Little Black Boy & Cousins
Rashod Taylor & Kristen Joy Emack
A Two Person Exhibition Presented Online
February 2026
This two-person exhibition pairs the work of contemporary artists Rashod Taylor and Kristen Joy Emack. These artists use portraiture to explore the photographic image as a space of liberation and truth. Their world is full of anxiety but also wonder, beauty, and hope. Little Black Boy & Cousins speak in quiet tenderness, offering a visual testament to Black childhood that is both sacred and radical. In a time when systemic erasure threatens cultural memory, these works affirm the power of the image to author personal legacy on its own terms. Through intimate portrayals of familial bonds, Taylor and Emack present narratives that resist stereotypes. They celebrate affinity and resilience. Their photographs are vessels of love and agency.
In Little Black Boy, Taylor transforms a father’s gaze into a poignant dialogue between love and fear. Images of his son unfold like a family album, tender, yet layered with paternal unease. Using deliberate analog methods and large-format cameras—Taylor slows time to let warmth and tension coexist, and to anchor the work in photographic history as means of inheritance and resistance.
In Cousins, Emack offers a sacred, sustained meditation on girlhood and kinship. For over a decade, she photographed her daughter and nieces—girls whose bonds radiate with innocence, confidence and spiritual knowing. Her images are full of magic and wonder. Spontaneous and playful, there is no performance—only observant communion, shared growth, and embodied presence.
Rooted in a lineage of such image-makers as Gordon Parks, Sally Mann, Ruby Latoya Frazier and Melissa Shook, both Taylor and Emack use the camera to counteract structural invisibility. Their frames hold space for connection. These images do more than document Black childhood—they elevate it. They were made to affirm, empower, resonate, and endure.
About the Artist: Rashod Taylor earned his B.A. in Fine Art Photography from Murray State University. Taylor utilizes traditional and large format practices, including wet plate. He earned an Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions Photographic Portraiture in 2021 and is collected by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, SmithsonianNational Museum of African American History and Culture, Library of Congress and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others. Taylor is represented by jdc Fine Art gallery.
Little Black Boy - by Rashod Taylor
20 x 24 in. Silver Gelatin Prints | Edition of 10 | $3,000 - $5,000
30 x 40 in. Pigment Prints | Edition of 6 | $4,000 - $6,000
About the Artist: Kristen Joy Emack is a visual storyteller whose work resonates with conversations around visibility, representation, and belonging. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and is in the permanent collections of the Boston Athanaeum, Cambridge Public Library, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Her Book, Cousins, was published by Lartiere in 2023. This is jdc Fine Art’s first presentation of Emack’s work.
Cousins - by Kristen Joy Emack
12 x 18 in. Archival Inkjet Prints | Edition of 15 | $1,200 - $3,000
26 x 40 in. Archival Inkjet Prints | Edition of 10 | $2,000 - $5,000
E-mail us to request a link to an extended checklist of works by Taylor and Emack.