NAIMA GREEN
MONOCHROME
May 8 - Jun 14, 2025
Come Back to Bed, 2017
Archival pigment print
Framed: 43 1⁄2 x 43 1⁄2 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
Desert Rain / Orange Tree, 2018
Archival pigment print in walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners Framed: 14 3⁄4 x 10 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
After the Baby Shower, 2022
Archival pigment printin walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners
Framed: 21 3⁄4 x 15 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
Reseeding, 2024
Archival pigment print in walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners
Framed: 21 3⁄4 x 17 1⁄2 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
Soubrette, 2023
Archival pigment print
Framed: 35 1⁄2 x 35 1⁄2 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you, 2023
Archival pigment print
Framed: 35 1⁄2 x 35 1⁄2 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
Glittering Dusk, 2025
Photogram, photographic paper, darkroom chemicals, raw silk mat in walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners
Framed: 20 3⁄4 x 20 3⁄4 inches
Unique
I take on shapes like water, 2023
Archival pigment print in walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners
Framed: 20 3⁄4 x 20 3⁄4 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
Blue Thirst, 2021
Archival pigment print in walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners
Framed: 20 3⁄4 x 20 3⁄4 inches
Edition 1 of 5 + 2APs
Papaya Placenta, 2025
Photogram, photographic paper, darkroom chemicals, raw silk mat in walnut artist frame with maple dovetail corners
Framed: 20 3⁄4 x 20 3⁄4 inches
Unique
A Litany of Flame, 2016
Dye transfer print
8 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 inches
Unique
Opening on May 8th at Astor Weeks, Monochrome is a new body of work by artist Naima Green that elucidates and deepens her methodical indexing of the gathering spaces she shares in and constructs, developing a visual language grounded in attunement, reprisal, and attention to presence and omission.
Building on her emergent digital archive Skin Contact (2020–), the exhibition’s photographs revisit the sets, altars, homes, and landscapes that have framed her portraits in the past. In returning to these sites yet absenting or obscuring her sitters, Green shifts her attention to what once surrounded them — the spatial and material residue of gazing and intimacy. Bringing what was once peripheral or barely within her frame into focus, she affirms these environments as subjects worthy of sustained attention in their own right, extending her ongoing inquiry into how we remember, document, and hold space for one another.
In I take on shapes like water, a refracted figure appears only as tattooed legs framing a tropical landscape. The viewer’s gaze is led past palm trees, umbrellas, and the edge of a pool — beyond the body to the context that holds it. In Soubrette (2023), a reflective surface Green previously used as a backdrop for a recent collaborative project is lit and photographed on its own. The resulting image offers no discernible figures mirrored back; instead, it abstracts the studio environment, documenting her placemaking practice in soft focus.
Other works like After the Babyshower (2022) and Reseeding (2024) echo the compositional framing and sensitivity to light of Green’s portraiture, treating photography as a kind of touch. The lumens included in the exhibition, created using found objects, foraged plants, and flowers during a residency in Miami, extend this experimentation with the material traces of intimacies in her image-making practice.
Through these quiet returns and reimaginings, Monochrome becomes both a record and a ritual — foregrounding how memory and presence endure not only in bodies, but in the spaces that hold them. These works, through their tight crops and spatial abstractions, model a gaze that is indirect but never indifferent.
– Rachell Morillo, writer, educator, arts worker
Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photographic forms, sound, installation, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.
Green has an upcoming exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York this fall. She has had solo shows at Baxter Street CCNY and Fotografiska, both NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at the Getty Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Mass MoCA, BRIC, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Houston Center for Photography, and Gallery Factory, Minneapolis, MN, and others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Baxter Street CCNY, Bronx Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, MASS MoCA, Penumbra Foundation, Pocoapoco, and Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Green holds an MFA from Bard College, an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA from Barnard College. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography Library, Museum of Modern Art Library, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.