TLC Artist Conversation with Delphine Sims & Charles H. Lee

@ The Griffin Museum is honored to host and lead a panel discussion, with TLC curator Delphine Sims, and artist Charles H. Lee. Join artist Charles H. Lee and curator Delphine Sims for a conversation centered on Lee’s photographs of Black cowboys and their horses in California and Louisiana — work made over years of considerate, complex, and steadfast relationship-building with his subjects. Lee’s practice offers a window into TLC, an exhibition that takes its title from the shorthand we use for tender loving care — an acronym as at home in whispered intimacy as in a beloved song refrain. Sims and Lee will discuss how TLC shapes not only who and what Lee photographs, but how he sees: a visibility that insists on his subjects being recognized as multifaceted, flawed, and undefined individuals, always worthy of tenderness — even as harsher realities like patriarchy, trauma, and societal neglect remain deliberately held just beyond the frame. So You Wanna Be a Bull Rider?, © Charles Lee Untitled, © Charles Lee Untitled, © Charles Lee Creole Cowboy, © Charles Lee The conversation will also place Lee’s work in dialogue with the exhibition’s three other contemporary photographers — Alanna Airitam, Harlan Bozeman, and Star Montana — each of whom embraces a similar TLC ethos: Montana piecing together the stories of Chicana matriarchs in her own family, Bozeman returning each summer to Elaine, Arkansas to photograph and spend time with local Black youth, and Airitam building trust with the multiracial Chosen Few motorcycle clubs. Together, their photographs reveal TLC as both a method and a lens — one rooted in care, and in dialogue with long histories of portraiture and family photography. About Delphine Sims – Delphine Sims is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She completed her PhD in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley with a focus on Blackness and American landscape photography. Delphine was awarded predoctoral fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exhibitions she curated and cocurated include, (Re)Constructing History, Around Group F.64, About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging and Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds. In addition to exhibition catalogs, her writing can be found in Aperture, Matte magazine, and the Believer. In 2026, Delphine was selected for the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Arts Leadership Praxis. About Charles H. Lee – Charles Lee is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator based in the Bay Area. Using photography, archives, video, and installation, the interdisciplinarity of Lee’s work is a metaphor for what Blackness is; a stateless existence that is always in flux and at odds with categorization, challenging traditional Western epistemologic views. Lee holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and was named a 2026 SF MOMA SECA award finalist. The Griffin Museum of Photography Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live