"Beautiful and rich on multiple levels."
author Tracy Chiles McGhee
"REVOLUTIONARY." THIS "exhibit of past, present, Afrofuture
Black love is a needed loving insurgency."
Black love is a needed loving insurgency."
Truth Thomas, NAACP Image Award-winning poet
"immersive and inviting.... Woolford is a powerful performer and...offers us a story that feels familiar and compelling..."
Cara Ober, arts writer and publisher in her BmoreArt article about the exhibition
Pamela Woolford founds a new art form with the creation of her multimedia project Antoine and Me, which she presents as a series of photographs, for which she models as a character who is in love with the photographer who takes the photographs. For the first seven photographs in the series, she has written and performs, in the voice of the character, descriptions of each photograph in audio tracks that are sound designed. This is what is now termed “sound-designed photo narrations,” or SDP narrations.
Pamela Woolford sets her Antoine and Me narrations in an ambiguous time period with elements of the past and, perhaps, an alternate present or an imagined future, creating a new form of Afrofuturism. She is inspired by photo albums and scrap books created by her paternal grandmother, Gertrude Woolford, which, long after Gertrude Woolford has passed on, serve as a documentation and glimpse into her life as a spirited, young Black woman in Baltimore a hundred years ago.
Pamela Woolford includes in her Antoine and Me project two handmade photo albums containing photographs from the series, as artwork representing the quotidian beauty of photo albums, including those of our ancestors.
The Antoine and Me project with related archival materials, including Woolford family memorabilia, was featured at the Baltimore, Addressed: Baker Artist Awards exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art from November 13, 2022-March 12, 2023.
"glorious. ...expertly melded words, voice, ambient sounds, and images into a stunning celebration of a loving partnership.... masterful ... a lineage of romantic, devoted, lasting love...."
journalist Laura Sturza
“…there’s a tenderness to the personal scale of Woolford’s work that feels healing and optimistic...”
arts critic Michael Anthony Farley
The video below is an excerpt from the press preview for the
Baltimore, Addressed show at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which ran 11/2022 to 3/2023.
"Give yourself 12 minutes of exquisiteness--the quiet cadence of her voice, the ambient sound circling around, the gorgeous photography--each element becomes part of the whole experience."
artist Sanzi Kermes
CREDITS
Pamela Woolford is the writer, director, voice actor, and model for Antoine and Me. Her voice recordings are complemented by sound design by Gregory Robinson. The photographs of Woolford are by Antonio Moses, whose work has been published on the Italian Vogue website PhotoVogue. The block printing and letterpress on the books is done by Sarah Matthews. Antoine and Me is made possible in part with support from Maryland State Arts Council.
Inspiration
BY COINCIDENCE, OR PERHAPS FATED, PAMELA WOOLFORD modeled for HER ANTOINE AND ME PHOTOS EXACTLY A HUNDRED YEARS after photos from her grandmother gertrude woolford were taken in baltimore, maryland .
Click the button below to visit the Antoine and Me NFT Collection on Opensea.
Antoine and Me also marks the premiere of the world's first SDP narration Collectibles. A supply of 7 of the SDP narration for Photograph One of Antoine and Me is released with the WOCAX art show, Juneteenth weekend, 2022, and NFTs of the SDP narration for Photographs Two through Seven are being released over time. For more info, visit Pamela's NFT webpage.
