May 9 – June 29, 2024
Main Gallery
Free to the public
Renee Maria Osubu is an award-winning British Nigerian photographer and film director from London. She often investigates themes about community, identity, race, and childhood, using the nuances of everyday life as her visual language. Osubu is best known for her on-going photography series Dear Philadelphia, which over time became a love letter to a North Philadelphia neighborhood and its residents.
Like much of her work in the United Kingdom and United States, Dear Philadelphia documents and normalizes the tenderness of Black families, while maintaining a specific focus on fatherhood. The photography series was subsequently adapted into an Oscar and BAFTA qualifying short film. It had its international premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 and won Best Short Documentary at the Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia that same year.
Osubu’s exhibition at TILT is a continuation of the project she embarked upon several years ago, providing audiences with an opportunity to experience new and early artwork from the series woven together with interviews between the artist and community members. The programs for the exhibition highlight the experiences of the North Philadelphia residents chronicled in the work.
This exhibition is presented in association with (re)FOCUS, a citywide collaboration of over sixty large, small, and diverse visual arts organizations, all addressing feminist issues of marginalization, gender, social justice, and inequality.
