Drawing together photographs and installations from both his celebrated and lesser-known series, Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love charts new connections across the artistic practice of Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, NY). The exhibition explores Harris’s critical examination of identity and self-portraiture while tracing central themes and formal approaches in his work of the last 35 years.

The artist’s recently-completed Shadow Works anchor the exhibition. In these meticulous constructions, photographic prints are set within geometric frames of stretched Ghanaian funerary textiles, along with shells, shards of pottery, and cuttings of the artist’s own hair. Our first and last love follows the cues of the Shadow Works’ collaged and pictured elements—which include earlier artworks and reference materials, personal snapshots, and handwritten notes—to shed light on Harris’s layered approach to his practice.

Harris’s work engages with broad social and political dialogues while also speaking with revelatory tenderness to his own communities, and to personal struggles, sorrows, and self-illuminations. Groupings centered around singular Shadow Works will expand upon these multiple through lines, including Harris’s continued examination of otherness and belonging; the framing and self-presentation of Black and queer individuals; violence as a dark undercurrent of intimacy and desire; tenderness and vulnerability; and notions of legacy—both inherited and self-defined.

In conjunction with the Click! Photo Festival, Peel will celebrate photography in many ways this month including a show of Galinsky's mall snapshots from the early 90's and their accompanying publications. This body of work revisits a time when the Berlin Wall was about to fall and capitalism had won the cold war, partly through a relentless campaign of jeans and Coca-Cola diplomacy.

A talk and signing for Galinsky's book "The Decline of Mall Civilization" and a last look at the exhibition in the gallery space.

The self-portrait, by its very nature, is linked to an artist’s identity. She insists on her relevance, her existence, even, through her representation of self. Over the course of two years, I created numerous self-portrait images, with each one subjected to multiple digital processes, producing enormous numbers of variations. A subtitle for the portfolio, As If A Mirror, could be “Theme and Variation, and Variation, and Variation, Ad Infinitum”. The process consisted of layering a gridded self-portrait with disparate images: scenes from my garden, beloved objects, a room in my house, a place I had visited, for instance, all of them screen-captured grids, chosen from my iPhone’s camera roll because of a particular format, say, or composition, or color scheme. The starting point is always a self-portrait. The second layer changes with each new creation, depending on the time of year, what sparked my interest, where I was sitting at the moment, what I fancied as significant at the time, for example. The layers’ facets mix, push and pull in an always surprising way, like a visual square dance. The resulting image presents at times as a mosaic, at times as a tapestry, at times as a painting.

Jason Farago, in his New York Times essay on Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, implies that the artist presents “the self as a subjective individual, the author of one’s own life story”. My self-portraits, consciously self-centered, are vibrant, deliberate, fabricated, staged composites that state, I am here, and this is my story.

Student exhibition from NC Botanical Garden and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University photography workshops with Frank artist/teacher Barbara Tyroler. Co-curated with ArtsCenter gallery curator  Caroline Haller.

Featuring work by: Denise Allen, Diane Cashion, Nancy Chescheir, Dawn Colsia , Blythe Devlin, Gina DeVine, Mirinda Kossoff, Chris Krueger, Amy Lark, Lisa Parnell, Elizabeth Prioli, Vicki Russell, Philip Sloane, Alison Weiner, and Anne Winslow.

Cary Photographic Artists will celebrate the 16th Annual Open Juried Photographic Exhibit with an opening reception tonight from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. The exhibit will run from October 24 through December 15, 2023 at the Cary Senior Center in Cary, NC.

Stop in to view the exhibit and hear the judges talk about the photographs and the Julia Daniels memorial scholarship awards.

Since photography’s beginnings, practitioners have sought ways to add color to their photos. For the first 100 years, this required tinting the photos by hand.  This exhibit provides a range of examples from this period, from daguerreotypes to silver-gelatin, and focuses on two formats: enlarged, hand-painted tintypes from the late 19th century and oval “chalk photos” from the early 20th. The widespread popularity of these enlarged formats largely took over the role of folk- art painting, while making portraiture more widely available across class and racial lines. Rather than being limited only to those wealthy enough to commission a painting, now anyone could have a portrait of an honored family member hanging over their mantel.

An exhibition of a slidehow carousel of images from the NC State Fair by local photographic artists & with accompanying electronic music. Music begins at 7pm.

