Intermissions | Pamela Woolford: Antoine and Me

Antoine and Me
Sound-designed photo narrations, 12:01 minutes

A surreal love story by Pamela Woolford, Antoine and Me is a multimedia project that includes handmade photo albums and the emergence of a new art form—which Pamela Woolford originates—sound-designed photo narrations or SDP narrations. In this first SDP narration series, Woolford models as a character who is in love with the photographer who takes the photographs. For seven photographs from the shoot, Woolford has written and performs, in the voice of the character, descriptions of each photograph in sound-designed audio tracks. She sets her Antoine and Me narrations in an ambiguous time period with elements of the past, an alternate present, or an imagined future, creating a new form of Afrofuturism. She is inspired by photo albums and scrap books created by her paternal grandmother, Gertrude Woolford, which, long after Gertrude Woolford has passed on, serve as a documentation and glimpse into her once life as a spirited, young Black woman in Baltimore a hundred years ago. The two oversized Antoine and Me handmade photo albums contain about 60 photographs from the series, as artwork representing the quotidian beauty of photo albums, including those of our Black ancestors.

Writer, Director, Voice Actor, and Model: Pamela Woolford
Photography: Antonio Moses
Sound Design: Gregory Robinson
Antoine and Me series
2022
Courtesy of the artist

Artist Bio
Pamela Woolford is an interdisciplinary artist, intertwining her work as a writer, immersive-media director, filmmaker, and performer to create new forms of narrative work about Black women and girls, and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art. She is the recipient of eight Maryland State Arts Council Awards (including Independent and Individual Artist Awards), five film-festival awards internationally, two Baker Artist Awards in interdisciplinary arts, a United Way of Central Maryland Changemaker Challenge Award, an aSHE Fund Grant, a GrubStreet Boston Writers of Color Literary Support Stipend, and a host of other honors. She has been a James Weldon Johnson Fellow in the Arts, a NES Artist Resident, a Bard College at Simon’s Rock Artist Resident, and the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University. She has been awarded inaugural residencies from The Last Resort Artist Retreat and Storyknife Writers Residency and has been the recipient of an Official Citation from the Maryland House of Delegates.

Woolford premiered Antoine and Me at the Baltimore Museum of Art, along with her site-specific installation of family photos and ephemera celebrating Black love and life in Baltimore over the past 100 years, in a 2022-2023 exhibition voted one of the top 5 in the Baltimore area during the show’s opening year by BmoreArt magazine. Her latest film, Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-noir, had a limited online release with a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people.

Woolford has authored more than 100 memoir, fiction, profile, human-interest, and think pieces published in The Baltimore Sun, Poets & Writers Magazine, NAACP’s Crisis Magazine, Harvard University’s Transition, and other publications. Her writings have been selected for anthologies, translated into German, and widely cited.