Seeing Otherwise: Black Womanhood and the Matrilineal Archive

On March 15th, join us for a CPW Conversations panel that treats history as a living, relational, and deeply human space. On the panel are: Qiana Mestrich, Winner of CPW’s 2025 Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer; Channon Anita, sister and collaborator of artist Nona Faustine (1969-2025); Lesly Deschler Canossi, photography educator and cultural producer; and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, independent curator and intersectional environmentalist.

Centered on ideas and questions that inform two current CPW exhibitions, Seeing Otherwise brings together Faustine’s What My Mother Gave Me–the first-ever retrospective of her decades-long practice–and Mestrich's Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate, featuring her ongoing collage series The Reinforcements. Through photographs, (auto)biography, and archival practices, both artists confront historical absence and distortion, asking: How do images shape what we know about history and what we remember? How can we re-frame our histories with fuller perspectives?

In a moment of both active historical erasure–and active historical re-framing–Seeing Otherwise creates an open space for collective reflection and dialogue. Both artists ground their work in matrilineal memory and intergenerational knowledge; Faustine's fearless engagement with America's racial past and intimate portrayals of Black Motherhood and womanhood resonate alongside Mestrich's reimagined workplace scenes, where women of color are restored to visual narrative histories from which they have long been ignored. Together, these exhibitions remind us that photography can be a powerful tool not only for seeing differently, but for imagining more just and expansive futures.

Lopez-Diago and Deschler Canossi are founders of Women Picturing Revolution (2016-2023). Their book Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press, 2022) featured the work of both Faustine and Mestrich.

Channon Anita, is the sister of Nona Simmons, was her artistic collaborator and now manages her estate.

Lesly Deschler Canossi is a photography educator and cultural producer. For over 14 years, she was a faculty member at International Center of Photography and currently leads long-term critique groups for La Luz and CPW. She holds an MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Lesly co-founded Women Picturing Revolution (2016-2023), an organization dedicated to women-identifying photographers who have documented conflicts and crises in private realms and public spaces. In 2022, she co-edited Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press). Her writing has been published in Mother Tongue Magazine, Cornell University Press Online, among others. Her personal artist's practice centers on themes of care and grief, and her research centers on recovering the contributions of women and marginalized practitioners who have been relegated to footnotes or rendered anonymous in photography's traditional narrative, bringing this inclusive historical perspective into her teaching.

Lesly lives in Beacon, New York. You can find her weekly writing on photography and visual literacy in the age of AI at her Substack, Widening the Lens (There Will be Typos).

Zoraida Lopez-Diago is a photographer, curator, and intersectional environmentalist whose work explores land, memory, and visual justice. She examines photography as both archive and intervention—reclaiming narratives shaped by race, gender, place, and power, and interrogating how images construct belonging and historical memory.

In 2022, she co-curated Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility, an exhibition centering Black girls and genderqueer youth as sites of imagination and autonomy. She is co-editor of Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven University Press / Cornell University Press, 2022), and is currently co-editing Picturing Black Girlhood (Aperture, 2027).

Her curatorial practice engages artists who build counter-archives and reframe the political image through maternal, ancestral, and feminist lenses. Grounded in nearly two decades of work at the intersection of environmental justice, land, and public narrative, she brings a relational, place-based approach to both her artistic and institutional leadership. She serves as Vice President of Development, Communications, and Strategic Partnerships at Glynwood in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Qiana Mestrich (she/her, b. 1977, NYC) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and photo historian whose autobiographical artwork and research delves into the complexities of Black and mixed-race identity, motherhood, and women's corporate labor. A first-generation American of Panamanian and Croatian descent, her photography and collage work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, most recently at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and at The National Museum of Computing (Bletchley, UK).Mestrich is the founder of Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History (est. 2007), a long-running initiative to diversify the medium's canon, and her book based on its interviews was published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis in March 2025. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA in Advanced Photographic Practice from the ICP-Bard College. Recent awards and residencies include the 2022 Magnum Foundation Counter Histories grant, a 2024 Baxter St artist in residence, the 2025 CPW Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer and the 2025 VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for excellence in contemporary photography. Mestrich lives and works between Brooklyn and New York's Hudson Valley.

Banner image © Qiana Mestrich.

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