Sponsored by Peel Gallery

It Ain’t All Black And White is an exhibition of photographic works curated by North Carolina-based photographer Leticia Clementina. Black people are often asked to shrink their complex emotions into two categories, joy and pain; sitting high on joy as a reaction against the impact of colonization or burdened by pain that is exploited as the focal element in galleries, news, and social media. It Ain’t All Black and White is a photography exhibition that encourages us to consider emotions such as serenity, apprehension, yearning, and more. Captured by 10 dynamic photographers dedicated to documenting the fullness and complexity of Black life, this exhibition offers each of us an opportunity to see ourselves with renewed attention.

Black people need to unapologetically center their stories, free of the white gaze, in order to examine our emotions and their relationship to our ancestors, community, and environment. These emotions have roots. They are living and breathing, steering our experiences and how we show up in the world. Examining the life source of our emotions provides an opportunity for us to welcome the liberation of introspection.

The images in this exhibition are black and white to demand that we focus on the subject, challenging the viewer to explore how the abundance of sophisticated emotions manifest in our physical, mental, and spiritual being. This abundance ultimately influences how we show up for ourselves, our families, our community, and beyond. What are they expressing in their face and/or body? How are they loving, living, and healing?
– Leticia Clementina

Through February 23, 2024

Leticia Clementina
Guest Curator Leticia Clementina is a Durham, NC-based photographer and program director for a community-based nonprofit. Raised in Eastern North Carolina, her curiosity about the obscure realities that exist within the human experience was nurtured in family photo albums that held snapshots of lived moments she desired to know more about. Leticia’s current photography practice seeks to explore, document, and reveal the intricate and less obvious aspects of the lives of those around her and her personal experiences as she learns more about herself, her family, and the environment that nurtures them. Her master’s degree in social work and professional practice creates an opportunity for Leticia’s photography to combine evidence-based knowledge with symbolic representation. Leticia’s ongoing photography series Fruit of the Black Man’s Hand aspires to recognize the fruitful contributions of Black men in her life and community and how those contributions impact their loved ones and beyond. Work from this series and other projects have been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the Triangle and Piedmont areas in North Carolina.

About the Artists

Derrick Beasley

Derrick Beasley is a multidisciplinary artist from Durham, NC. His works explore Black life and its intersections with the environment. Derrick’s work often uses
surrealism to stretch ideas around what is possible and imagine new realities for
Black masculinity and relationships with the environment. Beasley received a BA at North Carolina A&T and a MPA from Georgia State University. Derrick’s work has been exhibited and published nationally, with his most notable solo exhibition and residency being at NorthStar Church of the Arts in Durham, NC. He has received multiple grants and awards including from the Pivotal Fund, the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant, and the Awesome Foundation Grant. Beasley’s work aims to facilitate the exploration of possibilities and the imagining, designing, and unearthing of just and equitable worlds.

Mark Anthony Brown Jr.

Mark Anthony Brown Jr. is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist living and
working in the American South. He migrated from Ohio and settled throughout the South, from Georgia to North Carolina. Mark is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and received his Bachelor of Science Technology from Bowling Green State University. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Visiting Researcher Fellowship and the Southern Futures Emerging Scholar Award, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He has completed residencies at the Penland School of Craft, Penland, North Carolina, and at Remerge, Atlanta, Georgia, and has exhibited his work nationally. Mark’s art practices consist of narrative and abstraction, that utilize whichever medium is the best fit to achieve the goal of the work being made. Mediums and materials range around and through the Mark Anthony Brown Jr., Before You Jumped Off the Porch, 2021, printed 2023, 11” x 14”, Gelatin Silver Print medium of photography, including collage, video, vernacular photographs, family archives, institutional archives, “found” photographs, portraiture, and landscape, in addition to the use of “found” objects, painting, and drawing. With Mark’s interest in aesthetics, materials, and perception, themes within the work are found at the intersection of the overarching human experience and the Black experience.

Samantha Everette

Samantha Everette is a lifelong artist, designer, world traveler, and photographer. She is a Durham native and graduated Summa Cum Laude from North Carolina State with a BA in Industrial Design. After graduating, Samantha spent ten years as a shoe designer. As a designer, Samantha
spent half of the year living in China and traveling throughout Asia. Samantha was inspired to capture the world around her during these travels. This interest has since blossomed into a full-on passion for photography. Everette has shown her work internationally and throughout North Carolina. She was a Regional Emerging Artist in Residence at Artspace, Raleigh, NC, and an Artist in Residence at Durham Fruit, Durham, NC. Her works have appeared in numerous publications. The definition of Photography is “drawing with light,” and Samantha Everette believes that the brightest light is the one that shines from within. Her mission is to help her subjects show their light to the world. Samantha has a knack for finding everyday people and capturing something extraordinary within them. Her subjects range from travel, fashion, and beauty to lifestyle. But one thing remains constant, and that is her dedication to celebrating Blackness.

