Opening Reception and Curator's Tour: tide lines of the frame

Bringing together two Caribbean diasporic lens-based artists, tide lines of the frame examines the entanglements of memory, landscape, and visual culture across fractured geographies. Through image, video, collage, and material experimentation, both artists reclaim narrative and territory, asking how not only bodies, but objects and landscapes carry the weight of what has been silenced, commodified, or denied. Their gestures subvert the heavy visual culture that once framed the Caribbean as consumable spectacle, revealing instead the absence of true archival care.  The frame is not neutral. Like a coastline, it is shaped by what has moved through it—power, gaze, history, memory… In Thompson and Michel’s hands, ecosystems—wetlands, currents, sediments—become active memory spaces, migrating and reconfiguring the frame.  This exhibition features the 2025 WOPHA Artists-in-Residence, Kat Thompson and Natyfa Michel and is curated by Cecilia González Godino, Interim Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. On view: September 13–December 14, 2025 About the curator Cecilia González Godino is Interim Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia and the former Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She is a curator, writer, and researcher engaging with contemporary art from transoceanic, diasporic, and archipelagic frameworks, always drawn by water and a yearning for geological poetics that she inherited from her long maritime family history. Cecilia holds a Master of Arts from New York University and is a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. About the artists Kat Thompson is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Virginia. She holds an MFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Photography from George Mason University. Rooted in her Jamaican heritage, Thompson’s lens-based practice spans photography, textiles, sculptural collage, and installation to explore Black selfhood within the African Diaspora Nathyfa Michel is a Caribbean photographer born in Réunion Island, to a Guianese father and a French mother. Her practice focuses on the intricate layers of Caribbean and Amazonian identity at the intersection of intimate and collective history. She explores dynamics of transmission, searching for a "home" reinvented through rhizomatic and hybrid imagination.