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Fall 2012: “In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America,” Photos by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian

The most common term for being in prison is “doing time.” Ask someone who just got out where he’s been and he’ll say “doing time.” Because time is what you do in the penitentiary—except on Death Row, where time doesn’t count. The judge doesn’t sentence a condemned prisoner to spend time on Death Row; the judge sentences a condemned prisoner to be killed. So Death Row is limbo, a waiting place, a prison like no other, because it is a prison in which time does not matter. An inmate on Death Row in Texas, where these photos were taken in spring 1979, sent us a poem in which he referred to being “in this timeless time.” Condemned men in Texas are in a different prison now, and the conditions of their daily life are far more harsh, far more severe, far more cruel. But that central element of living “in this timeless time” hasn’t changed at all.

Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture, and Diane Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teacher Professor of English, SUNY Buffalo, have worked together for more than thirty years, documenting and writing about the complex issues of the American prison system. Their new book, In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America, published by UNC Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, explores the life of death row inmates in Texas and in other states. Jackson and Christian capture, through words and pictures, the daily experiences of inmates, while also highlighting arbitrary judicial processes related to capital punishment.

Summer 2012: “Southern Food from the Backroads & Byways,” Photos by Kate Medley

“As a documentary photographer telling stories about food and farmers for Whole Foods Market, my job provides me plenty of opportunity to travel the backroads of the South, exploring communities and the diverse foodways of the region. The images in this collection are an extension of that work, in which I aim to examine intersections between southern food and identity. My interests lie both in the dialogue taking place at the gas station lunch counter and the farm-to-table restaurant. I am compelled both by the buckets of produce at a roadside stand and the messy fields of an organic farm.”

A native of Jackson, Mississippi, Kate’s background is in newspaper photography. She holds a BA in Photojournalism from the University of Montana, and an MA is Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi, where she first became involved with the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Spring 2012: “Illumination,” Textile Art and Mixed-Media by Ellen Kochansky

“The works in this exhibit explore moments of epiphany in an artist’s journey, as I pursue the connection between the quilt and the page.  The balance of words and images represents the balance we must achieve between the visual and the verbal.  We grope with the unfamiliar…pages must be decoded, from a language we do not know.

The quilt tradition threads throughout these works, created over the last decade.  Silk organza, the base of each of these structures, is held together occasionally with stitches, and often with an ancient and organic formula for bookbinder’s glue.  The silk originally won me for its lightness, but held me with its transparency.  That the surface becomes secondary to the content seemed to me poetic.  It continues to conceal and expose in ways that have informed and invigorated this leg of my journey. Using available materials, scraps of previous techniques from decades of exploration, and fragments of text from my own history, I ponder the lessons of nature and our awkward place in it, and the mystery of words as they hide or reveal a story.  A common image for me is decomposition, or Cultural Compost.  All of the works here embrace nature’s messy imperative that nothing goes to waste, but is recycled into future fertility only when it is broken down.  I cherish this mantra as environmental issues increasingly consume our mother planet.

My father’s history in publishing, honored in Conversations III, has inspired an awareness of balance and the elegance of white space, the rest the eye needs in a composition.  My mother’s letters to him (War Correspondence), written throughout World War II and shredded after his death in 2000 in her personal ceremony of grief and letting go, yielded a vast wealth of fragments which came to symbolize all war stories as they ceased to reveal hers. 

Footprints, from a series called Embedded Energy, explored the shared documentation from the history of a mill village in Columbia, SC, and its memories of the community center at 701 Whaley Street that had been lovingly restored.  I was its first resident for a program called 701 Center for Contemporary Art, and communed with the many ghosts whose steps still echoed in the hallways, and their grandchildrens’ relationship to the tales they had told.

Things Left Behind was another series honoring the memories and artifacts whose value went unnoticed by the family I had been part of.  I was tasked with clearing out the home of my mother-in-law after her death, and discovered the materials for Family Foundation.  It borrows my favorite masonry image, using the envelopes from her bank statements in which hand-written balances recorded the careful gifts and modest donations of a generous and frugal lady. I also discovered the notebook that formed both a weaving journal and a farewell from the family’s father, a radiologist who, dying of a brain tumor, took up weaving to heal and soothe himself, and to make gifts for his friends. This folio is called the Red Thread.