Chris Facey

Chris Facey is a Brooklyn, NY-raised photographer currently based in Raleigh, NC. His photographic journey encapsulates the powerful yet tender moments that shape our world. Drawn to the impactful works of Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith, Chris documents communities, primarily the African American community, with a unique sensitivity, carving space for emotional resonance while delving into significant issues such as racial injustices during the
current civil rights movement to combat stereotypes within these communities. With a keen eye and passionate spirit, Chris has dedicated his career to spotlighting the African American community’s stories. As a father, he’s embarked on “The Dad Duty Project,” aiming to challenge the misconception of absentee fathers within the black and brown communities. Additionally, his “Even In Death” project shows the preservation of an African-American cemetery and its fight against erasure and revisionist history in North Carolina. A graduate of The School of Visual Arts with a BFA, Chris’s journey is further enriched by his service as a United States Army veteran. His trajectory in the world of photo documentary has led to significant recognition, including features in eminent publications like The New Yorker, New York Magazine and The New York Times, as well as exhibited in galleries such as The Golden Belt Gallery, The Bronx River Art Center, and The Gage Gallery at Roosevelt University. Through his evocative storytelling and a commitment to visual activism, Chris Facey continues to wield his camera as a tool for social change. His work, steeped in both empathy and insight, serves as a testament to the capacity of photography to provoke thought, provoke emotions, and initiate dialogue on matters of crucial importance.

Titus Brooks Heagins

Titus Brooks Heagins is a documentary photographer who is obsessed with creating beautiful images regardless of the subject matter. He photographs in ways that the beauty in the experiences of the “outsider” simply doesn’t escape his eye. That photography is rooted in and dedicated to the expressive documentary spirit and tradition. Within that spirit, authorship and a personal visual aesthetic are grounded in humanistic stories and themes. Heagins was born in Chicago but grew up in a small rural neighborhood in Houston, Texas. His practice is deeply rooted in the lessons learned and experiences of those who lived within the confines of the segregated South and dreams unattained as a result. Heagins graduated from Duke University and the University of Michigan with a Master of Fine Art. He taught photography at universities afterward. For the past twenty years, Heagins has created extensive bodies of work throughout the Black Diaspora, including Cuba, Haiti, Barbados, Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil. His projects have carried him to China, photographing those displaced by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, Japan, photographing Lolita Girls, and Vietnam, creating portraits of the children of African American soldiers. He has portfolios of his photography in theSmithsonian Museums in Washington DC, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Do Good Fund. He is included in the exhibition and book Southbound: Photography of and About the New South, the largest exhibition of 21st century photography about the American South. He lives in Durham with his wife, Maureen, and their English Springer Spaniel, Carter.

Gadisse Lee

Gadisse Lee is an emerging fine art and self-portrait photographer who blends creativity, life experiences, and cultural influences in her work. With a Fine Arts degree specializing in Photography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Gadisse captures her life’s essence. Her art reflects an unconventional upbringing and adapting to a new culture during her
formative years. This background shapes Gadisse’s self-portrait photography, infusing each image with introspection and identity. Currently, Gadisse’s art graces the Greenhill Art Center in Greensboro, NC, alongside artist John Rosenthal. She recently showcased evocative works at Durham’s Apple Art and has previously exhibited at the Block Gallery, Raleigh, NC, and the Peel Gallery, Carrboro, NC. She’ll have her second solo exhibition at the Horace Williams House Preservation in Chapel Hill, NC, in 2024. Gadisse’s impact is recognized, earning her a top-three spot for the Artadia Research Triangle Artists Grant. Her motivation stems from artists’ raw vulnerability and visibility. Being part of this artistic community fulfills Gadisse profoundly.

