UPCOMING EXHIBITION

The Reinforcements

Qiana Mestrich

BAXTER ST at CCNY is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition at its new location at 154 Ludlow Street with The Reinforcements, a solo presentation by 2024 BAXTER ST Resident Artist and writer Qiana Mestrich, opening June 4, 2025.
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 color in the American labor force 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 of robust 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 historical record 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 color in corporate and institutional histories. With this inaugural exhibition, Baxter St renews its commitment to presenting urgent, socially engaged work by emerging and mid-career lens-based artists.

ABOUT QIANA MESTRICH
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.

ABOUT BAXTER ST
Founded in 1884, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York is one of New York City’s oldest artist-run nonprofit spaces committed to lens-based arts. Today, the organization is a socially engaged art incubator that prepares lens-based artists for their debut and helps them create sustainable practices to move forward with integrity. In addition to a year-round exhibition schedule, the organization hosts artist residencies, critique groups, and a public series of artist talks and workshops. Baxter St promotes artists of all ages, races, ethnicities, and identities whose work connects with global conversations on culture, human rights, environment, and equality. The organization is committed to uplifting artists by sharing ideas and resources and learning together to create profound and lasting change in our organization and communities.