UPCOMING CONVERSATION
‘The New Girl in the Office’ Film Screening and Discussion
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UPCOMING CONVERSATION
‘The New Girl in the Office’ Film Screening and Discussion
Join us at 154 Ludlow Street on Saturday, August 9th at 4 PM for a screening of the 1960 short film The New Girl in the Office which details the integration of Mary Newton, a Black woman, into a predominantly white office environment, navigating initial resistance and eventual acceptance. This film screening is followed by a discussion and Q&A with the 2024 BAXTER ST Resident, Qiana Mestrich, whose solo exhibition The Reinforcements is currently on view at BAXTER ST. Mestrich’s photo collages visualize the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in the American corporate workplace.
The screening will be held in BAXTER ST’s basement project space which down one flight of stairs. The film’s run time is 30 minutes and 41 seconds.
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, her insightful 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 her research on women of color in 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.