The QUEER|ART COMMUNITY PORTRAIT PROJECT is an annual commission of digital portraits, celebrating artists who are part of our diverse and vibrant community.

For the Queer|Art Community Portrait Project, artists from across different disciplines and generations gather once a year to participate in a marathon photoshoot event, sitting for their portraits as representatives of the Queer|Art community. Over time, the project will chart nuances of generational and personal growth within the community—as many artists return and new artists are welcomed into the mix—all seen through the lens of a different photographer each year.

The 2024 Community Portrait Project was made possible by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

2024 COMMUNITY PORTRAIT PROJECT

COMMISSIONED ARTIST: GOLDEN

The seventh edition of the Queer|Art Community Portrait Project was photographed by Golden, the winner of the 2023 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women. Golden built collaborative portraits with various members of the QA community in spaces of domestic comfort, creative production, and personal significance. Whether the photoshoot took place in an apartment, studio, workplace, exhibition, or a local park, this sprawling project recognizes that home is a place that extends beyond brick and bone. Symbolizing the many parallel yet individualized stories within our communities, Golden’s hope with this year’s Community Portrait Project is to provide each artist space to share their world(s), neighborhoods, artistry, beauty, (chosen) family, and aliveness that extends across the New York City area and beyond. The result of our most geographically ambitious project to date is a radiant body of work, with each photograph teeming with vitality, story, and spirit.

Click on the pictures below to learn more about each subject and their affiliation to Queer|Art. These images should not be reprinted or linked without permission, and credit to the photographer and the Queer|Art Community Portrait Project must always be included. All requests for reusing any of these photographs should be directed to info@queer-art.org.

Golden’s portraits will be on view as part of their solo exhibition, I made it home, which opens Friday, June 27th with a public reception from 6–8 PM at Pen + Brush at 29 E 22nd St. Learn more here.

ABOUT GOLDEN

Golden (they/them) is a Black gender-nonconforming photographer, author, & educator raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts (Massachusett people land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (2022), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry (2023), and Reprise forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2025.

Golden is the recipient of a National Geographic Second Assistant Grant (2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), a Best of the Net Award (2020), a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-2021), a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography (2021), a Women Photograph Project Grant (2021), a Collective Futures Fund Grant (2022), an Aperture/Google Creator Labs Photo Fund Grant (2023), and a MacDowell Fellowship (2025). Their photographic series On Learning How to Live, was selected as an Arnold Newman Prize Finalist (2021) and won the the Queer|Art Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2023).

As a teaching artist, Golden has taught and facilitated creative writing, spoken word, and photography classes/programs at Wellesley College, New York University, GrubStreet, and the ICA. They hold a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University.

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