NEW YORK, NY.- Sikkema Jenkins & Co. announced that the gallery now represents photo-based artist Deana Lawson.

Lawson’s work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and religious spiritual aesthetics. Her practice borrows from various visual traditions including photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the materiality of black culture and its expression as seen through the body as well as in domestic environments. Materials such as lace curtains, artificial nails, blemished skin, colored weave, and plastic couch covers are identified and highlighted. Careful attention is given to lighting and pose, both formal constructs used to transform, inform, and intensify representations of power and liberation through the personal and intimate space. Lawson meets her subjects in everyday walks of life: grocery stores, subway trains, busy avenues in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and road trips taken to the Deep South. Lawson received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, which gave her the opportunity to expand her geographic range and photograph in international locations such as The Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Jamaica, and Ethiopia.

Born in Rochester, New York, in 1979, Lawson received an MFA in Photography from RISD in 2004. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Museum of Art; MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Underground Museum, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem; KIT - Kunst im Tunnel, Düsseldorf; and Light Work, Syracuse.

Lawson is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a NYFA Fellowship Grant. Her work has been published in TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, California Sunday Magazine, Contact Sheet, and PQ: A Journal for Contemporary Photography. She has participated in residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York; Light Work in Syracuse, New York; and Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Lawson currently teaches photography at Princeton University.