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
Tiffany Jade Munroe, Live Pridefully, 2021
Digital Print
Photography by Christian Thane
Courtesy of Caribbean Equality Project
Tiffany Jade Munroe (she/her/hers) is a Black Trans woman from Guyana. After experiencing homelessness and years of emotional and physical violence, she emigrated to New York City when her parents abandoned her. As an immigrant and a Trans woman, Tiffany struggled to navigate and access healthcare and immigration services until she was connected with the Caribbean Equality Project (CEP).
Today, Tiffany leads the Caribbean Equality Project's Trans Justice Unit, coordinating trans-focused community events, programming, and actions. She supports the organization's Food Justice program by volunteering at its monthly pop-up food pantries, which provide LGBTQ+ people, immigrant families, seniors, single-parent households, and HIV-impacted people with culturally-responsive groceries and fresh produce. When the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement collided, Tiffany amplified her advocacy for Black Trans rights, immigration reform, protections for asylum seekers, and civic engagement.
Tiffany's advocacy for Trans women, sex workers, and gender-expansive people has been fearless. Her visibility at the 2020 Brooklyn Trans Liberation Rally and March was featured in The New York Times and Teen Vogue. She testified at the New York State Assembly hearing in 2021 to repeal the "Walking While Trans Ban." She participated in the City Council's hearing on Resolution 1487 ("Recognizing November 20th annually as Transgender Day of Remembrance and March 31st annually as Transgender Day of Visibility in the City of NY”) in 2020. In 2021, Tiffany spoke at the first commemoration of the Transgender Day of Remembrance at Queens Borough Hall, opening for Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. She said, "We deserve city-wide recognition and more robust laws to end workplace discrimination, access to affirming healthcare options, and immigration services to protect undocumented transgender people and asylum seekers."
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
