SINCLAIR is pleased to present its second exhibition you’re just a bee charmer featuring new work by Brooklyn-based artist Andina Marie Osorio. The opening reception is on Saturday, May 30 from 3-6 PM.

Presenting a new film and unique photographs, you’re just a bee charmer weaves together Osorio’s long-standing relationship to matriarchal societies, domestic spaces as evidence of labor, and her role as steward of her family’s photographic archive. Drawing parallels between her upbringing in a predominantly female household and the matriarchal structures of honeybee colonies, Osorio's new body of work comes together through a series of collaborations with a beekeeper and the hives he tends to in New Haven, CT.

In honeybee colonies, all-female worker bees maintain their hives through constant labor, performing tasks such as nursing, cleaning, and defense. When strengthening units or introducing new queens, beekeepers typically use newsprint as a temporary barrier to slowly mingle pheromones and prevent conflict. Osorio subverts this practice by introducing family photographs as the barrier. As the bees tear and clean the image out of the hive, they create new forms that call into question the delicacy between precious nostalgia and physical erasure.

The show features eight photographs—five candid family moments and three formal portraits—that capture specific eras through small visual clues. Spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, these images document the significant, though often unacknowledged, labor of women. Depicting a range of intimate events including holiday meals and loving embraces on slipcovered sofas, the ubiquity of these scenes disguise the exhaustive labor needed to orchestrate the moment. The hand of a woman is present in every detail: the elder who called to set the date of a gathering, the mother who cooked the turkey, the cousin who forgot the dessert, the aunt who was called to curl hair, the sister who tended to the newborns. Every element of these gatherings, through time, was shaped by their labor.

The exhibition title, you’re just a bee charmer, is drawn from the queer cult-classic book and movie Fried Green Tomatoes. The phrase is spoken to Idgie Threadgoode after she calmly gathers honey from an angry beehive for her forbidden lover, Ruth Jamison. Bee charmer becomes Ruth's affectionate nickname for Idgie, and is emblematic of her care-free personality and refusal to abide by heteronormative gender roles. Osorio embraces this utopic vision of matriarchy, where paternal hierarchy is refused and maternal, communal care is the norm. The strength of the collective—auntie, worker bee, godmother and queen bee—is found in their expansiveness and capacity to live in fluid roles, a model Osorio mirrors in her photographic practice.

Osorio adopts an expansive approach to archiving and actively de-emphasizes the image's inherent preciousness. The photos in the exhibition were meticulously documented and mailed to relatives in Puerto Rico as evidence of togetherness and prosperity and typically live in the safe-keeping of a plastic binder. They represent home as a fixed and stable place and memories as fact. However, in their current state, the photographs are quiet, torn, and barely visible. The bees have, in some works, "cleaned" away so much of the surface that the resulting loss is greater than the image. As she revives images of the many women that have raised her, Osorio shifts the concept of matriarchy toward a framework of relational and ecological queerness and asks us to consider the dualities and tension between collaboration and loss.

you’re just a bee charmer will be on view at SINCLAIR from May 30- July 11, 2026. 

Andina Marie Osorio is a lens-based artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Osorio’s practice explores the intersections of memory, identity, queer affect, migration, and Black femme sexual politics through assemblage, self portraiture and archival work centered on the familial and queer experience.

She received her BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2019) and MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art (2024). Her work has been exhibited at Webber Gallery LA, Hesse Flatow, The Clemente, The Latinx Project, Ogunquint Museum of American Art and Studio Museum in Harlem. She has been awarded the Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund and was a finalist for The Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. Residencies include Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Fire Island Artist Residency, and Wassaic Project. She is currently an adjunct professor in Photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Portrait by Ally Caple