PAST EXHIBITION

It’s Never Too Late to Admit That You Love Me

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell

Baxter St is proud to present It’s Never Too Late to Admit That You Love Me, a solo exhibition of photographs by Baxter St 2023 Resident Darryl DeAngelo Terrell. Using song lyrics as points of entry, these self-portraits explore desire and the identity and body politics of being deemed worthy of love. As a self-identified fat, black, queer, disabled person coming from a disenfranchised family in Detroit, Darryl renders themselves in scenarios of love and intimacy that often go unseen and uncelebrated by the public gaze. The exhibition will be on view at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York at 126 Baxter Street from September 13 – October 18, 2023.

Baxter St Residencies are supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Love takes on many forms in Darryl’s works, from romantic love to the love between friends and family members. This selection of photographs depicts various scenes and relationships, from a loving embrace between mother and child in a Detroit backyard to a moment of physical intimacy between two people at home. Darryl draws upon music, an integral part of their artistic practice, to frame the works, and titles each photograph using a set of instructions for finding specific song lyrics. For example, the work titled Play the 1968 Soundtrack to Sparkle, track 2, at 1:22 (1 & 2) refers to Aretha Franklin’s Something He Can Feel. In this photograph, Darryl embodies their femme alter-ego, Dion, who provides the artist with access to femininity in a way that they do not have on a daily basis. Here, Dion wears a gown and long hair inspired by Diana Ross, to reference the glamor and decadence of black women in Detroit getting dressed up to go out. The photograph is taken at a distance, showing Dion flanked by the lights and poles of the photography studio that they stand in. This perspective, which lets the viewer in on the portrait’s larger setting, serves to elicit conversations about social norms around heavier bodies presenting in high femme. 

In a separate scenario, Dion is being held, gazed onto, and physically supported by a male who is providing a level of labor and intimacy that Dion receives rather than provides. As a person who is 6’7”, weighing nearly 400 pounds and assigned male at birth, Darryl liberates Dion from the societal expectation that larger bodies take on labor and provide support rather than receiving it. A series of four close-ups of the artist’s face include three that are slightly edited to achieve different levels of perceived desirability. Hung at 6’5” on the gallery wall, the series requires the viewer to look up and perform a physical act that forces them to take in the artist’s height. Taken as a whole, the exhibition asks its audience to consider the ways in which identities and bodies are subject to different expectations about desirability, and moreover, to accept bodies that defy social norms as deserving of love.