I made it home
A Solo Exhibition by Golden
Image Courtesy of the Artist
Pen + Brush is pleased to present, I made it home, a solo exhibition by photographer, poet, and organizer Golden. The exhibited portraits were commissioned by Queer|Art as the 2024 Community Portrait Project, the seventh edition of an annual tradition celebrating artists in their growing and vibrant network. This new body of work comprises intimate portraits of fifteen artists and cultural workers within the Queer|Art community in spaces of deep personal resonance–apartments, studios, workplaces, parks, theaters, and exhibitions. Beyond the beauty of each subject, these portraits reflect the lives they’ve built and worlds they’ve nourished, revealing how identity is shaped by the environments we create and inhabit.
In their interdisciplinary practice, Golden’s highly attentive process centers collaboration, trust, and storytelling. Guided by a creative ethos of care and respect, they allow each sitter to determine how they are seen. In this sense, they subvert the traditional photographer-subject hierarchy, and instead privilege self-definition as an artistic right.
I made it home celebrates queer and trans collectivity while honoring the distinct narratives within it. The sprawling project spans several months, multiple states, and includes sitters from different creative disciplines. In some cases, successive generations are pictured, giving us a glimpse into a dynamic community in bloom. The result is a multifaceted series that resists homogeneity in favor of lived complexity.
The exhibition design draws on visual cues from historical salons, public gathering spaces, and domestic interiors. By collapsing these diverse architectural references, the exhibition evokes a spirit of belonging that transcends physical spaces. In Golden’s world, home is defined not by brick and bone, but by connection, memory, and kin.
The 2024 Community Portrait Project was made possible by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.
Golden (they/them) is a Black gender-nonconforming photographer, author, & educator raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts (Massachusett people & Wampanoag land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books 2022), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry (Game Over Books 2023) and Reprise (Haymarket Books 2025). Their photographic series On Learning How to Live, an Arnold Newman Prize Finalist (2021), documents Black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States.
Golden is the recipient of a Pink Door Fellowship (2017/2019), an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Luminaries Fellowship (2019), the Frontier Award for New Poets (2019), a Best of the Net Award (2020), a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence (2020-2021), a Mass Cultural Council Fellowship in Photography (2021), a Women Photograph Project Grant (2021), a Collective Futures Fund Grant (2022), an Aperture/Google Creator Labs Photo Fund Grant (2023), the Queer|Art Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2023), and a MacDowell Fellowship (2025). They hold a BFA in Photography & Imaging from New York University.
Their published & collaborative work can be found on/in The Yale Review, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Muzzle Magazine, Split this Rock, Women Photograph, MFA Boston, Button Poetry, Best of the Net Anthology, Instagram (@goldenthem_), or through their website goldengoldengolden.com.
