The Lens

Excavated: From Soil to Stars examines land as a keeper of memory. In the fields of Maysville, Kentucky, and under the stars above, a weathered wood building stood witness to a 190-year-old history. A short film directed by Emmy Award-winning director Alphonso J. Wesson traces the journey of the sun as it rises and falls over the crops of Maysville and the land upon which a slave pen once stood. That slave pen, carefully excavated and now on display in the Grand Hall of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, provides testimony of a wicked past.

Probate inventory... Continue reading Alphonso Wesson: Excavated: From Soil to Stars

Call Me When You Get Home is a body of work drawing from Marissa Nicole Stewart's relationships with the women in her family. It explores the place-making practices and generational worldbuilding that occur within a Black matriarchal household while also celebrating self-constructed identity.

The exhibition seizes fleeting moments, brings forward deeply ingrained memories, and challenges photographic tradition with an experiential eye. The exhibition’s rich images of Black women are revealed in black-bordered prints, allowing the work to sink into the space and envelop the viewer. These flow into the matriarch of the family, the... Continue reading Marissa Nicole Stewart: Call Me When You Get Home

Blank Generation presents a panoramic visual survey of the tectonically shifting arts culture of the 1970s–80s in downtown New York City, and the raw and dynamic new ideas in music, film, art, literature, graffiti, fashion, queer culture, and performance that it spawned. The bleak and bankrupt NYC of Travis Bickle and Ratso Rizzo felt like a city teetering on the verge of collapse, but in the dive bars, abandoned buildings, and squats of the grimiest neighborhoods, a cultural renaissance was taking place. 

The iconoclastic writers, musicians, scenesters, performers, outsiders, and other creators whose life... Continue reading Blank Generation: Downtown New York 1970s–80s

The highly skilled and imaginative work of photographic artist Kimball Derrick, which has lain dormant for 40 years, takes center stage in My Book of Life—The Preface, a 50-year survey of Derrick’s work. He is a nationally recognized residential designer and cabinet maker who for decades has diligently captured images of nature and the world around him, reflecting a reverence for the beauty and spirituality that can be discovered in nature. My Book of Life—The Preface invites audiences to explore the backstory of this artist’s life and experience his artistic vision, which has for so long been kept out of public... Continue reading Kimball Derrick: My Book of Life—The Preface

Not so many years ago, people stopped touching photographs. While print media and brick-and-mortar galleries exist, the common, everyday experience with photographs has drastically shifted from handling prints to scrolling through digital images on a screen. These photographs are easily created, manipulated, and shared, but at a cultural level the sense of intimacy and preciousness that comes with holding an image has been lost.

CORPUS reminds us that a photograph exists in the world, accumulating the history that sticks to all things that take up space. It aims to investigate photographs that re-engage the... Continue reading CORPUS: Exploring the Power of the Physical Photograph