I made it home

A Solo Exhibition by Golden
Pen + Brush, 29 E 22nd Street, New York
June 27th–September 5th

Queer|Art and Pen + Brush are pleased to co-present, I made it home, a solo exhibition by photographer, poet, and organizer Golden. The exhibited portraits were commissioned as the 2024 Community Portrait Project, the seventh edition of an annual tradition celebrating artists in their growing and vibrant network. This new body of work comprises intimate portraits of fifteen artists and cultural workers within the QA community in spaces of deep personal resonance–apartments, studios, workplaces, parks, theaters, and exhibitions. Beyond the beauty of each subject, these portraits reflect the lives they’ve built and worlds they’ve nourished, revealing how identity is shaped by the environments we create and inhabit.

In their interdisciplinary practice, Golden’s highly attentive process centers collaboration, trust, and storytelling. Guided by a creative ethos of care and respect, they allow each sitter to determine how they are seen. In this sense, they subvert the traditional photographer-subject hierarchy, and instead privilege self-definition as an artistic right.

I made it home celebrates queer and trans collectivity while honoring the distinct narratives within it. The sprawling project spans several months, multiple states, and includes sitters from different creative disciplines. In some cases, successive generations are pictured, giving us a glimpse into a dynamic community in bloom. The result is a multifaceted series that resists homogeneity in favor of lived complexity. 

The exhibition design draws on visual cues from historical salons, public gathering spaces, and domestic interiors. By collapsing these diverse architectural references, the exhibition evokes a spirit of belonging that transcends physical spaces. In Golden’s world, home is defined not by brick and bone, but by connection, memory, and kin.

I made it home opens Friday, June 27th, with a public reception from 6–8 PM at Pen + Brush at 29 E 22nd St. The show is on view through September 5th, 2025.

The 2024 Community Portrait Project was made possible by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.
Installation images by Bird Piccininni & Manny Fernandes.

WORKS ON VIEW

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.