Pandora’s BoxX Project

Pandora’s BoxX Project is a photographic portrait archive I’ve been building for the past seven years, bringing together 360 portraits of women artists, curators, writers, and cultural practitioners-cis, trans, and non-binary-whose work has shaped the art world from the 1960s to the present. It’s an inter-generational record shaped by lived experience, and by the forces that decide what is preserved, valued, and remembered.

In a sense, I’ve weaponized these portraits to ask a few simple questions:
Who gets remembered? Who is left out? How are histories built, and who holds that power?

The project isn’t about elevating a select few. It’s about seeing the broader, interconnected community that actually sustains the art world. It insists that history isn’t fixed or finished—it’s continually rewritten through who is visible, who speaks, and whose work is carried forward.

My work begins with an act of witnessing that moves between intimacy and documentation. For more than four decades I’ve worked across painting, photography, and social practice, tracing how identity is formed and performed, how power is written onto the body, and how art can interrupt that record.

Showing up myself has been essential to the project’s making. I try to meet each participant where they live or work, creating a moment of direct encounter that can’t be outsourced. We talk. People share pieces of their history, their personal stories.

I don’t use professional lighting. I prefer to enter the chaos of the moment, using whatever light is available—light that shifts with each person and each space. Everyone is photographed looking directly into the camera, inviting an eye-to-eye encounter. After each session, the sitter chooses the image that represents them, ensuring the portrait reflects how they wish to be seen.

The project has been largely self-funded, and will eventually become a book.

I actually began the project simply to make art friends again-a network I’d stepped away from while raising kids, riding motorcycles, and living a life that wasn’t exactly centered on the art world. But it quickly revealed itself as something much larger than one person, a time capsule of an extraordinary moment.

Taken together, the portraits trace six decades of artistic and social shifts. They begin with the sea change of the 1960s and 70s-shaped by feminist and civil rights movements alongside performance and land art-when women artists, in growing numbers, became the pebbles in the pond whose ripples continue through subsequent generations. And many of the people in these portraits are still actively shaping the field today.

The portraits move through the critique-driven 80s and 90s, the global and technological shifts of the 2000s, and into the complicated present we’re living through now.

More than a third of the participants are now in their 80s and 90s. Some have already passed. These portraits stand as evidence of achievement, and as a warning of how easily lives and contributions can be forgotten, or rendered invisible.

Like its mythic namesake, the project opens a vessel of stories too long contained—releasing faces and voices that have carried history forward, often without recognition.

They are not only witnesses to art history. They are its authors.

“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