Image: Installation view, Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, Queens Museum. Photo credit: Hai Zhang.
LIVE PRIDEFULLY: Love and Resilience within Pandemics - The Exhibition
Photo by TrinCity Photos
Caribbean Equality Project
est. Queens, NY, 2015
Darren J. Glenn, Live Pridefully, 2021
Digital Print
Photography by Christian Thane
Courtesy of Caribbean Equality Project
A Trinidadian-born intersectional environmentalist, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration rights advocate, storyteller, and New Yorker, Darren J. Glenn (he/him/his) currently serves as the Programs Director and as an ambassador for the Caribbean Equality Project.
Glenn was born in San Juan, Trinidad, and migrated to the New York City area at a young age. He mostly grew up in Long Island, NY, getting involved in community service projects through various faith-based organizations.
While pursuing his undergraduate education at Binghamton University, Darren began doing more social justice-oriented community organizing, specifically working around creating safe spaces and developing healing justice resources for queer people of color.
Darren went on to earn his Master’s degree in Library and Information Science at Syracuse University, graduating in 2013. While living in Germany from 2014-2015, Glenn became passionate about solving current environmental challenges, particularly for vulnerable communities.
Darren first encountered the Caribbean Equality Project in 2016 at the memorial for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. He began to attend other events before beginning to serve the organization as a special projects volunteer in 2017. He now bears responsibility for the expansion of existing programs and launching new initiatives as the Programs Director. He successfully co-organized the 2018 Breaking Silences conference in Toronto and is working on creating a survey capturing the experiences of Caribbean LGBTQ+ individuals throughout the tri-state area. He also acts as an ambassador for CEP, creating relationships with similar organizations in other cities throughout North America and the Caribbean.
In response to the 2020 pandemic in New York City, Mr. Glenn co-created CEP’s COVID-19 Relief program to provide material aid to community members experiencing loss of income during the shelter in place order. He also participates in a hyperlocal coalition of progressive organizations in the South Queens area alongside other community advocates from the United Madrassi Association, Sadhana: A Coalition of Progressive Hindus, Jahajee Sisters, South Queens Women’s March and other organizations. This coalition was formed to address community-level challenges through mutual aid and advocacy efforts and has been responsive to food insecurity issues in the community as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders.
In addition to his work behind the scenes at CEP, Darren is a public librarian in Brooklyn where he works in under-resourced communities to support early literacy initiatives and connect low-income Brooklynites with city resources. Moreover, he is currently involved in organizing a number of environmental, social, and economic justice projects in Trinidad and Tobago through his own non-profit, the Glenn Family Foundation.
About Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics:
As part of the Queens Museum’s Year of Uncertainty, the Caribbean Equality Project is proud to present Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrates queer and trans Caribbean resilience through a racial justice lens, while fostering critical conversations related to pride, migration, surviving colliding pandemics, and coming out narratives. Caribbean diasporic immigrant rights, gender justice, and trans rights advocates live at the intersections of outdated immigration policies, anti-black violence, racism, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based violence, xenophobia, and misogyny in the United States and throughout the Caribbean region.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, queer and trans immigrants of color have lived in a constant state of fear and isolation, from food insecurity, a lack of access to equitable healthcare, and rising rates of anti-Asian violence and police brutality against Black bodies. In a year of uncertainty, Live Pridefully reimagines and affirms undocumented Black and Brown LGBTQ+ immigrants and asylum seekers as essential workers, creatives, and contributors to the cultural diversity of New York City.
This interdisciplinary exhibition was originally presented at the Queens Museum from December 4, 2021, to March 6, 2022, as part of the Year of Uncertainty. In 2022, it was transformed into an outdoor photography exhibition shown at Brooklyn Bridge Park during the 2022 Photoville Festival. In 2023, this historic exhibition becomes the first public art installation by Photoville in Richmond Hill, Queens -home to predominantly Indo-Caribbean and South-Asian immigrant communities where Caribbean Equality Project is based.
Curated by Mohamed Q. Amin, portraits of Caribbean LGBTQ+ immigrants anchor the exhibition, with oral Afro and Indo-Caribbean migrant histories and stories driven to construct healing through storytelling, embodied resilience, and intersectional dialogue on postcolonial belonging, anti-Asian hate violence, and Black trans liberation.
Photography: Christian Thane
Visual Director: Richard Ramsundar, Creative Director, The World is Rich Productions
