions to
the field of photography history. Her artwork has garnered international attention, with
exhibitions at the RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain and London Art Fair’s Photo50,
and inclusion in collections such as the Peggy Cooper Cafritz collection. A graduate of the
ICP-Bard College MFA program, herinsightful perspectives have been recognized through
awards like the 2025 Saltzman Prize and CPW Vision Award, as well as the 2022 Magnum
Foundation’s Counter Histories grant for herresearch on women of colorin the corporate
workplace. Mestrich’s dedication to expanding the discourse around photography is evident in her
2007 founding of Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History. This groundbreaking
initiative, which evolved from a blog into a vital critique group, actively championed
photographers of color. Her newly released book (Routledge, March 2025), features 35 updated
interviews from the blog along with 7 critical essays on photography. Mestrich lives and works
between Brooklyn and New York’s Hudson Valley.

The Reinforcements, a solo presentation by Qiana Mestrich, a powerful series of photo collages begun in 2023, The Reinforcements visualizes the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in the American corporate workplace. Drawing from archival images—including photographs of Mestrich’s own mother, who worked in sales at Rugol

Trading Corporation in New York City in the late 1960s—the work explores the everyday realities
and systemic inequities that have long defined professional life for women of color.
This body of work stems from Mestrich’s broader, ongoing research project @WorkingWOC:
Towards a History of Women of Color in the Workplace, an independent digital archive aimed at
documenting and interpreting the role of women of colorin the American laborforce from the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the early 2000s.

Despite the founding of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965, Black and
other women of color continue to face racial and gender discrimination, limited pathways to
leadership, and persistent wage inequality. In response to the absence ofrobust archival material
addressing these inequities, Mestrich has created speculative visual narratives by collaging
images from vintage fashion and office supply magazines. The resulting works are imagined
interventions into a historicalrecord that too often neglects the labor, agency, and ambitions of
these women.

The Reinforcements not only centers the experiences of its subjects but also asks viewers to reckon
with the ongoing erasure of women of colorin corporate and institutional histories. With this
inaugural exhibition, Baxter Strenews its commitment to presenting urgent, socially engaged
work by emerging and mid-careerlens-based artists.