Qiana Mestrich

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Working primarily within (auto)biography, my interdisciplinary practice incorporates public and private archives, photography, writing, collage, installation and internet-research work. My latest body of work, the "Reinforcements" (2023) series, has emerged from a larger project, @WorkingWOC: Towards a History of Women of Color in the Workplace, an independent, multimedia archive that visualizes the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in America’s workplace. Inspired by archival images of my mother, who worked in sales at the Rugol Trading Corporation offices in the late 1960s, as well as my own corporate career over the last two decades, "Towards A History" started as an visual investigation of evidence of the labor of women of color between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the early 2000s. Despite the founding of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) via the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Black and other women of color today continue to lack representation in leadership roles, receive minimal support for career advancement, face more day-to-day race and gender discrimination and consistently earn less than their White counterparts. Seeking to illustrate this gulf that still pervades today, I launched this community-driven online archive and conducted outreach to companies like IBM, and also mined digital collections from various institutions to gather historical images. Feeling limited by what minimal archival materials I could find through this...

Artwork