Next Door: Environmental Injustice in Our Neighborhoods
Jun 6, 2024 – Jun 29, 2024
The exhibit at the Los Angeles Center for Photography is the culmination of work by Los Angeles-area high school students and professional visual storytellers. AfroLA, a nonprofit news outlet covering L.A. through the lens of the Black community, partnered with Black Women Photographers to produce an immersive art exhibition focused on the intersection of environmental and racial justice.
Exhibiting Artists
Black Women Photographers
Tumi Adeleye
Jessica Bethel
Amber Clemons
Amari Dixon
Hanna Leka
Tara Pixley
Nia Symone
Anisa Williams
Da Vinci Communications High multimedia journalism
Arianna Goldfarb
CJ Lucey
Joey Peinado
Mia Rios
Nick Torres
Rogerick Watts
Brian Winbush
DVC Instructor: Adam Watson
Curator
Tara Pixley – photojournalist, filmmaker and visual media consultant based in Los Angeles, CA
Project Coordinators
Dana Amihere, Jessica Bethel, Amari Dixon and Tara Pixley
Opening Reception
Thursday, June 6th, 6-8pm, FREE with RSVP, @ LACP, 252 S. Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012, RSVP Here
Exhibition Run Dates
June 6, 2024 – June 29, 2024
Student + Residents Panel
Saturday, June 29th, 6-8pm, @ LACP, 252 S. Los Angeles St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
The legacy of historic redlining and environmental racism have resulted in policies and development that disproportionately impact people of color, specifically Black and Latine communities. Next Door documents the everyday lives of L.A.-area residents impacted by poor air quality, contaminants in their water, oil infrastructure, and dust and pollution resulting from commercial trucking and warehousing in their neighborhoods.
Read and listen to additional reporting on residents’ experiences and the environmental injustices they face on AfroLA’s website.
Listen to Da Vinci students’ audio projects below.
Gallery
About
The exhibit at the Los Angeles Center for Photography is the culmination of work by Los Angeles-area high school students and professional visual storytellers. AfroLA, a nonprofit news outlet covering L.A. through the lens of the Black community, partnered with Black Women Photographers to produce an immersive art exhibition focused on the intersection of environmental and racial justice.
Pairs of BWP photographers and Da Vinci Communications High School’s multimedia journalism students interviewed residents from predominantly Black and Latine communities, including Inglewood, Leimert Park and Wilmington. They also spoke with community advocates, researchers and experts whose work centers mitigating environmental harms, past and present.
The interviews were produced as “mini-podcasts” by the students that will be accessible at the exhibit via QR codes displayed alongside the artwork. What is it like to live near warehouses that reroute industrial traffic through your neighborhood? What adjustments do residents have to make to deal with contaminated water or poor air quality that results in chronic illness? What’s it like to live next door to an oil field? Attendees will be able to see and hear how residents—especially those in historically-marginalized communities—live day to day.
The Curator
Tara Pixley, Ph.D. is a queer, Jamaican-American photographer, filmmaker, and professor based in Los Angeles. Her photography and films reimagine race, gender, climate futures, LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities through a liberation lens. Her work as a photojournalist has taken her from the ships of eco-pirates to the U.S. presidential campaign trail and her writing and photography have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Allure, People, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, and ESPN, among many others. She has been named a Reynolds Journalism Fellow, Pulitzer Center Grantee, World Press Photo Solutions Visual Journalism grantee and a Knight Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. Tara is on the Boards of the National Press Photographers Association and Stocksy. She is a co-Founder and current Director of Authority Collective — an organization dedicated to establishing equity for women of color in visual media — and she is currently photographing the environmental justice crisis of Southern California oil production.
Features
- Opening reception on Thursday, June 6, 6-8 pm, 2024
- USC student discussion on Thursday, June 20, 10 am – 12 pm
- Closing panel discussion on Saturday, June 29, 6-8 pm, 2024