Steven Cuffie: Women and the Archive (Offsite)

New York Life Gallery is pleased to present Steven Cuffie: Women and the Archive, an exhibition of photographs and ephemera from the archive of Steven Cuffie, on view from February 25th through March 1st, 2026, hosted by Gallery 6, Los Angeles.

Steven Cuffie (1949, North Carolina – 2014, Baltimore, MD) was an American photographer who lived and worked in Baltimore. Cuffie began taking photographs as a teenager and studied photography for three years at the University of Maryland before leaving to pursue his career, connecting with a small group of Baltimore-based photographers with whom he exhibited locally and worked on commission. While his personal practice was rooted in portraiture, for the majority of his life, Cuffie worked as a photographer for the City of Baltimore, documenting public events, crime scenes, and infrastructure damage required for public record. Work that fell outside of these municipal categories remained largely private. After his death in 2014, his children, Marcus and Morgan Cuffie, encountered the breadth of this private practice while sorting through the extensive personal archive he left behind, which included hundreds of portraits made in the 1970s and 1980s that had never been publicly shown. Save for a small number of exhibitions in Baltimore before his children were born, this work remained unseen during his lifetime.

Steven Cuffie: Women and the Archive brings together a selection of lifetime prints and ephemera, as well as newly digitized material emerging from an ongoing archival process. The works on view include photographs made in the 1970s during a narrow window in the forty years Cuffie was taking photographs, focusing on portraits of women in his personal life and surroundings. The majority of the lifetime prints presented here are being shown for the first time. Produced in the artist’s home darkroom, these works remained outside of Cuffie’s public-facing practice. A small selection of these lifetime prints was previously included in vitrines alongside contact sheets in New York Life Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Women, in 2022, a solo presentation of Steven Cuffie’s portraits of women, curated by the artist’s youngest, Marcus Cuffie, and the first time his work was shown outside of Baltimore.

In October 2025, New York Life Gallery began representing the Estate of Steven Cuffie. In collaboration with the Estate, the gallery is cataloging and digitizing tens of thousands of previously unseen negatives from the photographer’s archive. This ongoing work has involved returning to negatives that had not previously been printed, alongside organizing and preserving archival materials reflecting the breadth of Cuffie’s practice.