By Okla Jones ·Updated October 23, 2025 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
In her latest exhibition, Instead, I spin fantasies, on display at the International Center of Photography through January 12, 2026, Naima Green invites viewers into a world that reimagines the experience of pregnancy through photography and performance. Curated by Elisabeth Sherman, the show challenges visual and social expectations around motherhood, asking what it means to desire, resist, or redefine this state of being.
The exhibition unfolds through a series of constructed self-portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Green’s images neither romanticize nor reject pregnancy; instead, they consider it as both a personal and societal identity. Each frame becomes a fragment of a life that could be. “Do I want this for me,” Green asks, “or is this kind of an expectation that’s even just non-verbally been put on me around having children, being pregnant, being a birthing person?” Her questioning of these narratives forms the heart of this body of work.
For Green, the project began with curiosity. Watching friends navigate Instead, I spin fantasies never feels preachy. Humor, tenderness, and possibility flow through the work. Green’s photographs capture not just the heaviness of choice, but the joy of imagining different lives. Her title, borrowed from Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, underscores that sense of exploration. “It felt really important to talk about the idea of fantasy,” she says. “I love to play and picture these possibilities without having to fully live them.”
Through this act of imagining, Green reframes pregnancy as a metaphor, and a space where desire, doubt, and autonomy coexist. Her lens resists finality; every image feels open-ended, as if the story could turn in any direction. The result is a body of work that questions what it means to make life, but also to live one’s own on one’s own terms.
TOPICS: black art Black Artist Naima Green
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