A related set of Bricks was made from the remains of my production quilt line, as I recognized and recycled that era of my professional and creative life.  The hearth, symbolic center of the Log Cabin quilt structure, turned into a sculptural symbol as I bound hundreds of bricks and built a hearth for a New York show I curated, “Artful Home”.  The building process, in constant balance with the breaking down, continues to inspire my next efforts.”

Ellen’s artistic practice is rooted in her experience as a textile artist, designer and quilter.  In a career spanning over 30 years, Ellen Kochansky has actively promoted the arts, the preservation and extension of craft traditions, and environmentally responsible practices, and continues to foster emerging artists through teaching and mentorship for all ages. To further these goals, she has launched a non-profit residency program called The Rensing Center. She has been an American Craft Council Trustee (1989-1993), a National Endowment for the Arts American Canvas Panelist (1997), and a founding Director of Ripple Effect Sustainable Design Group (1999-2001).  She has twice been chosen Craft Fellow by the South Carolina Arts Commission.  She serves on the Pickens County Cultural Commission and on the City of Clemson’s Green Ribbon Commission. Ellen has shared her experience through teaching and workshops, including Penland, Arrowmont, and the Innovation Institute (McColl Center, Charlotte, NC). She has served as a juror for national art shows such as Cherry Creek, Evanston, and American Craft Council, as well as South Carolina’s Verner Awards.  Her work is included in The Mint Museum, The American Museum of Art and Design in NY, and the White House Collection, and she has been cited in various book, articles, and television programs, notably CBS Sunday Morning and the book Six Continents of Quilts. A list of exhibitions, commissions, awards and more can be found on her website: www.ekochansky.com.

Fall 2010: “40 Days and 40 Nights,” Photos by Donn Young

The exhibition designed for the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, Chapel Hill, NC. had two distinct purposes. The first, in observance of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – this country’s largest natural and human-caused disaster – the Center for the Study of the American South, the UNC Center for the Study of Natural Hazards and Disasters, in partnership with the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity, the School of Government and the School of Law, truly a cross campus involvement, joined together to explore the human impact of the storm through workshops, storytelling, photography, and music. The three days of tribute was scheduled for the opening of the 2010 fall semester. The second, the Photography exhibition was designed as a retrospective of Young’s 40-year career, a commitment to creating socially conscious art: hunger, poverty, human rights.

In August 2008 Young completed a 3-year photo essay documenting the effects of Hurricane Katrina upon civilization for the Louisiana State Archives. The exhibition 40 Days and 40 Nights was is the largest and most well attended exhibition in the history of the Louisiana State Archives.(http://tulane.edu/publichealth/40days/home.cfm).

His work is exhibited worldwide and is found in the public and private collections. Currently, Donn’s work is on permanent exhibition: 40 Days and 40 Nights at the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for the Study of Natural Hazards and Disasters; a retrospective of four essays (State Street, The Hunger Project – A Portrait of Hunger in North Carolina, 40 Days and 40 Nights and Living Legends of Jazz) at The Depot at Hillsborough Station. 2012 Summer exhibitions of 40 Days and 40 Nights at the The International Civil Rights Center & Museum, the F.W. Woolworth building, Greensboro, NC 27401 and at The Framer’s Corner Four Photographic Essays 210 West Main St, Carrboro, NC. He is the staff photographer for artsee magazine and assignment photographer for both Endeavors magazine of research and creative activity at UNC – Chapel Hill and Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau.

Fall 2010: Music Maker Series, Photos by Jimmy Williams

Jimmy Williams is a fine art and assignment photographer based in Raleigh, NC.

Williams studied visual design at North Carolina State University, and shortly thereafter, opened an independent studio where he established himself as a successful and award-winning assignment photographer. Now, more than thirty years later, Jimmy devotes much of his time to personal photography endeavors, nurturing and maturing his photography into significant bodies of work.

Williams’ work has recently been showcased at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado and the Worldwide Photography Biennial in Argentina. Locally, his photography has been exhibited at the Betty Ray McCain Gallery, the Raleigh City Museum, the Gregg Museum of Art & Design and the Exploris Museum. In 2010, the City of Raleigh acquired a selection of prints to be part of the city’s permanent collection.

Williams is a recipient of an Excellence Award by Color Magazine; Merit of Excellence for Nature Photography at the Masters Cup Awards; Outstanding Achievement in Photography at the International Spider Awards; and 2nd place Deeper Perspective Photographer of the year at the Lucie Awards Gala at the Lincoln Center, NYC. Other recent accolades include: 1st place at Center’s Singular Image Awards, Fine Art Photographer of the Year at The International Spider Awards, and editorial features in Lenswork, Rangefinder, Photo District News, B&W, Color, Communication Arts, and Graphis.

