Samantha Box: Confluences

Through her photographs, Samantha Box (b. 1977, Kingston, Jamaica) explores the shifting spaces of identity. Spanning nearly two decades of Box’s career, this exhibition brings together two seemingly disparate bodies of work, “The INVISIBLE Archive” (2005–18) and “Caribbean Dreams” (2018–ongoing). Box’s nuanced images of at-risk and unhoused queer youth of color in New York City and of her personal experience of living in the Caribbean-American diaspora reflect on networks of care and survival, as well as ideas of community, home, and belonging. In these two bodies of work, a common thread is Box’s artistic ethos: She probes and questions prevailing societal structures, expressing possibilities that unsettle the dominance of the white heteronormative gaze. Suffused with introspection, beauty, and tension, the ambiguous spaces in Confluences have served as generative sites of self-exploration, provocative inquiry, and creative discovery. 

Samantha Box: Confluences is organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in partnership with the Des Moines Art Center. The exhibition is generously supported by the members of NMWA.  

All works on view are courtesy of the artist. 

The INVISIBLE Archive

Box began “The INVISIBLE Archive” in 2005, as a student at the International Center of Photography, when she embarked on a significant project photographing at-risk and unhoused LGBTQIA+ young people in New York City. In the first series within this body of work, “The Shelter, The Street” (2005–12), Box photographed residents of Sylvia’s Place, an emergency shelter for unhoused LGBTQIA+ youth, while in “The Last Battle” (2010–18), she photographed the events, houses, and spaces that formed the Kiki ballroom scene. “The Village: Maps” (2018), the last chapter of the archive, revisits the now-gentrified neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and the Meatpacking District; in this work, Box’s photographs seek to reverse the erasure of this community from places that were historically the sites of their gathering and survival.   

Kristen, on 34th Street, on her way to work on the stroll, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2008  

Archival inkjet print 

Box photographed former sex worker Kristen Lovell, who today is a trans activist and filmmaker known for her documentary The Stroll (2023). The “stroll” was a term coined by trans sex workers for a section of 14th Street in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District where they lived, worked, and protected each other from harassment and violence. The area’s extreme gentrification, beginning in the 2000s, forcibly removed this community of Black women and Latinas from the space they depended on to survive. 

Isyss and Q, Yasmina and Kaylah, in front of Sylvia’s Place, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2008  

Archival inkjet print 

Bama, Omar, and Devin, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2008  

Archival inkjet print

Cocco visits her mother’s grave, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2007  

Archival inkjet print

Box’s photographs depict moments of grief, joy, tenderness, and introspection. Here, a young woman sits by her mother’s gravestone. The pained expression on her face, handwritten notes on a flower bed, and a small sign reading “Happy Mother’s Day” reveal the depth of her tragedy. Cocco’s mother’s death forced her into the foster care system, which she escaped, seeking refuge in the streets. 

At Melissa’s Mother’s Day picnic, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2007  

Archival inkjet print

Baby, near Occupy Wall Street (Zuccotti Park), from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2011

Archival inkjet print

Rhiei, on Astor Place, following a fight with her wife, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2011

Archival inkjet print

Yasmina, on the stroll, from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2007

Archival inkjet print

Untitled (New Year), from the series “The Shelter, The Street,” 2010

Archival inkjet print

Sylvia’s Place, a shelter for LGBTQIA+ youth, is located in the basement of the Metropolitan Community Church in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, sharing the space with the church’s food pantry. While most residents who met Box did not stay long, many formed new chosen family bonds. These vital connections helped the community to endure in the face of homophobia and transphobia, racism, and oppressive public policies.

“The Village: Maps,” 2018 

Inkjet prints, left to right: 

Maps #3 

Maps #1

Maps #2

Maps #4

Here, Box rephotographed places in Greenwich Village that she originally visited for “The Shelter, The Street.” Using a map of the area, she drew the street lines of each location on the back of corresponding photographic prints and folded the paper accordion-style along those lines. After inverting scans of the creased paper to give the effect of a black-and white negative, she reprinted the images on flimsy paper. In this series, Box questions what it means to give an address to this community of trans women and underscores the fleeting nature of the community itself. 

