Scheherazade Tillet
Scheherazade Tillet is a photographer, curator, and feminist activist who explores the themes of trauma, healing, pleasure, and play. Blending photojournalism, documentary style, archive and autobiography, and a collaborative social engaged practice, Scheherazade photographs those liminal spaces - "the betwixt and between" - shaped by her itinerant black girlhood in order to capture instances in which black freedom dreams are achieved, even if just for a moment, and acts as a blueprints for our collective futures.
Born in Boston, growing up in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Newark, NJ, and now working in Chicago, Scheherazade actively embeds herself in the communities with whom she collaborates as well as empowers her subjects by encouraging them to photograph themselves or help shape her gaze. Currently, Scheherazade is the inaugural artist in residence for “Pictures and Progress,” a joint initiative between Shine Portrait Studio and New Arts Justice. Her first solo show “Let Her Be Born & Handled Warmly: A Retrospective on Black GirlHood” to be exhibited in Newark in Spring 2021.
All images from the series below are Archival Pigment Prints, Dimensions Variable
PHOTOGRAPHY
Misty Eyed:
Sites Of My Childhood
2020
Misty Eyed: Sites Of My Childhood revisits sites of Scheherazade's itinerant childhood here in Newark, NJ and is influenced by her travels in Boston, Chicago, and Trinidad.
This gallery will be updated in the spring of 2020.
Prom Send-Off:
A Rite of Passage for Black Girls
2018 - 2020
This new body of photographic work documents how African-American girls in Chicago celebrate the dynamism of their identities and the communities from which they come. The event much like a quinceañeras are for Latinx communities, “the prom send-off” is a complex, year-long rite of passage for black girls, their friends, and families that renders proms as more than a party or fashion statement. Through this ritual, proms are communal spaces of self-expression, inimitable style, and coming into adulthood.
My Family Chair
2018 - 2020
Scheherazade Tillet takes up Huey Newton’s 1967 iconic image while also re-staging and updating this familiar object from her childhood home -- the wicker chair -- with African-American teen girls. Featuring prom dress and wedding dress materials as the backdrop, this series features girls and young women from Tillet’s A Long Walk Home’s Girl/Friends Leadership Institute which empowers black girls from Chicago to use art to advocate for themselves, other girls, and for racial and gender justice in their schools, communities, and beyond.
Little Girl Blue: A Sojourn to Nina Simone's Childhood Home
2019