Meet our 2026 Sankofa
Artist-in-Residence
Get to know Billie Carter- Rankin
Billie Carter-Rankin (b.1995) is a visual artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She experiments with photography, darkroom processing, and archived images to explore loss within personal and collective memory. Her work primarily focuses on the absence of information, and the potential that is created as a result of that absence. Carter-Rankin has contributed to publications such as TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Oxford American, and The Guardian. Her work has been recognized on The most memorable New York Times illustrations lists for two consecutive years, as well as the Best Artist Illustrations list for The Guardian US. She graduated with a MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, and her BA in Media, Journalism, and Film from Howard University in 2018.
Carter-Rankin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Inheritance from our ancestors is not a static offering. Through chemical experimentation and other manipulations of archival imagery, L.A. based image maker Billie Carter-Rankin contemplates the longevity of value and collapses the long temporal arch of memory onto one plane. Her work recontextualizes our perception and engagement with the ephemeral. Such material traces illuminate the paths of our migration; the improvisational lessons of our music; the sustenance of our homes. These belongings are more than rich markers of the past— they are keys to the future.
Yearning for Faith to Preserve Myself, to see you Completely New captures a transition in Carter-Rankin’s practice as her attention shifts towards the communal implications of inheritance. The exhibition layers research, process, and familial lineage to express the dynamic evolution from lived memory into cultural artifact. Images become anthropological tools to implode material memory and unearth their blueprints for collective perseverance. A display of new concepts and familiar works, celebrate this transformative presentation as the hometown portal into her next phase of creation.
