The Naomi Rosenblum ICP Talks Photographer Lecture Series Presents: Cara Romero with Jami Powell
Visual artist and photographer Cara Romero discusses her blended approach to imagemaking and how collective history and lived experiences are crucial to her photographic practice while sharing recent projects during this conversation featured in The Fall 2023 Naomi Rosenblum ICP Talks Photographer Lecture series. Romero will be in conversation with curator Jami Powell.
This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and do not include access to ICP's galleries. Online tickets are available for free.
About the Series
The Naomi Rosenblum ICP Talks Photographer Lecture Series presents one-hour live events featuring scholars and curators in conversation with renowned photographers who champion social change through photography, employ exciting alternative and emerging practices, or ask critical questions about the form. This year's Fall Season includes Shala Miller with Ebony L. Haynes (9/12/23), Cara Romero (10/11/2023), Sunil Gupta with Gayatri Gopinath (10/17/2023) and Muriel Hasbun with Susan Meiselas (11/28/2023).
Recent participants in ICP Talks include Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Clifford Prince King, Marvin Heiferman, Joshua Rashaad McFadden, Catherine Opie, Farah Al Qasimi, Guadalupe Rosales, Pacifico Silano, Dayanita Singh, and Jeff Wall.
Current ICP students and faculty of the One-Year Certificate programs are automatically enrolled and invited to attend all lectures.
The 2023-2024 Naomi Rosenblum ICP Talks Photographer Lecture Series is made possible through generous support from the Rosenblum Family.
Cara Romero (b. 1977, Inglewood, CA) is a contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, CA and the urban sprawl of Houston, TX. Romero's identity informs her photography, a blend of fine art and editorial photography, shaped by years of study and a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective.
As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, Romero pursued a degree in cultural anthropology. Disillusioned, however, by academic and media portrayals of Native Americans as bygone, Romero realized that making photographs could do more than anthropology did in words, a realization that led to a shift in medium. Since 1998, Romero's expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art and commercial photography. By staging theatrical compositions infused with dramatic color, Romero takes on the role of storyteller, using contemporary photography techniques to depict the modernity of Native peoples, illuminating Indigenous worldviews and aspects supernaturalism in everyday life.
Maintaining a studio in Santa Fe, NM, Romero regularly participates in Native American art fairs and panel discussions, and was featured in PBS' Craft in America (2019). Her award-winning work is included in many public and private collections internationally. Married with three children, she travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands.
Jami Powell is the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College where she also serves as a senior lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department. Powell is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her tenure at the Hood Museum, Powell has curated exhibitions including Form and Relation: Contemporary Native American Ceramics, CIPX Dartmouth with Kali Spitzer and Will Wilson, Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting from Yirrkala, and This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World. Powell's co-edited volume titled Reimagining American Art is scheduled to be released in 2024. She has also published articles in Museum Anthropology, Museum Management and Curatorship, and serves on the editorial advisory boards for First American Art Magazine and Panorama. She is a recipient of the 2020 New Leadership Award from ArtTable, the foremost professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the visual arts. Powell's upcoming projects include the first solo exhibition and catalogue for Chemehuevi photographer and artist Cara Romero.