When I visited the Manhattan studio of the artist Allison Janae Hamilton recently, I was struck by the many family photographs pinned up around her workspace. There were dozens of them, dating as far back as seven generations ago. All four of her great-grandmothers were there: Della, Maria, Alice (who she’s named after), and Ola. At one point Hamilton pointed to a pair of portraits of her great-aunt she took when she was 12—some of her earliest artworks. “I would take the film and develop it in my little darkroom in middle school,” Hamilton told me. “I was obsessed with it as a kid.”
Surrounded by all these family photos, she says there’s a “haunting, ancestral thrust” that infuses her practice. It comes not just from the people in the photographs, but from the land. Most of the photos were taken on her family’s farm in rural Tennessee. Hamilton grew up in Florida but spent a lot of time on that farm as a kid, helping with each planting and harvest. “My experience of Black womanhood is really bound up with the land. My aunts all hunted and fished and farmed, and I grew up around that culture,” she says. “Which is not often the first assumption that pops into mind when people think about Black womanhood.”
Hamilton has long tapped the landscapes of her pan-Southern upbringing to inform her work, and for a new solo exhibition at New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, called “Celestine” (through March 8), she takes a particular point of view: looking upward. This show, her second at Marianne Boesky, sees Hamilton playing with familiar motifs in novel ways across film, painting, and sculpture. “The theme is sort of like vertical landscapes: the soil and then the stars,” she says.
Allison Janae Hamilton, Celestine (Florida Storm), 2024. Still 045.Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery.