“Before I lift my camera, I always open myself up to the moment and trust my emotions to dictate and inspire a compelling story. Whether I’m shooting a portrait or a landscape, my purpose always remains the same: to establish a connection with the subject and to produce utterly “real” moments. The emotions are raw. Sometimes private. Always Honest.” (www.JimmyWilliamsFineArt.com)

Dec 2009 – Jan 2010: “SOUTH: from Saxapahaw to Antarctica,” Paintings by Nerys Levy

“Working on site using mixed water-based media on paper, I try to portray the forms and forces of nature: Polar landscapes and wildlife, Chinese and Russian rural and urban landscapes, North Carolina’s forests and rural landscapes, Alpine masses and glaciers, cloud formations, animals, European gardens and old architectural forms altered by time. I often do a series of works of the same subject in shifting light, seasons and weather. When painting animals, I usually document their movements in a series of works done on site and in their home environments. I visited the Antarctic Peninsula in December 2007 and in July 2009 worked in the Norwegian Arctic. As a result of these Polar experiences, I produced a large body of work on Polar animals and landscapes for the 2010 multimedia exhibition “Ice Counterpoint” at UNC’s Fed Ex Global Education Center  and “Artico, Asolo Antartico” at the Asolo Civic Museum, Veneto, Italy in November 2010. In the Spring of 2013, some of these Polar works will be on exhibit at the National Humanities Center and in late 2013 at the Whatcomb Museum, Bellingham, WA, in their international exhibit “Vanishing Ice.” These exhibitions were and are intended to put a face on Earth’s endangered upper latitudes and to examine the implications of the ecological and climatic changes there for the rest of the planet.”

Born in Wales and now a resident of Carrboro, North Carolina, Nerys Levy is deeply rooted in her native country’s culture which has influenced her painting. Levy had a first career in race relations, community work and education, working in India, the Caribbean, South Africa and London. She has a PhD in Modern South Asian History from the University of London. Although she painted throughout much of her childhood, Levy began serious studies in 1980 in La Jolla, California, working with various members of the Visual Arts Department of the University of California at San Diego. She also studied at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, California. Many of her works are in private collections both in Europe and the United States. Nerys Levy is a member artist of FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. (www.frankisart.com)

Fall 2008: “Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Photos by Chris Sims

Christopher Sims was born in Michigan and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, a master’s degree in visual communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a M.F.A. in studio art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and currently teaches photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

His most recent exhibitions include shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, the Light Factory, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. His recent project on Guantanamo Bay was featured in The Washington Post, the BBC World Service, Roll Call, and Flavorwire. In 2010, he was selected as the recipient of the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers and in 2012 he was named one of the “new Superstars of Southern Art” by the Oxford American magazine.

“In recent years, I have been making photographs within fictitious Iraqi and Afghan villages on the training grounds of U.S. Army bases, places largely unknown to most Americans. The villages are situated in the deep forests of North Carolina and Louisiana, and in a great expanse of desert near Death Valley in California. Each base features clusters of villages spread out over thousands of acres, in a pretend country known by a different name at each base: Talatha, Braggistan, or ‘Iraq.’

The villages serve as a strange and poignant way station for people heading off to war and for those who have fled it. U.S. soldiers interact with pretend villagers who are often recent immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan, who have now found work in America playing a version of the lives they left behind. The remainder of the village population is drawn from the local communities near the Army bases, including spouses of active duty soldiers as well as military veterans of America’s wars in Vietnam and Korea, some of whom are amputees and who play the part of wounded villagers in their new identities.

The villages are places of fantastic imagination. The actors continue playing their roles as police officers, gardeners, and café owners during the long stretches of day between training exercises. Some villagers plant crops that they harvest months later for food for their lunches and dinners. Others pass their leisure time painting murals on the interior walls to beautify their surroundings, or making arts and crafts to trade with other villagers.

