News
Gordon Parks & the Post War American City
In April of 2025, I will be presenting a paper at the University of Illinois-Chicago. My contribution will highlight Parks’ interdisciplinary career, moving from photography to filmmaking, specifically exploring his recurring engagement with Harlem. I hope to weave my own family’s history with further research as I discuss his 1968 film “The World of Piri Thomas”, a biopic of the late Puerto Rican poet who chronicled life in Spanish Harlem.
This conference will bring together scholars in the humanities and social sciences, photography curators, artists and filmmakers, and provide an opportunity to explore a towering and yet unsung intellectual figure, his unique photographic, cinematic and written perspectives, and an important period of social transformation in American life that reverberates into the current day.
To Rise Above Ruins
In the Spring of 2025, a survey of my work will be exhibited at the Riverside Art Museum from March-September in the two galleries on the upper level of the museum:
“To Rise Above Ruins takes inspiration from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who ruminates on how cultures persist under the threat of erasure. Photographer Tamara Cedré builds her work upon this notion of the remaking and reassembling of cultures from fragmental memory by bringing together archival and new images to conjure what Walcott calls a “visual echo of history.” Looking closely to imagery made around the turn of the American Century, this exhibition engages past and present, to create a photographic commons for Cedré and the communities she calls home in Puerto Rico and Southern California to understand how land has been used and shaped in the service of power.”
—Dr. Catherine Gudis
On View: March 15, 2025 – August 31, 2025
Public reception at the museum: Thursday, May 1
Panel Talk at the Culver Center: Wednesday, June 4
For press inquiries, please contact: cagudis@ucr.edu
Live from the Frontline
In cooperation with A People’s History of the I.E. , Live from the Frontline, is a participatory public memory project I am leading that invites artists into the archives and the landscapes of logistics to create site-specific works that explore the roots of environmental racism. The project includes eight sites located in Riverside and San Bernardino where long histories of colonialism and extraction from the land and labor are palpable, offering opportunities to reflect on what the curators call “the slow violence of the supply chain.”
This summer, my solo show on Colton and Fontana will debut at the California Museum of Photography from
June-October on the lower level of the museum near the archives! I will be giving a public talk and screening of my new short at the museum on October 13th.
A Q/A panel with responses from me can be found here and a thoughtful review of the exhibition by Dr. April Baca can be read in CARLA’s Winter Issue/# 38 here.
Thank you California Arts Council!
Our film Un Corrido de la Tierra | A Ballad of the Land and zine The Space has been awarded CAC Creative Corp funding! We are so grateful that the state of California supports its artists and that we get to work with our community to spur discussions surrounding how capitalism has been racialized in the I.E.
Along with this funding for my personal projects, I also
co-wrote a grant to collaborate with Dr. Cathy Gudis, Dr. Jennifer Tilton, Dr. Audrey Maier and journalist Anthony Victoria to chronicle how communities of color have been displaced by the supply chain. Live from the Frontline, a public history project of site specific art installations across the I.E., was also awarded funding.
CPW Woodstock Residency
I am so excited to announce that I have been selected for the 2023 CPW Woodstock Residency program in Kingston, New York this summer. I will be using this time and space to work on my first monograph To Rise Above Ruins; a collection of images that I made over the last 7 years in Puerto Rico.