From the series “The Last Battle,” 2017 

The House of Mattel

Photograph on vinyl (center) 

Marcus Garvey spoke here, Harlem

Family Tree

Archival inkjet prints (top left and bottom right)

Untitled (snapshots)

Archival inkjet prints

House structures are the core of the ballroom scene. Houses, with kinship structures of “father,” “mother,” and “children,” offer systems of family support. The House of Mattel, referring to the well-known toy company, is headed by Founding Mother Icon Sharae Mattel, who has hosted many Mattel and Playhouse-themed balls. Her honorific title of “Icon” indicates her longstanding, significant impact on the Kiki community.  

In Family Tree, Box mapped the extensive networks of several Kiki houses in a drawing of a family tree, illustrating the myriad ways in which people related to the scene. Arrows and dotted lines indicate the intertwined chosen family relationships of parents, siblings, godparents, and more. 

Team Performance, The HMI Awards Ball, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2014

Archival inkjet print

The Ballroom scene grew in the 1960s as an alternative to early twentieth-century drag balls, which excluded members of the Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ community. Participants, organized into “houses,” gather for monthly balls involving performance-art battles, where they compete in various categories, including “Best Dressed,” “Runway,” “Vogue,” “Realness,” and “Face.” The Kiki scene, an offshoot of Ballroom, plays a pivotal role in HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention for at-risk LGBTQIA+ youth. 

Grand Prize, Runway, Sharae’s Playhouse, Part 2, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2015

Archival inkjet print

BQVF, Function unknown, Roulette, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2014

Archival inkjet print

Female figure performance, The HMI Awards Ball, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2014

Archival inkjet print

Here, Box catches performers voguing. With flinging hair, intense expressions, and forceful gestures, the dancers’ physicality, energy, and self-assurance take center stage as they dominate the floor, cheered on by a rapt audience. In this way, Kiki balls are spaces of self-empowerment and advocacy. 

Realness, From NYC to Miami Ball, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2013

Archival inkjet print

Face, the FIERCE Ball, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2010

Archival inkjet print

The audience, The HMI Awards Ball, from the series “The Last Battle,” 2014

Archival inkjet print

Caribbean Dreams

In 2018, Box moved away from the black-and-white, documentary-style photography seen in “The INVISIBLE Archive” to the dazzling colors of the ongoing series “Caribbean Dreams.” In this body of work, Box—who is of Black Jamaican and South Asian Trinidadian ancestry—fractures the myth of the origin story. Instead, she proposes a notion of a self that resides within the multiplicity of diaspora. In these digitally and physically collaged images, elaborate compositions brim with traces of the artist’s own experiences and colonial legacies. The unstable surfaces of these photographs present a series of questions: How do identity, culture, and knowledge shift across borders? How can a photograph become more than a document, a definition? Through her staged still lifes and constructions, Box creates a “portal toward complexity,” layering history, self, identity, and narrative. 

Fracture, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2021

Archival inkjet print

An image of the artist as an infant in her family’s front yard in Kingston is glitched and multiplied across this composition. Here, Box ruptures the assumptions about “homeland” as the source of a person’s origin. Rather than subscribing to nostalgia for her birthplace, Box depicts the hybrid narratives that come from diasporic experiences. Box traces her lineage to the Black and South Asian populations of Jamaica and Trinidad, respectively. Her family’s migration from Jamaica to the multicultural landscape of central New Jersey added another layer to her diasporic identity.

The Jamaican National Dish, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2019

Archival inkjet print

A can of ackee, produced by the company Caribbean Dreams, sits centered in the composition. This still life brings together ackees with salt fish, the national dish of Jamaica. These items—and their union—speak to historical and contemporary routes of transport and the commodification of people, culture, and objects. Ackees, indigenous to western Africa, were brought to Jamaica as a food staple for people who were enslaved, while scraps of salt-preserved codfish, the refuse from the lucrative global trade in cod, supplemented that fruit.

A Supreme Jamaican Product, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2022

Archival inkjet print, collaged with archival inkjet elements

Flashcards, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2018

Archival inkjet prints

Accent Shift, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2019

Audio, 2 min., 31 sec. 

