TCF Ep. 422 - Nydia Blas

The Candid Frame: Conversations on Photography

Ibarionex R. Perello

Arts, Visual Arts

4.8 • 768 Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nydia Blas is a visual artist living in Ithaca, New York with her two children. She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the School of Visual and Performing Arts. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Southside Community Center, a historically Black community center in downtown Ithaca. She uses photography, collage, video, and books to address matters of sexuality, intimacy, and her lived experience as a girl, woman, and mother. Blas delicately weaves stories concerning circumstance, value, and power and uses her work to create a physical and allegorical space presented through a Black feminine lens. The result is an environment that is dependent upon the belief that in order to maintain resiliency, a magical outlook is necessary. She is a recipient of the 2018 Light Work Grant, and her new series Whatever You Like is currently on exhibition at Over The Influence gallery in Los Angeles. Her work is featured in the book Mfon: A Journal of Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. In the Summer of 2018, she will teach a course entitled Photography as a Tool for the Image Text MFA program at Ithaca College. She has completed artist residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Dazed and Confused Magazine, Strange Fire Collective, Lenscult, Yogurt Magazine, PDN, Fotografia Magazine, and Vogue. Resources: Nydia Blas James Van Der Zee 2018 StreetFoto Fest Workshops including Ibarionex's 2-Day Workshop 2-Day New York Street Photography Workshop 2-Day Paris Street Photography Workshop The Candid Frame Alexa Skill Download the free Candid Frame app for your favorite smart device. Click here to download for iOS. Click here to download for Android Support the work we do at The Candid Frame with contributing to our Patreon effort. You can do this by visiting patreon.com/thecandidframe or visiting the website and clicking on the Patreon button. You can also provide a one-time donation via PayPal. You can follow Ibarionex on Instagram and Twitter.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Your support of the Candid Frame over the past 12 years has been invaluable to us.
0:05.5	You have not only helped us to produce over 400 episodes, but your donations directly helped
0:10.8	us to create the Candid Frame app and making it available for free.
0:15.4	We are now proud to announce the release of a new way for you to listen to TCF.
0:20.6	We have released a new skill that is compatible
0:22.8	with Amazon Alexa enabled devices. Using voice commands, you can listen to the latest episodes,
0:29.0	jump forward and back, and if you stop listening partway through an episode, it will remember
0:33.8	where you left off. And like the Candid Frame app, it's free for users in the
0:38.6	U.S. and Canada. In the coming months, the skill will be available in other countries. And I'll
0:44.1	let you know when those become available. You can help and continue to support the work that we do here
0:49.1	by contributing as little as $2 a month to our Patreon campaign. You not only help us to meet our cost of production,
0:56.4	but provide us the means to improve the quality of the show
0:59.2	and do so much more.
1:01.2	Contribute today by visiting patreon.com
1:03.7	forward slash the candid frame.
1:24.2	Many photographers believe that they have to go far away from their personal, everyday lives in order to produce great work.
1:32.9	They see photographers photographing in faraway lands or spending time in a different culture,
1:38.7	and think that exoticness will inspire creativity and great photography.
1:46.5	But there are countless photographers,
1:51.9	many of whom we've had on the show, who have demonstrated that the best subjects are sometimes in our own backyard. That was the case with photographer Nydia Blas. Nydia found her inspiration
1:58.8	for her project, The Girls Who Spun Gold, among a group of teenagers that she worked with at a community center in her hometown of Ithaca, New York.
2:08.2	The Girl Empowerment Group provided the African American girls a place to gather and a safe environment to discuss issues of growing up, sexuality, race, and more.
	...

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