Something in the Water: Expanding the Walls 2024 features photography by the sixteen artists in the 2024 cohort of the Studio Museum in Harlem's signature teen program, Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community. This year's exhibition marks the program's twenty-fourth anniversary.
In Something in the Water, artists call out to the city as if it’s an old friend they have not seen or spoken to in some time. However, their perception of each other has changed. Together, they recount, reconsider, and reckon with the changes that are taking place. With the camera in hand, each of these photographers is anxious to capture the fleeting minutes of their adolescence and relationship to place, but also question it all as well. As they traverse New York City, they’re speculative of the world unfolding around them, with eyes wide open, their feelings are wedged between uneasiness and anticipation. This feeling, which they all seem to share, is how these photographers find themselves in the quiet moments of this city and its outskirts—along the water and on the streets.
Ally Caple (b. New Haven County, Connecticut)
Ally Caple is an artist and educator living and working in New York City. As the Expanding the Walls Coordinator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Caple leads the museum’s eight-month long teen photography program and also works closely with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The Photographer’s Green Book. An alum of SUNY Purchase College, they work primarily in photography where their current practice considers state surveillance, digital safety, and Black visibility in image-making. They’ve completed programs at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Magnum Foundation, and are a 2024 resident at Wassaic Project and Center for Photography at Woodstock.
Jayson Overby, Jr (b. Cleveland, Ohio)
Jayson Overby, Jr is a curator and writer living and working in Harlem. As an assistant curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Overby works closely with the permanent collection and all curatorial activities leading up to the museum’s reopening. Over the course of three months, Overby worked closely with the Expanding the Walls participants to support, review, and select final photographs for the 2024 ETW exhibition. Prior to the Studio Museum, he held various positions at Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Louis Armstrong House Museum. He is an alum of Morehouse College, and AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective.