Passports Book Launch with Keisha Scarville and Nigel Westmaas

Join us on Thursday, June 18 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Keisha Scarville’s new book Passports (MACK, 2026), an intimate collection of work centered around an early passport photograph of the artist’s father.

In the book, Scarville reinterprets the photograph, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery—paint, beads, photographic fragments of Black bodies, glitter—to form a deeply textured act of photomontage. The book also includes archival images taken between the 1960s and 80s in Guyana and New York City, Scarville’s own photographs of her father as well as his self-portraits and transcripts of their conversations. Drawing on all these strands, the book examines and reimagines diaspora, bureaucratic images, and the archive, asking what it means to understand a person, especially a loved one, through an image.

For the launch, Scarville will be joined in conversation by Nigel Westmaas, Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College.

Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives in Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the International Center of Photography, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Huxley-Parlour, London; ICA Philadelphia; Contact Gallery, Toronto; Light Work, Syracuse; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Higher Pictures, Brooklyn; and Webber Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include To Conjure at the International Center of Photography (co-curated by Elisabeth Sherman, Sara Ickow, and Keisha Scarville); the 2nd Biennial das Amazonias (curated by Manuela Moscoso); 2025 Les Recontres D’Arles; The Rose at CPW (curated by Justine Kurland and Marina Chao); If I Had a Hammer at FotoFest, Houston (2022); and All of Them Witches at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2020, curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons).

Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Light Work, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Stoneleaf, WOPHA, Baxter Street CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in Vice, Small Axe, and The New York Times, where her work has also received critical reviews. She is a recipient of the 2026 Brooklyn Museum UOVO Prize, the 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund, and was awarded the inaugural Saltzman Prize in Photography in 2024.

She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023 Aperture/Paris PhotoBook Awards. Her new book, Passports, with MACK, is scheduled for publication in June 2026.

Nigel Westmaas is a researcher, public scholar, and professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Hamilton College in New York. His work focuses on social movements in Guyana and the wider Caribbean, archival research, and the history of the newspaper press in Guyana. He has published in academic journals as well as history articles in Guyanese newspapers.

Among his notable publications is the chapter “An Organic Activist: Eusi Kwayana, Guyana, and Global Pan-Africanism,” included in Black Power in the Caribbean (University Press of Florida, 2014). In 2021, he contributed the chapter “Musings on Walter Rodney, the Black Power Movement, and Race and Class in Guyana” to The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation (Black Rose Books).

Westmaas is also the author of A Political Glossary of Guyana (2021), a reference work that examines key concepts, events, organizations, and figures in Guyana’s political history.