Queer | Art Presents: Community Portrait Project — Golden

In partnership with Pen + Brush

Pen + Brush is proud to host Community Portrait Project — Golden, an intimate and expansive exhibition that celebrates queer life, artistry, and chosen community across New York City. Created by 2023 Illuminations Grant winner Golden, this project was commissioned by Queer|Art with support from the Leonian Foundation as part of its ongoing effort to uplift the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ artists.

Over the course of several months, Golden collaborated with 15 members of the Queer|Art community to co-create portraits in spaces of deep personal resonance—homes, studios, workplaces, parks, exhibitions. Each photograph is a window into a world of creative survival and radiant selfhood. These are not just portraits of people, but of the lives they’ve built, the beauty they’ve crafted, and the communities they nourish.

At the heart of this body of work is the idea that home is not merely a structure of walls and windows—it is a feeling, a network, an act of self-definition. Golden’s approach is rooted in mutual respect and deep listening, allowing each participant to shape how they are seen. The result is a collection of portraits that are as multifaceted as the individuals they honor, capturing the vulnerability, resilience, joy, and complexity of queer and trans artists navigating their worlds.

This project resonates deeply with Pen + Brush’s mission to provide a platform for artists whose work and stories have been historically marginalized. Golden’s photographs reflect an ethos of visibility, care, and collaboration—values that Pen + Brush has championed for over 131 years. Spanning boroughs, backgrounds, and creative disciplines, Community Portrait Project — Golden offers not just a series of images, but a collective portrait of queer aliveness in all its complexity. It is an offering of presence and pride—one that invites us to bear witness to a community in motion, in expression, and in bloom.

Join us this June as part of Pride Month for this celebratory installation and reception with the artist and Queer|Art community.

The 2024 Community Portrait Project was made possible by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

Golden (they/them) is a Black gender-nonconforming photographer, author, & educator raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts (Massachusett people & Wampanoag land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books 2022), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry (Game Over Books 2023) and Reprise (Haymarket Books 2025). Their photographic series On Learning How to Live, an Arnold Newman Prize Finalist (2021), documents Black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States.

Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), a Best of the Net Award (2020), a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-2021), a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography (2021), a Women Photograph Project Grant (2021), a Collective Futures Fund Grant (2022), an Aperture/Google Creator Labs Photo Fund Grant (2023), the Queer|Art Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2023), and a MacDowell Fellowship (2025). They hold a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University.

Their published & collaborative work can be found on/in The Yale Review, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Muzzle Magazine, Split this Rock, Women Photograph, MFA Boston, Button Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Instagram (@goldenthem_), or through their website goldengoldengolden.com.