Trust Me

Aug 19, 2023–Feb 25, 2024

Two people embrace, one partially hidden by foliage.
Two people embrace, one partially hidden by foliage.

D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Elysian, 2018. Inkjet print: sheet (sight): 44 9/16 × 29 1/2in. (113.2 × 74.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Photography Committee 2020.129. © D'Angelo Lovell Williams

Drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Trust Me brings together photographic works that invite shared emotional experience. The artists in the exhibition embrace intuition and indeterminacy as part of their creative process and recognize that vulnerability, usually associated with powerlessness and exposure, can play a role in forging connection. Depicting familial and ancestral bonds, friendship, romantic partnership, and other networks of influence and exchange, these photographs make such connection visible—in the image and often beyond it—by evoking the overlapping lives and loves of the works’ creators, viewers, and caretakers.

The exhibition features an intergenerational group of artists: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, Alvin Baltrop, Jenny Calivas, Moyra Davey, Lola Flash, Barbara Hammer, Muriel Hasbun, Dakota Mace, Lee Mary Manning, and D’Angelo Lovell Williams. Many of their images do not include people but instead offer reflections on everyday surroundings and experiences, with objects often representing intimate aspects of the artists’ lives. Precisely staged or in response to chance encounters, these images encourage careful attention. As artist and writer Lydia Okrent has said about Manning’s photographs, such work “emboldens available tenderness,” kindling through the image something already present in the viewer.

In addition to taking up themes of vulnerability, the artists in the exhibition have chosen a precarious medium. Photographs emerge through combinations of light, chemicals, time, and chance, and yet these same elements can also push an image past legibility. Many of the artists draw parallels between material and emotional contingency, and welcome accidents, imperfections, and the unexpected. Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning.

The exhibition is organized by Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In the News

“This exhibition is breathtakingly intimate.” —Conde Nast Traveler

“Trust Me does an impressive job of showing audiences the true diversity and range of the photographic medium.” —The Guardian

“Gambling on the power of images to carry deep feeling, the works in Trust Me ultimately offer space for expanded capacity, reciprocity, and learning.” —Juxtapoz

“While many of the works included in “Trust Me” individually and overtly comment on themes of intimacy…Long’s depiction of relationality extends more broadly through the lines one can draw between the 11 artists included in the exhibition.” —The Williams Record

“La exposición se desmarca de la fotografía convencional, haciendo hincapié en la intuición y la vulnerabilidad como modos de expresión creativa.” —Telemundo

“…this fiercely tender grouping holds its own.” —Art Review

“Depictions of ancestral bonds, friendship and romantic partnership are captured intimately in photographs that could have only been made with vulnerability by the artist.” —SVA Features

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whathappensontheship.space/artport

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