Phillip “King Phill” Loken

Currently based in Mebane, North Carolina, Phillip “King Phill” Loken was born in Texas and has lived in various cities and towns across North Carolina since age four. His photography is intimately tied to his lived experiences as a Black man in the American South. He wants to capture the rich history and vibrant cultural expressions that influence his subjects’ lives. Loken’s work has been exhibited nationally. Most recently, his work was part of the group exhibition Black and White: 2023 at Black Box Gallery in Portland, Oregon (2023). In 2022, Loken participated in the Give Black Raleigh Her Flowers’ exhibition at Anchorlight Gallery in Raleigh, N.C. (2022). In 2021, Loken participated in the exhibition BLACK GAZE: Representation, Identity, and Expression at The Light Factory Photo Arts Center (2021). As a professional photographer, Loken has worked with a variety of organizations and companies, including the City of Raleigh, CreativeMornings, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Special Olympics North Carolina. His photographs have also been featured on Verizon’s Go90 docuseries American Down Low, and Walter Magazine. Loken was featured in a documentary film, Creative NC: An Introspective Look at Creative Culture, which premiered in 2017 at the North Carolina Museum of History.

Jaylan Rhea

Hailing from Durham, North Carolina, Jaylan Rhea draws inspiration from the rich tapestry of life often on view in his community, intertwining personal experiences and universal themes in their work. Rhea is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on portrait photography, highlighting diversity, gender, sexuality, and performance art. Rhea has shot for a range of publications such as Human Shift Magazine, Bricks Magazine, and Vogue.com and has had works featured in the “To Be Young: Coming of Age in the Contemporary” exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Cornell Watson

Cornell Watson is a Dope-Ass Black photographer based in Durham, North Carolina. He frequently contributes photography to national publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ESPN, and Bloomberg. He has also photographed national ad campaigns for companies such as T-Mobile, MeUndies, Bombas, and Adidas. With his photography centered around sharing the stories of Black people, he has won several awards, including The Alexia for his photo series “Behind the Mask.” When he’s not watching the 1000th episode of CoComelon, being the best spouse in the world, or editing photos while his four-year-old daughter edits the furniture with non-washable crayons, you can find him passed out from exhaustion on the living room couch.

This exhibit, originally organized by Cassilhaus (a home-based artist residency and exhibition program located between Durham and Chapel Hill), is a survey of more than 70 images drawn from Elizabeth Matheson’s 50-year career ranging from her early vintage gelatin silver prints to her stunning (and mostly unseen) self-portraits and her contemporary large-scale color work.

     For the Upstairs Artspace exhibition, photography loans have been secured from the artist and 13 individual private collectors. It is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Matheson’s work to date.

     “This is an ambitious exhibition of an extraordinarily talented artist with an exceptional eye,” Upstairs Artspace curator Sarah Schroth, Ph.D. said. “We are most grateful to Cassilhaus for helping us bring this special exhibition to Tryon. I first encountered Elizabeth’s work when I was the Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham. I was enchanted with the work’s poetic quality, its elegance and superb compositional sense. Everyone with an interest in photography should come see it. It’s an opportunity to see one of the greats!”

     The exhibition will open at Upstairs Artspace on Saturday, October 21, with Matheson present for a Walk & Talk from 5 to 5:30 p.m, followed by a reception until 7 p.m. Also on hand will be organizer Frank Konhaus and curators Vrba and Corley. The event is free and open to the public.  During the exhibition, prints by Elizabeth Matheson will be available for purchase.

     “I photograph what delights me and asks for my attention,” Matheson said recently. “I know that at any moment light can beautify the most ordinary corner of the most ordinary yard and that these small jolts of elation can be captured. For more than 50 years this visual call and response has been the constant and most reliable source of my deepest joy.”

     This first-ever exhibition in Tryon features Matheson’s personal and intimate experience of landscapes and interiors from North Carolina and around the world, a recurring motif reflecting an abiding interest in memory, perception, and the power of place. From Hillsborough to Havana, Matheson’s ever evolving, yet singular style rewards the viewer with an uncommon stillness and a sly humor. 

Have a Family Portrait Taken With Your Dog

Buehler Picnic Shelter Bond Park 801 High House Rd. Cary, NC 27513

($10 Suggested Donation)

Stop by the Buehler Picnic Shelter at Bond Park in Cary and have your portrait taken with your dog. This event is dedicated to the memory of Julia Daniels, a long-time member of CPA and a dog lover.

All donations from this event will be given to Freedom Ride Rescue non-profit animal rescue.

Join us in the gallery Wednesday, October 18 6:00 – 7:00 PM   for a dual artist talk with Living in the Ordinary World artists Gadisse Lee and Tama Hochbaum.  

