Last December, Genesis Báez and Jenny Calivas — who are best friends, as well as peers in the world of contemporary photography — opened a humble, two-person exhibition titled “Silt of Each Other.” Located in their friend and mentor Justine Kurland’s Brooklyn studio, the exhibition, which ran for a month and a half, was intended to be a space for Báez and Calivas to examine connections between their practices.
“We went into it wanting to learn from each other and our work,” Báez, who is a visiting lecturer in art at the College, told the Record. “We were literally like, ‘Our husbands and friends can see our work in Justine’s studio. Maybe my mom will come.’ And my mom couldn’t even come, sadly.”
Báez and Calivas wrote a press release ahead of the exhibit, and they sent it to everyone they knew — from family to art professionals and friends from graduate school. One recipient was Marcela Guerrero, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who Báez had previously met through a mutual friend. Guerrero passed the invite to her colleague Kelly Long, a senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney, and together, they attended the exhibition at the beginning of January.
Báez still remembers the moment the Whitney curators arrived at the Brooklyn studio. “They all moved through the space in silence,” she said. “They were looking at the work so deeply and reading it in a way that made me feel honored.”
A month later, Long reached out to the artists to ask if their work was available for acquisition. In August, three of Báez’s photographs — as well as work by Calivas — were included in “Trust Me,” a Whitney photography exhibition curated by Long that explores themes of vulnerability, intimacy, and connection.
Báez describes her practice as “somewhere in between carefully staging images and working with chance and improvisation.” She arranges her subjects — sometimes herself or the women in her family — into a scene, but the rest is less planned.
In the instance of Sound of a Circle, a photograph she created in 2018 where a subject whispers a secret to another in a New Haven restaurant, it took a particular ray of light to perfect the scene she had tried to stage for over two years to no avail. “Everything kind of lined up in this serendipitous way,” Báez said.
Báez, whose mother moved to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1980s shortly before she was born, interrogates tensions between diaspora and connection through her work. Her pieces examine themes of self-fragmentation, separation, and place.
Báez didn’t have a previous connection to the models she cast in Sound of a Circle, unlike those in the majority of her photographs — they were high school students who happened to walk into an open gallery of hers during her M.F.A. program at Yale.
“They recognized the light in one of my photographs,” Báez said. “They were like, ‘Is this from Puerto Rico?’” It was. The group, Báez said, formed a bond over their shared familial connections to the island, one that evolved into regular scene reenactments, and eventually into Sound of a Circle, which is included in the Whitney exhibition.
“I was thinking a lot about diaspora and the dispersion of people and community and how a place can create bonds between strangers,” Báez said. “There was something there that made them feel like my kin.”
The kinship in the two other photographs featured in “Trust Me” is a bit more literal: Báez’s mother is the subject. In Parting (Braid), the viewer sees a refracted silhouette of Báez’s mother styling her hair against a white sheet, what Báez described as her attempt to “braid a photograph” through overlapping shadows. Crossing Time depicts Báez’s mother holding a string against a wall, the shadow of which, created by light from a window, reveals Báez holding the other end.
When Báez started taking photographs, she naturally gravitated to her mother as one of her primary subjects. But as Báez has gotten older, she said, she’s understood her connection to her mother as indicative of a larger theme within her art. “My mother feels like the link between my life here and my life there — and by here and there, I mean Massachusetts and Puerto Rico,” she said.
“It would be so much easier if I just said to my husband, ‘Hey, can you help me hold this piece of string for a second?’” she added. “But it’s about her. It’s about us.”
In photographs that feature both her and her mother, Báez uses a self-timer since she cannot capture the picture herself, changing both the process and her relationship to the work. “There’s this element of letting go and being present in a different way, because I’m not behind the camera,” she said. “I liked that this image was used in this show, because there was an element of trust in making the image.”
These themes — trust and intimacy of many forms, as well as the relationship between subjects, artists, curators, and viewers — were ones Long had been considering over the past few years, even before “Trust Me” was formally in development. Amid the pandemic, a global racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, and the Whitney’s own unionization in 2021, Long felt an increased urgency to examine “multi-layered trust building,” not only in art-making and art-exhibiting, but also in everyday relationships, she told the Record.
“People were having to lean on each other and trust one another and take risks together in a way that felt really generative and empowering,” Long said. “What is the role of deep feeling and togetherness?”
While many of the works included in “Trust Me” individually and overtly comment on themes of intimacy — such as the embrace captured in Barbara Hammer’s Barbara & Terry — Long’s depiction of relationality extends more broadly through the lines one can draw between the 11 artists included in the exhibition.
Long displays Báez’s work alongside pieces by artists like Moyra Davey and Muriel Hasbun, who Báez remembers studying throughout her education — a relationship that, though not explicitly spelled out in the exhibit, evokes the theme of intimacy within the art community. “Thinking about teacher-student connections and mentorship is something that is a really through-line in ‘Trust Me,’” Long noted.
But even more potent is the friendship that ties pieces by Báez and Calivas together. (“The works are literally side by side!” Báez exclaimed.)
“I knew that not only did I want to use Genesis’s work and Jenny’s work, but I really wanted to be thinking about their works together,” Long remembered from her initial visit to “Silt of Each Other” in January. “This was a really beautiful opportunity to not only see the work of two practices that I think are truly astonishing, but also to see this model of friendship and mutual support and creative collaboration.”
Báez’s friendship with Calivas dates back over a decade, when the pair met as the only photographers at a painter-dominated residency in Vermont — while also wearing the same shoes. They quickly realized they have the same astrological sign, too. “It was like finding your twin in the woods,” Báez said. “We were like, ‘Wait, we have a lot in common. Hi, let’s be best friends.’” They both got their M.F.A.s from Yale within a year of each other, and the artists put on “Silt of Each Other” as a way to put their work in conversation.
It’s particularly special, Báez said, that the conversation has now been extended into one of the most prominent art museums in the world.
“It’s my first time showing in a museum in New York, and it feels like a really big deal, but what’s really important about it is that our work is going to be historicized together,” she said. “Future generations will look back — and it’s not that they’ll find my work — they’ll find Jenny and I in conversation together.”
Since her mother splits time between Puerto Rico and Massachusetts, Báez hasn’t had a chance to bring her to “Trust Me,” but she has plans to do so in November. In the same month, Báez will also present her work at an exhibition in San Juan, an opportunity for much of her extended family to see her pieces in person for the first time.
Until then, she has plenty to relish in. And relish she has: When she first saw the exhibition at the Whitney, Báez was too numb to take much of it in (she said she went home and wept), but she later returned with loved ones for the opening reception of “Trust Me” and started to soak it all in. The connections created by the exhibit have, at least for Báez, transcended the museum walls.
