CENTER Personal Award: Elizabeth Z. Pineda – Maíz
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Acta Valida
The CENTER Awards recognize outstanding images, singular or part of a series, in three categories: Personal, Social, and Environmental. All submissions will become part of the CENTER archive serving as an ongoing mission-driven fine art and documentary imagery resource.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Z. Pineda for being selected for CENTER’s Personal Award recognizing her project, Maíz. The Personal Award recognize work engaging in the exploration, expression, the power of self-representation and/or underrepresented experiences. The Award includes Professional Development Seminars, Complimentary participation and presentation at Review Santa Fe, Project Publication in Lenscratch, and inclusion in the CENTER Winners Gallery & Archive.
JUROR: Amanda Hajjar, Director of Exhibitions, Fotografiska New York shares her thoughts on this selection:
It was wonderful to see creativity in the submissions, including poetry as artist statements, non-traditional printing techniques, and expressing relatable questions. Trends that were not as successful were submissions that came with little to no explanation or if the execution of a project was not thought-out or executed poorly. I was very interested in the submissions that explored unique processes and provided context to explain their concepts.
In the selected project Maíz by Elizabeth Pineda, this photographer exemplifies how to brilliantly execute a very deeply personal project in a unique way. They have engaged in the exploration of unexpected materials (corn husks) and printing process (cyanotypes). They have connected the physical print with their personal heritage. And finally, they speak to the “value” of government documents and connecting that to resources they see as valuable from their culture.
Self-Portrait – Hija del Maiz © Elizabeth Pineda
Amanda Hajjar is the Founding Director of Exhibitions of Fotografiska New York. Hajjar collaborates with world-renowned artists to bring their exhibitions from initial concept to final reality. She has juried numerous awards, most recently the British Journal of Photography’s International Photography Award (2022), the PHMuseum 2022 Women Photographers Grant, and the Leica Women Foto Project Award (2022). Prior to Fotografiska, Hajjar was an Artist Liaison at Gagosian Gallery New York.
_____________________
Originally from Mexico City, Elizabeth Z. Pineda is a photographic emerging artist based in Surprise, Arizona. Her work explores complicated issues regarding immigration, identity, displacement, and migrant deaths that occur in the Arizona desert. Pineda speaks visually of community, touching on language barriers, culture, and society. Her practice is rooted in the craft of hand-made objects as an expression of her deep ties to the subject matter using historic and untraditional photographic, printmaking, papermaking, and book art processes. Elizabeth holds an MFA in Photography from Arizona State University.
@elizabethzpineda_fotografia
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Hoja Santa
Hoja de maíz, hoja, hoja de papel
What does someone’s culture, heritage, and identity say about a person?
This work began after a recent experience when my personal documents were deemed invalid because they held my married name and not my given name when I was first applying for a passport. I would need a picture ID of me as a child to prove my name and my identity. I was deeply hurt, in shock, and angered. It felt like erasure.
I began thinking about the validity of documents. The weight that piece of paper has, that “papers” have. And of the fact that they are simply paper.
I use corn husks to re-create my papers on something I valued–corn. At the beginning, I knew I would make cyanotypes of my birth certificate and marriage license on the husks–and give them the validity that was taken away from them. Shortly thereafter I realized that the experience made me question my roots and the idea of home. What home is and who has a right to dictate what home is and who has a right to it. And with that, cultural identity. So, I thought about what being home means to me. Being home is ultimately my mother and her cooking.
I began making prints of specific, traditional herbs my mother uses in her cooking. To me they are her and her story, her childhood, how she learned and her stories about cooking with them. That is home. It also made me aware that as people, no matter where one is from, no matter where one is, the mere thought of our homeland food–its aroma, its taste, will immediately transport one home. This is the heart and intent of this work. It gave me the validity I’d lost. It gave me the permission to feel whole. It made me work–hard.
But, I believe, it also gives others a voice. One, through a humble corn husk. – Elizabeth Z. Pineda
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Licencia Valida
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Epazote
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Mejorana
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Nochtli
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Maíz
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Papaya
©Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Jalapeño
Posts on Lenscratch may not be reproduced without the permission of the Lenscratch staff and the photographer.
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
