Black | Box pairs McAdams’s historic photos with her lyrical reflections. AutoWorks & WaterWorks showcases how Robinson captured the body performing games of chance with the camera.
byPratt Manhattan Gallery
On Friday, April 18, Pratt Manhattan Gallery will open two new photography exhibitions: Black | Box by Dona Ann McAdams, which combines black and white photography with text to encapsulate late 20th century American life, and AutoWorks & WaterWorks by Abby Robinson, which captures the body performing games of chance with the camera, moving through light and the fluidity of water.
Dona Ann McAdams: Black | Box
Black | Box is an exhibition by award-winning American photographer Dona Ann McAdams, combining 50 years of black and white photography with her own short lyric texts. Taken between 1974 and 2024, the photos document astonishing moments and people across decades of American life. These striking historical images paired with personal reflections that read like prose poems work together to convey an unapologetic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, the Culture Wars, and the Performance Art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. This show is timed to coincide with the release of McAdams’s recent monograph, Black | Box: A Photographic Memoir, published by Saint Lucy Books.
Abby Robinson: AutoWorks & WaterWorks
Abby Robinson (1947–2024) developed her AutoWorks series for over 30 years, beginning in 1971. The series communicates the art of women deploying the camera to debunk fixed gender roles through self-portrait photography and presentation. Composed of black and white prints approximately two-by-three in size, the images from AutoWorks are small and intimate photos.
Robinson’s WaterWorks series grew out of AutoWorks over the past decade, when she serendipitously took her camera into the shower. The use of color and significantly larger prints results in a different mood for the WaterWorks photos. The images are direct, showing merely a figure and a circumscribed space transformed by a combination of water and light. The exhibition features works from both series, which were selected by the photographer before her death in July 2024.
Both exhibitions are on display at Pratt Manhattan Gallery from Friday, April 18, until June 7, 2025, with a public reception on Thursday, April 17, from 6 to 8pm. Pratt Manhattan Gallery is located at 144 West 14th Street in New York City, open 11am–6pm Monday through Saturday.
To learn more, visit pratt.edu.
Pratt Manhattan Gallery’s program is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
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