Erin Stephens

In winter 2019–20 the collection of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art included “Pen, Lens & Soul: The Story of The Beautiful Project.” The exhibit featured photographs taken by girls ages 8 to 15 as a part of The Beautiful Project, a North
Carolina-based collective that uses photography and writing to encourage, support, and promote authentic expression of Black girls and women.

Erin Stephens, PhD Sociology ’18, was one of the co-curators of the exhibit. A member of The Beautiful Project since 2010, she appreciated the opportunity to share the collective’s work on a larger stage.

“It’s been incredible, and it was really incredibly received,” she says. “To have an exhibit at this scale was always the dream of Jamaica [Gilmer], our founder, who [said], ‘Let’s take this thing national!’ [She had] big visions of how this work could be shown.”

The exhibit was similar in style to the project’s Beautiful Nights event, where girls who had been in the program could display their work for their family and community. “So you get to see these photographs, and these stories, and this manifestation of the work over the year,” she says.

For the Met exhibit, the curators—Stephens, along with Gilmer, Khayla Deans, and Pamela Thompson—examined photographs from The Beautiful Project’s history to select the 85 pieces that were a part of the display. It wasn’t an easy task, Stephens says. “From going through the archives—15 years of archives—to selecting the prints, framing, of course, the other thing that was really important to us was figuring out how we bring the girls and the women who created the content into the space, so they could really witness it.”

Over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, The Beautiful Project brought 11 of the young artists and their families from North Carolina to New York so they could see their work displayed. Stephens says her favorite moment during the weekend was having the girls stand at the front of the exhibit room before their invited family and friends—more than 60 guests—and hear what they thought of the exhibit.

“It’s incredible to be in the Met; it’s incredible to have my face and name up there and be a part of something like that,” Stephens says. “It’s also incredible to get this moment for the girls. It is a life-changing thing. It’s something that they’ll carry with them, that
will be part of how they understand their identity. It is a very moving and amazing moment."

Young photographers at the Pen, Lens & Soul exhibit 
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.