In the early 1990s, Catherine Opie made a series of studio portraits of members of California’s LGBTQ sadomasochistic leather community for the Dyke Deck, a limited edition set of playing cards sold exclusively at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Like many underground artworks of the time, they were known among a select few but largely left out of the annals of contemporary art history.
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One day in 2017, while pursuing her MFA in Photography from ICP-Bard, African-American artist Naima Green stumbled upon the project while perusing databases in the New York Public Library for an intensive research class. Green was struck by a deep sense of kinship coupled with a feeling of surprise and disappointment for never having heard of the Dyke Deck before. She immediately set out to get a copy in order to learn more.
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After seeing the deck listed for $700 on an esteemed art-collecting website, Green headed over to eBay where she found a deck for $35. A week later the cards arrived. A seed was planted in Green’s imagination and over time it began to take root in the artist’s backyard: the borough of Brooklyn. It is here that Greens’ dream project took shape in a modern-day version of the deck that would focus on the community she knew best: queer, trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people of colour coming of age in the new millennium.
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“Brooklyn is a place where it has felt possible to be my biggest, queerest self and evolve into the person who I am and have become,” Green tells Dazed. “Brooklyn has given me a lot of space to breathe that some other environments that I have been in have not. In getting closer to myself by moving here, it was important to invite in all the people who have been a part of that story for me. But I also didn’t want to keep perpetuating this cycle of the queer Brooklyn faces you always see. It felt important to invite people that I don’t know to be a part of it.”
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