Truly honored to be included in this exhibition and in the Do Good Fund’s extraordinary collection of Southern photography!
Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund
Saturday, Oct 08, 2022 — Sunday, Jan 08, 2023
This exhibition is the first large-scale survey of the Do Good Fund’s remarkable and sweeping collection of photography made in the South from the 1950s to the present. Since its founding in 2012, the Do Good Fund has built a museum-quality collection of photography that charts a visual narrative of the ever-changing American South. The collection includes images by more than 25 Guggenheim Fellows, five Magnum Photographers and two Henri Cartier-Bresson Award winners as well as images by lesser-known or emerging photographers from the region. In part a survey of the art and artists within Do Good’s holdings, the exhibition is also and more crucially a scholarly investigation of southern photography since World War II.
Highlighting a wide-ranging group of photographers — diverse in gender, race, ethnicity and region — the exhibition will feature approximately 120 photographs by 71 artists. It unfolds within six sections that examine each of the project’s core themes: land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual and kinship. These themes are inherently expansive and internally paradoxical. Within this thematic structure, the project raises key questions that identify and problematize fixed ideas of an “American South” and “southern photography.” How do photographs navigate the interface between nature and culture in the South, as well as the ravages of extraction, settlement and sprawl? How do photographers string together histories of quotidian labor, creativity and caretaking and the region’s painful histories of enslaved and incarcerated labor? How have photographs captured the performance of southern community and identity through civic and religious rituals? How has the medium signaled exclusion and estrangement, yet also belonging and kinship in the American South?
These six themes link disparate works in the fund’s collection and capture southern history, culture and identity in all their complexity and contradictions. Through the installation, where clusters of objects variously construct and deconstruct each thematic category, the exhibition reckons with southern-ness as a coherent category. In so doing, it resists notions of the South as a retrograde region and instead presents the enigmatic, “ever-changing” qualities of the place and its people: a region where despair and hope, terror and beauty, pain and joy, and indignity and dignity commingle; a place seeking reconciliation and restoration, captured by photographers with an ethical vision for a “Better South.”
“Reckonings and Reconstructions” will be accompanied by the first comprehensive catalogue of the Do Good Fund’s photographic holdings. The project will also consider the role of Athens, Georgia — with its vibrant community of photographers, renowned photography program at the University of Georgia and celebrated alternative art and music scene — within the history of southern photography.
Curator
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, curator of American art
Galleries
Lamar Dodd, Boone and George-Ann Knox, Rachel Cosby Conway, Alfred Heber Holbrook and Charles B. Presley Family Galleries
