Essay
This is a review of “The Dirty South” at the VMFA where it originated and hung until September 6, 2021. The show is now on view at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, through February 6, 2022, and images in this feature are courtesy of that museum. Later, it will travel to Crystal Bridges Museum of »
Art
Oakland-born artist Adrian L. Burrell is a light worker. Using lens-based media that require light to function (primarily photography and film), the artist has traversed various “Souths”—from the local to the global, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Nicaragua, Brazil, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa—to spotlight instances of struggle and self-determination. Burrell’s family history, along with his own »
Photo Essay
America’s origin myth is prevalent on the three peninsulas that form the western shores of Virginia—from George Washington’s Birthplace on the Northern Neck to the Mattaponi tribe’s museum in King William County, which exhibits a necklace that belonged to Pocahontas. Alongside those larger myths are smaller ones that compete for attention: a clock repair shop’s »
Photo Essay
I. Geographer Dennis Cosgrove has written that American landscapes may best be apprehended from the air. So vast are US landscapes and, likewise, our interventions to rework them, that a vantage point at that level of remove is necessary to appreciate the scale of physical and human geographies here. Nowhere, perhaps, is that perspective more »
Photo Essay
In her series (Untitled) Kitchen Table (1990), photographer Carrie Mae Weems explores and questions perceived notions of racial and racially gendered identity, using the familiar, everyday experience of a woman seated at a domestic kitchen table. Alternating between images of herself alone and with a male lover, child, or with other women, she figures the »
Photo Essay
When I was six years old, my family and I packed up our life in four suitcases and left Sanming, my hometown, located in the western Fujian province of China. I didn’t know where I was going, and my parents didn’t know what they were expecting. All we knew was that we were moving to »
Essay
I have always been drawn to those places that mark the landscape, serve as our monuments of remembrance and guide our way and knowledge of the local, seeming to last in our consciousness even when they have nearly disappeared on a return to their previous unbuilt state. “It’s over there where Cedric’s house used to »
Photo Essay
It’s been more than eighty years since Doughten Cramer was a student at Black Mountain College. The school is long closed, the landscape has certainly changed. And yet, every time I set foot on Black Mountain College’s former Lake Eden campus, I share that same feeling. I become sensitive to everything. But despite the visceral »
Photo Essay
“When Trees Are Dying” is a photography project that explores human impacts on forests. Covering 31 percent of world’s land surface, forests are major carbon sinks and remain one of the most critical ecosystems to preserve. Key to biodiversity, forests are also crucial for water and oxygen supplies, food production, livelihoods, and mitigating the effects »
Photo Essay
When I was a kid, my watery sanctuary was a lake. On late afternoons when Georgia’s thick heat made it impossible to do anything else outside, my mom would tell my brother and me to “get ready.” While we put on our swimsuits, she’d pack a brown sack with Chips Ahoys, pork rinds, and paper »
Snapshot
Thaxton, Mississippi We come from the very land and water on which we depend for our survival. As the world turns, life also revolves. Spring gives us life. Summer gives us growth. In autumn, leaves fall and plants wither, becoming food for new life as the seasons turn back to spring. We produce from the »
Photo Essay
At first, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at: a windshield blotted like a Jackson Pollock painting; twin smokestacks squatting over pale water; a sawn tree stump, so red at its center you’d think it was bleeding; land so dry it looks like a rash. These are the images photographer Will Warasila captured in »