At the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, photographer Kacey Jeffers’s first solo exhibition, “Multitudes” (on view through May 4), bursts with color and insight. Spanning five series and 25 photographs, the work—made in Nevis, the small Caribbean island where Jeffers was born, between 2018 and 2022—weaves a rich tapestry of human experience, inviting meditations on Black joy, individualism, and the influences of colonialism and tourism on the tight-knit (yet wonderfully varied) local community.
“I hope this exhibition encourages you to reflect on the idea that by rejecting the limitations of singular narratives, we actively contribute to the revival of empathy and compassion for those different from us,” Jeffers writes in an accompanying essay. “Extending such grace to one another is how we acknowledge that every one of us contains multitudes.”
Here, he walks Vogue through the five photo series that make up “Multitudes.”
Postcards From the Future
“Growing up, and I would have play cousins come to visit. Every summer they would come, and I would get to hang out with them. And for me, they kind of represented an escape, because suddenly I could go to hotels and I could go to swim in swimming pools. I love a swimming pool to this day: For me, in some ways, a swimming pool represents wealth. It represents, I’ve made it. There’s no sea in the series here, and it’s not a disparaging thing against pictures by the ocean, but when we think about access and we think about wealth, and we think about the symbols that represent these things, for me, a swimming pool is that. We need images of Black people by the swimming pool.
[As a child] I thought only white people were tourists, because that’s all I saw. So, this series was also about expanding the idea of who gets to be a tourist, in the sense of: Why can’t it be a single mom? It doesn’t always have to be a nuclear family; it could be a mother who just had a baby and she wants to escape. Why not? I grew up with a single mother, and culturally a lot of mothers don’t know what rest is. They don’t understand these concepts because they have to hustle. And in some ways, this was an homage to her—to my mother, her aunt, and to the women I grew up with.”