Ten North Carolina Photographers, guest curated by Rosenthal, presents work by a stellar group of the state’s photography community: Rob Amberg, Catharine Carter, Alan Dehmer, Carolyn DeMeritt, Tama Hochbaum, Gadisse Lee, Elizabeth Matheson, Lori Vrba, Holden Richards, Wojtek Wojdynski

Exhibit runs through November 4, 2023

In step with Galinsky's exhibition, Peel will be taking 90's style glamour shots in the gallery space by appointment. It's time to invoke our bedazzled past and find those perfect denim on denim looks. Portraits, friends forever group shots,or maybe even engagement photos can become a nostalgic reality... again. BYO crimper.

Peel Gallery is open Thursday-Saturday from 12-6 and Sundays 12-5 and by appointment. 

The CLICK! Photo Fair, will be held during the Click! Photography Festival in the covered market at Durham Central Park on Sunday, October 15th from 10:00am–3:00pm. The fair will bring together arts organizations, galleries, vendors, and individual photographers to build community and promote photography in the Triangle.

Attendance to the Fair is FREE and open to the public!

For artists to exhibit, each 10’x10’ ft space is only $60. This is a great opportunity for individual artists or clubs to showcase their work and gain an audience. 

Artists that want to participate can do so by registering here.

ACTIVISTS FROM WARREN COUNTY PCB LANDFILL PROTESTS TO SPEAK AT PUBLIC EXHIBIT VIEWING

The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and the Warren County Environmental Action Team will host an event at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 14 to showcase the exhibit “We Birthed the Movement: The Warren County PCB Landfill Protests, 1978-1982.” Speakers will include two community members who played leading roles in the original protests, Dollie Burwell and Wayne Moseley, and Director of the Warren County Environmental Action Team, Rev. William Kearney. This event is free and open to the public.

Through archival photographs and materials, “We Birthed a Movement” offers a retrospective of a large, community-driven protest against N.C. Governor Jim Hunt’s 1978 decision to place a landfill for toxic waste in the small, majority Black town of Afton in Warren County. A multiracial, intergenerational coalition of citizens fought against the landfill for years, eventually committing civil disobedience in a 1982 protest, lying down in the roads to block the passage of the trucks carrying the PCB-laden soil.

Though the protests were ultimately unsuccessful at preventing the landfill, their legacy has endured. Forty years later, they are widely considered the beginning of the environmental justice movement.

“We Birthed a Movement” was originally created by staff at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library in collaboration with Warren County community members to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the protests. It is now on display at the Kenan-Keohane Gallery on the first floor of the West Duke Building on Duke University’s East Campus.

A photograph from the “We Birthed a Movement” exhibit shows Dollie Burwell (center, holding her hand against her neck) and Wayne Moseley (left, in striped polo shirt), as they gather with a crowd before a 1982 protest. Photo Credit: Jerome Friar.

In addition to viewing the exhibit, attendees of the public event on October 14 will have the opportunity to hear from two community members who played pivotal roles in the protests, Dollie Burwell and Wayne Moseley.

This event is brought to you by the Warren County Environmental Action Team, the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and one of its signature programs Just Environments (a partnership with the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability).

Create a Photo Zine and Get Your Work Out Into the World!

A photo zine is most often a hand-made, self-published book that is easy and inexpensive to create using simple techniques and materials. Zines offer exciting potential as an outlet for creative expression—and a democratized platform that can help get your work out into the world. Planning on publishing a photo book? Start by making a photo zine as a low-cost way to explore your creative options while learning about the bookmaking process.

In this workshop, creators at all skill levels will:

-Take a tour of the zine universe, so that we can explore what’s possible

-Review and critique zines made by established and emerging contemporary photographic artists

- Learn the basics of layout, construction, and binding a photo zine

-Discover ways to reinvigorate your stalled or unfinished bodies of work in a contemporary style

-Explore printing and publishing options for your zines, including using your home printer or commercial service

- Learn how distribute and sell your zines, to get them out into the world

Jeff Phillips is a photographic artist and educator living in Chicago, Illinois. He is interested in innovative methods of presenting photographic images. Jeff is a frequent lecturer and workshop facilitator, focused on zine making, photographic projections and immersive visual installations. He serves as Board President for Filter Photo, and since 2009 has helped produce the annual Filter Photo Festival. His personal work has been featured in more than 50 group and solo gallery exhibitions. Jeff holds an MA in Photography and a BA in Technology from DePaul University.

Location: Hampton Inn & Suites Carrboro

Registration Fee. $195.00 Workshop is limited to 20 students.

