In the wing and Opatrny Galleries, Floor 2L
Dates are subject to change.
In 2021, the Johnson Museum commissioned artist Nydia Blas to create a new body of work in response to a collection of family albums in the collection of Cornell University Library that capture everyday events and special occasions in the lives of Black families, holding photographs taken across the United Staes from the 1860s to the 1980s.
Nydia Blas was born and raised in Ithaca and currently lives in Atlanta, where she is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College, a historically Black liberal arts college for women. Her most widely recognized series, The Girls Who Spun Gold, developed from her experiences with Ithaca’s Girl Empowerment Group, which Blas founded after observing a lack of space and community for teen girls of African descent.
(Image courtesy of the artist.)
(detail)