Pandora’s BoxX Project: Portraiture as Witness, Legacy, and Cultural Voice

Pandora’s BoxX Project is a photographic portrait archive I have been building over the past seven years of women, trans, and non-binary artists, curators, writers, and cultural practitioners who have shaped the art world from the 1960s to today. With over 330 portraits made toward a goal of 360, the project grows directly out of my four decades as a multidisciplinary artist engaged in painting, photography, and feminist inquiry.

Like its mythic namesake, the project opens a vessel of stories too long contained, releasing faces and voices that together alter what cultural memory holds. From the outset I called it Pandora’s BoxX. The double X is intentional, a kiss, a refusal, a myth rewritten. These portraits are not only witnesses to history; they are its rewriting.

Six decades of creative labor brought into view, a living monument that asks: Who is remembered? What stories endure? How do histories get constructed, and how does that power shape what we see, what we value, and how we move through the world?

This project is built on the intimacy of exchange. For the past seven years I have gone to artists and visionaries where they are—studios, kitchens, living rooms, places of creation. I sit, I listen, I bear witness. What I record is not just a face but a moment of recognition. Everyone is photographed looking directly into the camera, their gaze asking the viewer to meet them eye to eye. In a fractured, noisy world of endless images and fleeting feeds, these portraits insist on quiet. They honor a truth that can only emerge in stillness, away from the volume and distraction of social media. Afterward, each participant selects the image that best represents them—a gesture of agency that resists the artist’s gaze as sole authority. In this way, the portraits honor both my vision and the subject’s own sense of self, building an archive that links personal testimony to the cultural, political, and institutional forces that define what is remembered.

What began as a way to expand my own network quickly revealed itself as something larger: a time capsule of an unforgettable community. The portraits together span multiple generations and eras: the radical roots of the 1960s and 70s, shaped by feminist and civil rights movements alongside performance and land art; the critique-driven 80s and 90s; the globalization, technology, and social practice of the 2000s; and the present, marked by both progress and backlash, amplified by social media, reproductive rights rollbacks, attacks on trans lives, and challenges to cultural institutions. Many of the earliest participants are now in their 80s and 90s; some have already passed. These portraits stand as evidence of achievement and as a warning of what remains at stake.

Pandora’s BoxX is not about canonizing the few but honoring the many. It demonstrates that history is not fixed but rewritten through who tells it, repositioning past legacies to reveal their ongoing impact on the present.

“You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant for our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.” Rebecca Solnit,‘Hope In The Dark’

“WOMEN MAKE ART HISTORY”, Guerrilla Girls

“Prodigy is at its’ essence adaptability, and persistent, positive, obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.” Octavia Butler,’Earthseed’