Collection: Fine Art
On View at Chambers
Qiana Mestrich
The Reinforcements (2023-ongoing)
September 20, 2025- December 31st, 2025
The Reinforcements is a series of photo collages that visualizes the labor history of Black and immigrant women of color in America’s corporate workplace. Inspired by archival images of my mother, who worked in sales at the Rugol TradingCorporation’s NYC offices in the late 1960s, The Reinforcements are part of a larger digital archive started as a visual investigation of evidence of the office labor of women of color during the information age.
Qiana Mestrich (b.1977) is an interdisciplinary artist and photo historian whose
work critically engages with themes of Black, mixed-race identity, motherhood/mothering and women's corporate labor. Informed by her upbringing as the daughter of immigrants from Panama and Croatia, Mestrich's artistic practice is complemented by contributions to the field of contemporary photography history. Her artwork has garnered international attention, with exhibitions at the RAY Fotografieprojekte Frankfurt/RheinMain and London Art Fair's Photo50.
A graduate of the ICP-Bard College MFA program, Mestrich’s work has been recognized through awards like the 2025 Saltzman Prize and CPW Vision Award, as well as the 2022 Magnum Foundation's Counter Histories grant for her research on women of color in the corporate workplace. Her solo exhibition on this body of work, The Reinforcements, was previously on view at Baxter St in the Lower East Side.
