Poe Park Visitor Center: Black History Month Exhibition
The Poe Park Visitor Center proudly presents its virtual exhibition in commemoration of Black History Month. Through striking photography, paintings, and multi-media art, established and emerging artists offer their unique interpretation of the Black experience. Visit our Black History page to learn more about Black culture and history in New York City and the parks that tell their stories.
About Poe Park Visitor Center
Poe Park Visitor Center is a community hub at Poe Park in the Bronx that offers art, literature, fitness, and community events. Due to the pandemic, the center is closed until further notice and the gallery has temporarily moved online.
Michael Young
Artist statement: I'm a street, portrait, and documentary photographer. My work captures reality but presents it so that the mundane is altered. I use photography as a means of expression to communicate and document the "beauty" and "hardship" of the world around me. My goal is to capture moments, expressions, a mood, a feeling. I always want you as the viewer to experience a connection when you look at my work... I want to create imagery that makes you feel a part of my experience and gives you a front-row seat to the world as I see it.

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My Generation, Terrenceo Hammonds
Artist statement: Based on lived experience, my artwork captures the crosscurrent in American Culture and characterizes this complex relationship of angst and hope. The complexity is formed through an equally intricate painting technique, in some instances collaging materials from billboards and magazines onto the picture plane and at other times decollating the media.

What Could Be More American #1
30.5 x 36, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, 2019
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Strange Fruit, James Deliard
Artist statement: Strange Fruit is a painting that depicts public lynching practice of slaves as punishment and warning to other slaves with intent. It was a way to terrorize the Black race. I wanted to demonstrate the savage, grotesque, and painful nature of this crime.

Strange Fruit
30 x 40, acrylic paint on canvas, 2021
Blacks in the Pandemic, Betty J. Murray
Artist statement: People are going into hospitals dying, being carried out in body bags with barely enough time for burial. In this pandemic, people are protesting the unjust murders of African Americans while America watched a police officer placed his knee on the neck of an unarmed man (George Floyd), choking the wind out to his body. His last dying words, heard him calling his dead mother. These injustices stimulated others to join African Americans in their protest, carrying signs with fists raised demanding equal treatment... As these two pandemics take place, we watch as it unfolded in America.




Gloria Zapata
Artist Statement: Being a Blacktina from Honduras, proud of my skin color, proud of my heritage, there is a sadness in the reflection of seeing myself, my people suffer. Suffer in suffocation, in lockdown, in misunderstood and misrepresented light. But in that reflection, I see feminity, masculinity, soul, support, empowerment, color, not just of brown palettes but rainbows themed through my storytelling. Rocks of strength molding solidarity, accountability, authority, for the past, the now, the suppressed, the unheard and unseen. During a time of drastic change with eyes and ears standing up, shouting out, my work plays through the scales of human-like chords of us as humanity embracing the unpredictable events of Covid, of quarantine, of separation and segregation. My art goes out to souls here, souls rested, souls lost.
men will be hmmm
women will be core
victims will be pain
covid will be virus
riots will be death
flags will be serenity
fist will be power
justice will be unspoken
profile will be judgement
colorisim will be ignored
and I will breathe for the suffocating, brush strokes for the gay, hold accountability for the inability of what's in the face of today.

Niya Power
16 x 20, collaborated painting by artist: Bio Tatscru
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Josipa Kecman

Madame
12 x 16, acrylic on canvas, 2016
A person is born with charisma and that person I call “Madam, a lady with a class.” To be charismatic is not determined by where you were born, what you do, your education level, and it is especially not determined by your skin color, your faith, or your belief. You are born with it, you can’t train it or learn it, either you are or you are not.
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Thinking Things Through, Joan Barnes
Artist statement: My work is an examination of the different photographers working in the black and white film media that have influenced me often to use black and white paper to prepare my wood and linoleum prints. Gordon Parks and Ansel Adams are my favorite photographers... I often use my photographs as the basis for a print... Living in the Bronx and engaging in many citywide activities, my soulful subjects are shown depicting urban life and the pulse the city has on them.

Linoleum prints and wood, 1970s
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Gregorio Velez
Artist statement: I'm an emerging contemporary painter, performing artist, and educator. My work is based on observations of nature, Picasso’s cubism, and Van Gogh’s impressionism styles. Although I keep the Garifuna culture present in my works, I also dwell in contemporary events and routine/mundane situations aiming at striking and maintaining mental balance and emotional health.

BLACK LIVES MATTER
28 x 39 3/4, mixed media on board, 2020
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Patrice J. Payne
Artist statement: I create because I want to tell a story and produce content that matters – content that represents aspects of my identity and personal experience as a Black woman navigating through various social environments... My work often depicts characters and/or figures that explore notions of empowerment as well as draw upon my interest in my cultural background, current events, the natural environment, and civil and human rights. Through my art, I aim to inspire people, especially younger audiences, to create work that is indicative of their experiences and understanding of the world we live in. Art is one way we can use our voices to share our stories. Ultimately, I want my work to capture and deliver the sensation of hope, power, dynamism, and true self-discovery.

Chadwick Above
Digital collage, 2021
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Trevon Blondet
Artist statement:I enjoy documenting everyday events to shine a positive light on my subjects, whether that subject is fatherhood, Artist, or the Bronx; I try to find hidden and tender moments. Using portraits, street photography, or photo journalistic approaches, I like to visually tell stories with my photography.

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