Image: Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York
The Bronx Museum of the Arts is presenting 'Lifelong Studio: Alternative Archives', an exhibition of artwork made by participants in its Lifelong Studio program for adults ages 55 and over. On view from July 23 through September 6, 2026, the show brings together projects developed in the museum’s free, sequential, hands-on workshops and places their focus on memory, image-making, and the archive as both personal and collective terrain.
According to the museum, the exhibition features work produced through 'Alternative Archiving Processes', a workshop series in which participants used personal archives as a point of departure. The artworks were created through collage, screen printing, and cyanotype, with photographic imagery treated as both material and subject. The result is a body of work that reflects on identity, heritage, and place while drawing from family photographs, personal collections, and lived experience.
The Bronx Museum describes Lifelong Studio as a free art-making initiative for adults 55 and older, part of its wider commitment to community-engaged programming. The museum also notes that the program is supported, in part, by E.A. Michelson Philanthropy. In the exhibition text, the institution frames the archive not only as an institutional repository of culturally valued material, but also as a space that can include personal narratives, everyday experiences, and family histories.
That expanded idea of archiving sits at the center of the show. The museum says participants were invited to recognize their own photographs, memories, family histories, and ordinary experiences as worthy of preservation. Through that process, the works on view explore how histories are preserved, interpreted, and transmitted across generations, and how personal memory can intersect with collective history without being reduced to a single official account.
The exhibition lists a large group of contributing Lifelong Studio artists, including Khuumba Ama, Darcell Berridge, Christel Brellochs, Barbara Flaxman, Ana Garcia, Ilana Hofmekler, Joyce Johnson Escalera, Jennifer Jones, Carol Kreider, Charles Langley, Mutshat Mahone-Lonesome, Nicole Levin, Madeline Millan, Silvia Morales, Priscilla Ocasio, Jeff Power, Gladys Ramirez, Yolanda Ramirez, Daniela Reinsch, Marisol Rivera, Frances Santoro, Sharon Silber, Rose Tyson, and Nina Valentin. Bronx Museum educator Duneska Michel is also credited, along with AIM artist guest instructors Diana Guerra and Jeniffer Teresa Villanueva.
The museum says the exhibition opening took place on Thursday, July 23, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM, and that the show is free and open to all ages. The Bronx Museum’s exhibition page gives the venue as 1040 Grand Concourse in the Bronx and notes that the museum remains open during regular hours while a renovation is underway. The exhibition is one of the institution’s summer offerings alongside other programming, but its focus remains on the workshop participants and the alternative ways they define an archive through their own materials and experiences.
The museum’s exhibition text concludes by describing the works as revealing the archive as an active and generative space, where personal memory and collective history converge and where new understandings of self, community, and belonging emerge. 'Lifelong Studio: Alternative Archives' remains on view through September 6, 2026.
