Melissa Ann Pinney: "What's Ms. Pinney Doing Here?" at ICP

From October 22, 2026 to January 11, 2027, the International Center of Photography on the Lower East Side presents "What's Ms. Pinney Doing Here?", a show by photographer Melissa Ann Pinney in the museum's Incubator Space. The space is on the ground floor and is free to enter during café and museum hours.

Since 2018, Pinney has photographed students in Chicago Public Schools as part of an artist residency. She arrived as an outsider, and over time the students began inviting her into their world. The project grew from a school-based record into a study of identity, community and pressing social issues. The portraits show young people moving through the changes of adolescence, with the triumph, grief, humor and tenderness that come with growing up. One image from the project is "Zydrea, Brooklyn, Akylah and Friends, Ogden-Jenner Middle School, 2019."

Pinney first drew wide attention in the Museum of Modern Art's 1991 exhibition "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort." Her work on the social lives and emerging identities of American adolescents has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awards and a National Endowment for the Arts Midwest Regional Fellowship. She was chosen for three Chicago documentary projects that were exhibited, published and archived there: Changing Chicago (1987), City 2000, and her Chicago Public Schools work.

Her books include "Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls" (2003), "Girl Ascending" (2010), "TWO" (2015) and "In Their Own Light: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools" (2023). Recent exhibitions include "The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today" at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Her photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney and ICP, among others.

The Incubator Space is a new ICP program for emerging photographers who respond in real time to the world around them and push at the edges of the documentary tradition. Projects will rotate through the space. It is curated by Sara Ickow, ICP's Associate Director of Exhibitions. This exhibition is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.