Annette Daniels Taylor

Annette Daniels Taylor brings the layered corporeality of Blackness in America to visual fruition in her films My Neighborhood and The Fillmore Strip. Integrating vivid experimentation with moving image, the films give an intimate, honest look at Buffalo’s East Side community. Discriminatory practices and redlining have overtly impacted minority communities, compounding socioeconomic issues that continue to resonate today. With a majority of Black residents in the city living east of Main Street, Buffalo’s reputation as a largely segregated city is no secret. Rarely is this reckoned with by focusing on the individuals and communities affected to share this history through their lived experience. As a result, their true identities, and the ways they come to terms with existence in such a layered space, become distorted and flattened. Daniels Taylor subverts this narrative, seamlessly weaving together candid conversations and expressive musings in My Neighborhood. The film offers viewers a new perspective, shifting the focus to see through the eyes of the residents themselves, the heart of a community defined by more than the conclusions drawn from its socioeconomic status. Daniels Taylor utilizes prose, with voiceovers narrating the depth of history’s lasting impressions on a place where “dreams sometimes dance with despair.” Despite this sobering reality, glimmers of hope remain: fragments from a conversation among neighbors can be heard, laughter followed by the proclamation, “I will not lose.”

Tiffany Gaines, Making Strange Co-Curator