When She Came Into View, Memory Stood With Her, 2025

September 1, 2025 – June 30, 2026

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For her residency at SHINE Portrait Studio at Express Newark, artist Laylah Amatullah Barrayn has created an installation placed in the Main Studio, visitors are encouraged to connect with and engage the backdrop as inspiration and a resource for their own practices.

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“This installation is a meditation on the ways Senegalese and African women have been represented through the medium of photography across generations and geographies. It brings into conversation a constellation of images: colonial-era photographs; portraits by Senegalese photographers active in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s; photographs made in the United States of enslaved Africans and their descendants; a portrait of the matriarch of the home where I resided; a recent portrait of two young women created during the summer of 2025 in the city of Thies.

 

Each photograph presents a Senegalese or African woman before the lens, asserting presence in the frame. How women’s presence before the camera can be both an act of witness and of reclamation.

 

Taken together, these images create a layered visual archive that reflects the shifting conditions of Black womanhood, dignity, and representation. This backdrop is both a collage and a dialogue, revealing how photography has long served as a site of power, memory, and visibility for Senegalese women and the wider African diaspora.”

 

-Laylah Amatullah Barrayn