Carmen Lizardo

In the Archetypes series, I act as an archivist, using public-domain photographs to highlight how historical records in archives reflect the cultural, social, and political biases of those who collect, maintain, and interpret them. My process was born from a personal space of living with postcards of public domain images of Unidentified African American women from the turn of the century for over a decade. This work reinvents the stories obscured by the disenfranchisement of women, particularly women of color, finding their place in American history and cultural landscape and reflecting on today’s continuing disallowance of women’s gender-defining identity within our societal standards of gender and race.