ARTISTS

Samantha Box

Guest Curatorial Program (2024)

Home/Land

Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. She holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from Bard College. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Light Work, the Silver Eye Center of Photography, and at Le Rencontres d’Arles; it is currently in exhibition at the Bronx Museum of Art, with upcoming solo shows at the Des Moines Art Center, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (DC). Box has been an artist-in-residence at the Center of Photography at Woodstock, the Visual Studies Workshop and at Light Work. She has been awarded a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Photography twice: in 2010 and in 2022, an En Foco Fellowship, and a Silver Eye Fellowship. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, the Louis Roederer Discovery Award, and the Prix De La Photo Madame Figaro. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and of the Harvard Art Museums.

Home/Land, is exhibition curated by Zoraida Lopez-Diago, Baxter St’s 2024 Guest Curatorial
Initiative Recipient. Featuring works of photographers Samantha Box and Sheida Soleimani,
Home/Land explore themes of belonging, displacement, family, and the personal and geopolitical
histories that shape their lives.

The landscapes, wildlife, flora, and fauna depicted by Box and Soleimani become spaces for
reimagining and inserting overlooked narratives into both the art world, and wider discourse. Food, in
particular, emerges as a powerful symbol of both cultural identity and the commodification of people
and the products they grow and harvest. As stewards of theirrespective legacies, Box and Soleimani
keep nature and its sustenance as metaphors for growth, healing, and the preservation of place.

Samantha Box draws on her Caribbean heritage in her series Caribbean Dreams. Her evocative still-lifes incorporate familial objects, food, plant life, while visually narrating stories rooted in her
ancestral homeland. For Soleimani, wildlife rehabilitation serves as a metaphorfor healing and care,
employing the symbolism of birds to explore activism, and protest, while illuminating the shared
trauma of families affected by conflict and war. Through their unique perspectives, these artists serve
as talismans, weaving together complex narratives of migration and legacy, with the natural world
acting as a site for regeneration and a keeper of memory. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on
these narratives and the intricate relationships between nature, identity, and the histories we both
inherit and inhabit.

Support for Baxter St’s Guest Curatorial Program is generously provided by the Phillip and Edith
Leonian Foundation.