New Haven Independent

The opening of the exhibit at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center Monday evening was full of beautiful black women, plus a few white women and a few men.

Photographer Jerry Taliaferro (pictured with his wife, Debra) premiered his “Women of a New Tribe” exhibit in Charlotte, N.C., in 2002. It includes 200 photos of stunning black and white images. His traveling exhibit includes a rotating 20 of those images. Plus, in every venue he visits, he invites local women to be part of a companion exhibit.

New Haven’s is different from the others he’s shot, he explained over the collegial buzz in the refurbished exhibition space at the Afro-Am Center on Park Street. “It’s unusual to include so many young women, which is very special, because normally we’re looking at what women have done. We look at the Yale student and we’re looking more at potential and possibility. We expect one day to look at the cover of Time and see the same women.”

Pamela George, an assistant dean and director of the Afro-Am Center (pictured in the center chatting with Curlena McDonald on the right), said she invited accomplished local women to participate as well as several students, staff and faculty from Yale. She was inspired after learning about Taliaferro’s work, and contacted him to bring his traveling exhibit to Yale.

“I thought about a lot of the emerging and existing leaders at Yale and in New Haven that I’ve had contact with or had heard about and had admired their work, or had others tell me about the importance of their work,” she said. They have excelled in many fields, including education, the arts, and the social services. “So I actually contacted a fraction of all the women we could have chosen for this exhibit.” She said quite a few declined to be photographed, not because they didn’t love the idea, but because they couldn’t fit it into their schedule. “So we’re looking to do this again, with another group. We’re hoping to perhaps make this an annual event.”

Madeline (Mattie) Johnson, a Yale sophomore pictured above, said she was happy to be asked. Her brief bio in the exhibit booklet says she works on issues of bigotry on campus and is a student journalist, and “Social justice is something that she hopes to work towards all of her life.” When she went to be photographed, she was carrying a book she needed to read for a class, “Interracial Intimacies.” So it became a prop. “I wanted to do it to show there’s more to blackness than just one stereotype. I’m different than other black people, and it’s not less, it’s just different, and that’s very OK.” Johnson said the book “speaks to me about what it means to be a beautiful black woman. I’m mixed race but because of race politics I identify more with my black self than with my white self.”

McDonald is one of the 25 local women in the exhibit. She’s a longtime community activist in the Dwight neighborhood (and president of the community management team).

Bea Dozier Taylor (pictured) is proprietor of A Walk in Truth Christian Books and Black Print Emporium on Edgewood Avenue in Dwight, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

The show will run through May 25 and is free and open to the public.

Ann Garrett Robinson, professor emerita at Gateway Community College, specializing in
“community service and culturally-conscous teaching,” according to her bio.