“Go take a little time, go to Panama. Make a little home there”
Abattoir presents the first photography exhibition at the gallery, a selection of prints from a new body of work by Atlanta-based photographer Nydia Blas. Born and raised in Ithaca, NY, Blas holds a BS from Ithaca College and an MFA from Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her first significant project, The Girls Who Spun Gold, resulted from a Girl Empowerment Group that Blas founded after observing a lack of space and community for teen girls of African descent in Ithaca. In 2021, she was commissioned by the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, (Ithaca, NY), to create a new body of work in response to the collection of family albums of Black families from the 1860s to 1980s held in the Cornell University Library. Love, You Came from Greatness, was a two-year project now on view at the Johnson Museum. She is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Spelman College in Atlanta.
The photographs on view, The Silver Woman: Becoming Afro-Latina, were made on a recent trip to Panama where Blas immersed herself in the landscape and history of the Afro-Latino heritage of her father. Part of an ongoing project, this exhibition is the first presentation of Blas’ Panamanian travels and research of the land and culture of an unexplored aspect of her family history. As all Blas’ work resides in photography’s singular ability for visual story-telling, this project continues to weave stories of circumstance, value and power in an allegorical space. As the artist says, “the result is an environment that is dependent the belief that in order to maintain resiliency, a magical outlook is necessary.”
