Tourmaline: Lives of a Pollinator

Thursday, October 2, 2025
7:00–9:00 pm, Opening Reception, Level 3

On view from October 3–December 21, 2025 

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is honored to present Tourmaline: Lives of a Pollinator, the first solo exhibition in the artist’s hometown of Boston. On view from October 3 – December 21, 2025, the exhibition features Tourmaline’s film Pollinator (2022), which first premiered in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, alongside a series of photographs— film stills, and archival outtakes—that expand the film’s visionary terrain. 

Born and raised in Roxbury, MA Tourmaline is a celebrated artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist, whose deeply poetic practice centers Black trans life, care, and liberation. Grounded in historical reimagination and speculative possibility, her work resists dominate narratives of trauma and erasure, while offering lush, expansive portraits of Black trans kinship, ecological attunement, and radical pleasure. In the film Pollinator, Tourmaline appears in early 20th-century costume, moving slowly through the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and the Edwardian period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. Her quiet gestures—brushing against petals, lingering among artifacts—are juxtaposed with archival footage of trans activist and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) co-founder Marsha P. Johnson, interspersed with home videos of the artist’s late father and interviews with Johnson’s friends. An intricate montage unfolds around a central motif: the flower. It appears in Tourmaline’s headdress, in Johnson’s flower crown, and eventually floats down the Hudson River during a memorial for Johnson. Through these tender connections, Tourmaline invokes the action of pollination—linking generations, transmitting memory, and nurturing community. 

Tourmaline: Lives of a Pollinator will transform the Carpenter Center into an expanded site of memory, imagination, and community. In addition to the film and photographic works, a reading and engagement area—developed in close collaboration with the artist—will feature a curated library of texts on Black trans liberation, abolitionist thought, and queer ecologies. The space will also highlight Tourmaline’s forthcoming biography on Marsha P. Johnson, a vital contribution to queer and trans historical scholarship, and serve as the setting for a season of public programming, including reading groups, collaborative workshops, and intergenerational gatherings.

This exhibition is organized by Kate McNamara, Interim John R. and Barbara Robinson Director with Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant. 
 
Funding is provided by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA). Generous support for Carpenter Center programming is provided by the Friends of the Carpenter Center. Special thanks to Chapter NY. 

Tourmaline (b. 1983, Roxbury, MA) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist who creates visionary works that center Black trans history, freedom, and possibility. Her films and photographs have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney Biennial (2017 and 2024). Her writings have appeared in The New York Times, Time, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere, and her much-anticipated biography of Marsha P. Johnson will be published in May 2025.

Tourmaline’s film Salacia (2019), part of MoMA’s permanent collection, explores 19th-century free Black trans life in Seneca Village and exemplifies her commitment to reimagining the archive as a space for dreaming and liberation. A Creative Capital awardee and Ford Foundation fellow, Tourmaline has long worked at the intersection of art and activism, creating narratives that honor the pleasure, imagination, and brilliance of Black trans lives.