Sometimes I visit the villages with access provided by the military’s public affairs office; other times I am a role player myself, playing the character of a war photographer for the ‘International News Network.’ Here, backstage in the war on terrorism, I see insurgents planting a bomb in a Red Crescent ambulance; American soldiers negotiating with a reluctant mayor; a suicide bomber detonating herself outside of a mosque; and villagers erupting in an anti-American riot. The designers and inhabitants of these worlds take great pride in the scope and fidelity of their wars-in-miniature. By day’s end, hundreds of soldiers and civilians lay dead—the electronic sensors on their special halters indicating whether friendly fire, an improvised explosive device, or a sniper’s bullet has killed them.”

Summer 2008: “Lower Ninth Ward,” Photos by John Rosenthal

“I drove into the Ninth Ward a year and a half after Katrina left it in ruins. Friends of mine who had already been there told me the devastation was “unbelievable.” I wondered what that meant—unbelievable.

My friends were wrong.

The Ninth Ward, in its ruin, was believable, but only in the way certain dreams are believable—post-World-War-III dreams. Miles and miles of empty houses. No voices, no cars—an eerie silence except for the distant rumble of dump trucks, the occasional crunching of wood. Now and then a darkened limo, or a Katrina tour bus, would drive through.  The initial documentary Gold Rush—photography inspired by overturned houses, cars in trees, and mountains of debris—was plainly over. Dramatic spectacle had given way to pervasive loss—a condition far less tangible, and difficult to photograph. I’m not sure what I felt about what I saw. Disbelief? To be honest, I wasn’t able to grasp the disaster. It was too large to be emotionally comprehended, especially by someone who didn’t live there.

And then, despite my original intentions not to, I began to take photographs—photographs that reminded me not so much of the New York photographs I took in the early 1970s but of the fundamental reasons why I even became a photographer. In those early years I’d walk around the city for days (as I imagined Cartier-Bresson had walked around Paris) searching for something to photograph—a person, a dog, a store window, a movie marquee, anything that might open up and reveal an idea about life in New York City. One afternoon, however, as I watched a wrecking ball punch holes in a building I had admired only the week before, the thought crossed my mind that whole sections of the city—particularly the parts with a distinct cultural identity—were beginning to disappear. This image of the disappearing city stayed with me, and, almost immediately, I began to photograph everything I considered imperiled—seltzer bottles stacked high in old wooden crates, Ukrainian men playing backgammon in Tompkins Square, a three-masted model of a ship in the dusty window of an Italian seamen’s club in Little Italy. I’m glad I took those photographs. The parts of the city I intended to fix in memory have largely disappeared. And since that time, for more than 30 years, using photography as a means to memorialize loss has served as the wellspring of my work.

By the time I arrived in the Ninth Ward in the winter of 2007, a large part of the neighborhood had already disappeared, and the rest was in danger of being hauled away. I began to photograph those things that still remained: beautiful wrought-iron railings, a church organ covered in cracked silt, and, oddly enough, a Sunday School bulletin board full of thumbtacks. I wanted the photographs to say “See, this was here, and that was there.” For a photographer, that seemed a simple enough and legitimate task. After all, the moment we allow ourselves to forget the intimate details of a Somewhere, Donald Trump and his friends, waiting in the wings, will happily make an entrance and build us a new and improved Nowhere—monolithic, impersonal, luxurious, and white. The Ninth Ward was disappearing, it seemed to me, not only because of Katrina, but because of a long-standing indifference to the poor, an indifference now transforming itself into a mercilessly strategic land-grab.

Photographs, though, not only remember, they register surprise. And what surprised me most about the Ninth Ward were the left-over particulars of a multi-layered human geography. What did I expect to find there? The media invariably headline poverty and crime, but those words, chanted like a mantra, don’t reveal or illuminate anything; they merely divert us from the deeper problem of American racism. In fact what I found and what I photographed wasn’t simply the remnants of a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood now demolished by a hurricane, but the vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity, and where religious faith found expression on every block. From my perspective, the floodwaters had washed away not only bricks and mortar, but also the toxic stereotypes that separate us from each other. What was left, in other words, was the vanishing common ground, and it is this familiar terrain that I have photographed.”

John Rosenthal’s photographs have been exhibited throughout the North and Southeast. His one-person shows include exhibits at The National Humanities Center, New Orleans African-American Museum, Boston’s Panopticon Gallery, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C, and NCSU’s Gregg Museum. His work is in the N.C. Museum of Art’s permanent collection and in 1998 a collection of Mr. Rosenthal’s photographs, Regarding Manhattan was published by Safe Harbor Books. Mr. Rosenthal was awarded a North Carolina Visual Art Fellowship in 2008 for his photographs of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.

 

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