CANDELAR FEATURE: FEBRUARY
FEBRUARY 2026: Christa Blackwood
February Candelar page featuring Blackwood’s image, Men in Repose : Blake Richard Morgan, City Park, 2023
Christa Blackwood is a photo, text and installation artist working with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Raised in Oklahoma City and New Orleans, Blackwood now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Her visual voice was developed while a student at New York University, when she began producing street art such as the poster, Butcherknives(1991), a work that addressed issues of sexual violence. A chilling juxtaposition of billboard-like close-ups and text from poet, Michelle Kotler, Butcherknives, was plastered all over the streets of lower New York City on the evening of the William Kennedy Smith verdict was announced. The posters timely and provocative appearance resulted in heightened critical attention for Blackwood, including an invitation to join The Woman’s Action Coalition(WAC) from renowned artisits and scholars, Kiki Smith and Lucy Lippard.
She received a Master of Arts from New York University and Bachelor’s degree in Classics and Filmaking from The University of Oklahoma and has exhibited her work since the early 1990’s, most notably at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Ogden Museum, The Houston Center for Photography, The Institute of Fine Arts NYU, San Francisco City Hall and the Contemporary Austin. Her work has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The Chicago Sun Times, The Village Voice, Lenscratch and Art Desk Magazine.
Blackwood also founded and managed The Children’s Photographic Collective, offering free/low cost photo and literacy workshops to elementary through high school students in New York City and Austin, Texas from 1995-2007.
For questions regarding acquisitions, exhibition opportunities, and information please contact me below.
For over a decade, my artistic practice has been rooted in an ongoing exploration of gender, power, and representation. Since 2013, I’ve worked almost exclusively with a core group of male collaborators—Sam, Blake, Morgan, Richard, and Matt—reimagining the visual language of the photographic figure study.
Our process often begins with a twist: the models themselves select reference images from a vast archive of historical figure photography. These images, more often than not, depict women through the lens of male photographers. This reversal is intentional. We’re engaging with, and subtly subverting, a canon shaped by artists like Weston, Stieglitz, White, Callahan, Newton, Man Ray, Gowan, and Gibson. Their work becomes material for homage, critique, and transformation.
The photographs are created using large-format film cameras, both in studio and on location. The final works span silver gelatin prints, photogravures, and platinum prints on vellum. Many of the silver prints are uniquely toned with Benadryl or layered with marbling and hand-painted interventions. Each piece becomes a tactile, alchemical object. Our collaborative journey has taken us across the American landscape, from the surreal dunes of White Sands, NM, to the sculptural rock formations of Garden of the Gods, CO; from the lush Piney Woods of East Texas to the haunting bayous of Louisiana; from Moab’s red earth to the windswept Texas Gulf Coast, standing in for the iconic dunes of Oceano, CA.
This body of work is as much about reclaiming gaze and agency as it is about beauty, vulnerability, and the shifting terrain of masculinity. It’s a living archive of collaboration, reinterpretation, and resistance.
Introduced in 2022, the Candelar is a limited edition set of fine art photographic calendar cards juried through a free one-week open call. The Candelar card sets, printed in-house on Hahnemühle paper by Candela Photographic Arts, can be displayed pinned, clipped, framed, or propped.