Box’s Flashcards depict the artist’s arm holding a Caribbean fruit or vegetable alongside its vernacular name in printed text. This food nomenclature illuminates the colonial histories and cultural legacies of Jamaica and Trinidad, asserting traditional systems of knowledge against colonially centered classification systems. For instance, sucrier fig, a type of banana, references the legacies of French colonialism in Trinidad. Bandanya, a type of coriander, underscores the cultural heritage of indentured Indian laborers who arrived in Trinidad during the British colonial era, after the abolition of African enslavement across the empire.  

In the accompanying audio, the artist’s mother enunciates the name of each food, and Box repeats it after her. The women’s different accents and levels of familiarity with the words reveal the complex cultural shifts that result from migration. 

Seal, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2022

Archival inkjet print, collaged with archival inkjet elements

Mirror #1, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2019

Archival inkjet print

One Kind of Story, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2020

Archival inkjet print, collaged with archival inkjet elements

Box surrounds a pixelated image of herself with photographs of her maternal relatives, including her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt. She sits with raised arms, in a pose modeled after the photograph Young Indian Woman (ca. 1890–96) made by French photographer Félix Morin (active ca.1869–1896) in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Such historical photographs were used as postcards for white tourist consumption, as well as pro-colonialist propaganda. In this image, family photographs disrupt the surface of the earlier image, proposing alternate narratives to visual histories dictated by the colonial gaze. 

Edges, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2020

Archival inkjet print

Box frequently poses against a black-and-white backdrop—a low-resolution, blown-up reproduction of a landscape in colonial-era Trinidad by one of the country’s most acclaimed nineteenth-century painters, Michel-Jean Cazabon (1813–1888). Box reframes Cazabon’s ahistoric, idyllic view of Trinidad; her image, held together by tape, demonstrates that the world within the photograph is a constructed space. In her hands, the sugar cane, a symbol of colonial plunder, now appears as a powerful weapon. The obscured body seizes autonomy, challenging colonial representations of the Caribbean.

Navel, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2022

Archival inkjet print, collaged with archival inkjet elements

The inset photograph here depicts Buckley’s Uprising of 1935, part of a wider labor movement across the British Caribbean, when sugarcane cutters in St. Kitts demanded better wages and working conditions. Box’s hand reaches for a Corelle dish with the “Crazy Daisy” pattern popular among U.S. immigrant communities in the 1970s and ’80s. Through this complex construction, the artist reflects on her immigrant experience and the broader systems of exploitation and resistance related to the Caribbean.

Transplant Family Portrait, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2020

Archival inkjet print, collaged with archival inkjet elements  

Throughout Box’s work, fruits, vegetables, and plants stand in for people whose bodies have been commodified and transported to and from the Caribbean: enslaved Africans, indentured Indians, and Caribbean immigrants. The purple grow-light reflects their methods of survival. Jars of Jamaica Mountain Peak Instant Coffee and Blue Mountain Country Natural Molasses reference industries that claim to make the Caribbean accessible to consumers worldwide. Collaged produce stickers, packaging, and receipts point to the present-day flattening of Caribbean cultures into commodities. 

Multiple #3, from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2018

Archival inkjet print

Construction #1(1), from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2018

Archival inkjet print

Construction #1(3), from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2018

Archival inkjet print

Box began the “Caribbean Dreams” series by studying seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Observing that Black figures in historical artworks were often reduced to objects—just as spices, tulips, porcelain, and other products of imperialism were—she staged still-life displays of Caribbean fruits and vegetables. Her works echo the warm color palettes, luminous surfaces, and deep shadows of these paintings. In her images, Box reaches out to hold or bite the fruit. By placing her own body into the composition, she recasts the historically disenfranchised Black figure as an active subject. 

Untitled (Golden), from the series “Caribbean Dreams,” 2024

Archival inkjet print, collaged with archival inkjet elements

Whereas colonial forms of art-making purported to show authentic views of the Caribbean as a paradise, Box reveals the artifice behind artists’ images. Here, she exposes the contours of her studio. This effort underscores the role of art history in creating cultural myths, seen in still lifes that defined luxury and empire through opulent objects. Her gold-foil backdrop, for example, reveals gold as a driving force for colonial exploitation. Box’s work questions underlying power dynamics, plumbing value, desire, and commodification within the Caribbean. 

“The Caribbean doesn’t have a shape or form. It exists everywhere, appears everywhere.”