The Reinforcements

A series of photo collages that visualizes the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in America’s corporate workplace. Mixing archival images from vintage fashion and office supply magazines with other clerical ephemera.

Working primarily within (auto)biography, my art practice incorporates photography, archival imagery, installation, search algorithms and the family album. "The Reinforcements" (2023-ongoing) is my latest series of photomontages and mixed-media collages that visualize the labor history of women of color in America’s corporate workplace. 

This body of work is aesthetically inspired by archival images of my mother, who emigrated from Panama in the late 1960s and landed a job in the sales department at the Rugol Trading Corporation’s NYC offices after a short stint at a perfume factory. "The Reinforcements" are part of a larger digital archive I created as a visual evidence of the office labor of women of color during the Information Age, specifically the period between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the early 2000s.

Over the last two years I’ve created this archive across social media platforms and conducted outreach to large corporations like IBM, while also mining digital collections from various institutions to gather historical images. Limited by the minimal photographs I could find online of the corporate labor history of women of color in the United States, I began to create my own speculative representations.

Sometimes the resulting images have an interstellar pattern, while others feature robotic women fashioned from the physical forms and ephemera of a bygone office era. Job market research, historical employment data and the lived, employee experiences of women of color also inform my creations and image captions. For example, the image titled “A Stylish Accessory for Career Advancement” (2025) was inspired by this quote I found in my research at IBM: “I feel extremely good about my job as a programming systems representative. And as a mother, I'm happy and proud too, because it tickles my ten-year old son to see me leave the house in the morning carrying a briefcase.”

Utilizing images from vintage wig advertisements, the piece titled, “The Crown Act” (2023), considers the US bill enacted in 2021 that prohibits employment discrimination based on a person's hair texture or hairstyle if that style or texture is commonly associated with a particular race or national origin. This piece and others in the series are created on a substrate of computer punch cards, one of the earliest icons of the Information Age and the first automated information storage device.

Utilizing vintage interoffice envelopes, three mixed-media collages in this series were commissioned in late 2024 for the Pushing the Envelope exhibition that was on view at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, UK where the world's first electronic computer, the Colossus, was created. 

The imagery I’ve created on top of these interoffice envelopes allude to the interior, emotional world of the office secretary or low-level employee (typically of the female gender). These thoughts and concerns (feelings of inferiority, internalized pressure to perform, worries about domestic and family responsibilities, etc.) naturally coexist alongside the expectations and deadlines of the administrative duties at hand.

Despite the founding of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1965, Black and other women of color today continue to lack representation in leadership roles, receive minimal support for career advancement, face more day-to-day race and gender discrimination and consistently earn less than their White counterparts. In early 2025, approximately 300,000 Black women left the U.S. workforce due to federal and state job eliminations and the rollback of diversity initiatives. This trend is a severe setback for workforce equity, the underlying theme of this body of work.

"The Reinforcements" is also informed by my own lived experience. To support my children and my art, I have balanced multiple full-time jobs in corporate America with my photography practice. These professional environments, where I was often the sole woman of color, provided a powerful perspective that fuels this series. I aim to center my subjects' agency, our collective career struggles, and our pursuit of financial independence within late-stage capitalism.