An Interview with Guggenheim Fellow, Kristen Joy Emack By Ethan Richmond

Since 1981, Shoreline Arts Alliance has championed Scholarships in the Arts, a juried scholarship competition for high school juniors and seniors. In its 44 years, this program has awarded over 400 scholarships to students throughout the 24 towns we serve. This article is part of a series of interviews conducted with some of our

scholarship winners...

“I still have the newspaper clipping! I still remember what I wore,” Kristen Joy Emack beamed when I asked her about her experience with Shoreline Arts Alliance. Originally from Madison, CT, she is now a Guggenheim Fellow in the field of photography. She was awarded this immense honor in 2022, but in 1984, before international recognition, Kristen won a scholarship for excellence in dance from Shoreline Arts Alliance. She applied for the scholarship without telling anyone, and it was the first scholarship or award she had ever applied for.

Kristen was a senior in high school at The Hammonasset School when she won, which was a private preparatory arts school in Madison. She attended The Hammonasset School her junior and senior years after leaving public school. “I really struggled at Daniel Hand. It wasn't a good fit for me to be there. It was a very traditional school and I didn't feel like a very traditional student. I always felt like an outlier, I always felt a little bit adrift.” She fit in much better at her new school and pursued modern dance. After graduating, when she realized she wasn’t yet ready to go to college, she moved to Boston at 18 and danced with some small dance troupes.

Photography was something she always liked but she felt too shy to take a class anywhere. Eventually, when she went back to school at UMass Boston, she finally garnered the courage to take a class. “As a young child, I always saw photographically… I started learning the craft that helped me deliver images I was already seeing in my head.”

It was fascinating to hear her reflect on the first teacher from her childhood: long drives. “This was before there were DVD players in cars or headphones and sitting in a long car ride meant looking out the window and that was my best instructor. Because if you're looking out the window, you're looking through a frame and there are different size frames—the back, front, and side window—and I was really getting this education. I'm a visual person so I enjoy looking out the window, but I was seeing how scenes can change from second to second depending on what's inside that rectangle.” She ended up taking a few classes as electives with one professor but was primarily self-taught. And now, Kristen is a Guggenheim Fellow.

The Guggenheim Fellowship is for scholars, artists, and writers with only around 5% of thousands of applicants joining the impressive lineage of fellows each year. Recipients include James Baldwin, Martha Graham, Zora Neale Hurston, Alvin Ailey, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop, and now, Kristen Joy Emack! “For photographers,” she said, “it feels like the thing to shoot for.” She emphasized how lucky she feels to have received it after only applying twice. The fellowship is well regarded in the academic world and comes with a stipend, which allowed her to do things like make and ship prints for shows. The fellowship is also a real stamp of approval. Someone in a well-regarded place, she continued, is saying, “I see you've done important work and believe you will do more important work and that for me was the biggest gift of the Guggenheim; knowing there was a body of people who said we know this woman will do more. She’ll give us more.”

The long term photography series that helped earn her this fellowship and that has had the most exposure is “Cousins,” a decade long project of photographs of her daughter and three nieces. The project began in the lake at Chatfield Hollow State Park in Killingworth, CT. She told me that an important aspect of the series is the power of positive representation for girls, especially for young Black girls. “They just love each other, and they center themselves as the protagonists in their own stories.” And at the same time, it’s a profoundly nuanced artistic role. “There are too many narratives of Black life that are skewed through a really white gaze,” she said. “I’m telling the story of my daughter and my nieces—I wouldn't be so presumptuous to say I'm speaking about Black childhood. I understand that that's what people are seeing and there are a lot of entry points for viewers to enter the work, but it’s a nuanced space.” She continued, “Another kind of unintended quality about the work is that [my daughter and nieces] did end up feeling seen. They have a presence in the world.” In addition to having been interviewed on the news, she told me stories of them getting recognized on the street where someone asks, “Is your mom a photographer? I’ve seen your face!”

A newer body of work she is creating is called “Book of Saints”, which overlaps with her job. Kristen works for the city of Cambridge’s public schools as a family liaison; she is a bridge builder between families and schools. She helps families navigate the education system, connects them to resources, and thinks critically and strategically about how to do that work in non-traditional ways. She is connected to children, but not in a classroom sense, committed instead to creating a safe space for kids to feel seen and supported. Her experiences of being a non-traditional student have made her a strong support for people who are also on the margins of traditional education.

The way her job informs her art is not intentional, she said. “I care about the families and the kids that I'm working with. The things that haunt me and the harm that I see being done out in the world is coming into my work. [I’m] elevating some of these kids and families that are special to me and an important part of the community that don't fit in in a traditional way... It's less about what I want [audiences] to get and more so that it just spills from you—whatever it is that is in your heart is just going to come out in your art one way or another.”

As we reached the end of our conversation, Kristen imparted powerful advice for young artists, though I believe her tremendously moving words could guide artists and non-artist of all ages, in all stages of life. “There is no arrival,” she said thoughtfully. “A lot of artists—especially artists that really can't help themselves, it's just the way that they see the world and just the way they are interpreting the word whether interpreting it through the movement of their body or oil paints or a lens—are led to believe that, if we get this award or this accolade or this exhibition or this interview, we’ve arrived. And I would love to tell any young artist that if you're really driven in this kind of way, there's no arrival. You just keep going. And not to be worried about that feeling that you haven't arrived. It’s just because you're meant to go onto the next and onto the next. It’s all a continuous process. There's no one big thing and then ‘there you are’ because creative people have to create and continue to process whatever is influencing them through whatever their art is.”

She concluded earnestly, “I wish I had the little newspaper clip I could show you... it meant so much for me to win the Shoreline Arts award. It was really the first time I ever felt seen. There was some sort of voice in me that knew I had some kind of talent somewhere, but it was not being reinforced to me in any sphere in my life and so it was the first outside people that said ‘I see you, you have some talent, and we want to recognize that’ and without that who knows what would have happened? I don't mean to be so dramatic but honestly, if I hadn't had that moment, who knows where I would have gotten the impetus to keep going?”