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"Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data" Featured in The Brooklyn Rail

April 7, 2022
On a white gallery wall, a large print of a strangely disfigured human is shown next to a monitor with dozens of faces displayed on it
Stephanie Dinkins, A _________ Smiling (2021), three GAN computer generated prints on aluminum, each: 20 x 20 inches, and three GAN computer generated videos, durations variable. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Hai Zhang, courtesy of Queens Museum. 

Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data, on view through August 14, 2022 at the Queens Museum, was recently reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail by Marcus Civin. The exhibition was curated by Srimoyee Mitra and premiered in Fall 2021 at the Stamps Gallery.

For Dinkins, one of the main problems with AI is the existing data it uses. In 2021, she worked with a text-to-image General Adversarial Network (GAN), a machine learning system that creates composite images of realistic-looking human faces from widely-used but implicitly biased datasets. Included in her first survey exhibition at the Queens Museum, On Love and Data, which originated at the University of Michigan Stamps Gallery, Dinkins’s series, ​“A __________ Smiling” (2021), includes three videos and three prints that show what the GAN generated when prompted to simulate a Black woman’s face by entering language about Black or African-American women smiling and about dark skin.

Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data | The Brooklyn Rail