Register by 9/20/23: $150

Registration Information

The self-portrait, by its very nature, is linked to an artist’s identity. She insists on her relevance, her existence, even, through her representation of self. Over the course of two years, I created numerous self-portrait images, with each one subjected to multiple digital processes, producing enormous numbers of variations. A subtitle for the portfolio, As If A Mirror, could be “Theme and Variation, and Variation, and Variation, Ad Infinitum”. The process consisted of layering a gridded self-portrait with disparate images: scenes from my garden, beloved objects, a room in my house, a place I had visited, for instance, all of them screen-captured grids, chosen from my iPhone’s camera roll because of a particular format, say, or composition, or color scheme. The starting point is always a self-portrait. The second layer changes with each new creation, depending on the time of year, what sparked my interest, where I was sitting at the moment, what I fancied as significant at the time, for example. The layers’ facets mix, push and pull in an always surprising way, like a visual square dance. The resulting image presents at times as a mosaic, at times as a tapestry, at times as a painting.

Jason Farago, in his New York Times essay on Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, implies that the artist presents “the self as a subjective individual, the author of one’s own life story”. My self-portraits, consciously self-centered, are vibrant, deliberate, fabricated, staged composites that state, I am here, and this is my story.

Up until January 13, 2024

Although Chapel Hill, North Carolina has been Wojtek Wojdynski's home for the last 20 years, he began his photographic journey as a teenager in Warsaw, Poland. At 12 he began spending time in a darkroom at one of Warsaw's art centers. When he was 16, Wojdynski build his first darkroom. After completing a master's degree at Warsaw's Polytechnic Institute, Wojdynski put his photographic dreams on hold and redirected himself for a career as an electrical engineer, which brought him and his family to the U.S. in 1981.

After twenty years of keeping his interests on the back burner, Wojdynski was able to realize his dream and make photography his full-time occupation in 2000.

Throughout the 1980s, as America's downtown districts declined in importance and the "big-box" stores began their slow march across the country, malls became increasing central to American popular culture, dominating the social life of a large swath of the population. In 1989 Michael Galinsky, a twenty-year-old photographer, drove across the country recording this change: the spaces, textures and pace that defined this era. Starting in the winter of 1989 with the Smith Haven Mall in Garden City Long Island, Galinsky photographed malls from North Carolina to South Dakota, Washington State and beyond. The photos he took capture life in these malls as it began to shift from the shiny excess of the 1980s towards an era of slackers and grunge culture. Malls Across America is filled with seemingly lost or harried families navigating their way through these temples of consumerism, along with playful teens, misfits and the aged. There is a sense of claustrophobia to the images, even in those that hint at wide commercial expanses: a wall or a ceiling is always there to block the horizon. These photos never settle or focus on any one detail, creating the sense that they are stolen records of the most immediate kind.

Exhibit runs through November 5, 2023.
Gallery Hours 1-6pm on Wednesdays
Thursday-Saturday from 12-6 and Sundays 12-5 and by appointment. 

Dan Gottlieb’s SWAMP features a suite of pictures inspired by explorations of eastern North Carolina’s hauntingly beautiful cypress swamps, mill ponds, and creeks – and their fragile ecologies. Dan combines his life decades as an artist, museum designer, and environmental activist using a laborious experimental process of his own design.

Garden Journeys, A Portrait Photographer Explores the Landscape showcases the work of professional photographer and educator, Barbara Tyroler. Primarily an environmental portrait artist and editorial commercial photographer, Barbara first began rendering the natural landscape while meandering through the local hiking trails with students, friends, and family during the early seasons of our Covid pandemic. The abstracted imagery emerged as shaggy and snarly forms, colors, and textures, and blossomed into a broader appreciation for the complex interconnectedness and social networking at play.

FRANK:inFocus, SEPTEMBER 26th to NOVEMBER 11th also features FRANK member and guest photographers: Alan Dehmer, Peter Filene, Bill McAllister, Tama Hochbaum, Bryce Lankard, John Rosenthal, Leah Sobsey, Tim Walters, and Wojtek Wojenski.

Until the advent of artificial lighting 200 years ago, darkness and night had been the universal human experience and the one for which we and all life on earth evolved. Recent excavations at some prehistoric sites in the UK have revealed evidence that megalithic stone monuments thousands of years old may have been visited at night or in low light. Recent studies have shown that the effects of rapidly increasing light pollution have deleterious effects on human, plant, and animal life.  Please join us on Thursday, October 12th, at The Fruit in Durham for an installation that evokes the artist’s nighttime contemplation and photographing of such prehistoric ruins at night as part of her recent Fulbright year in Cornwall. In 2021/2022 MJ Sharp went to Cornwall, UK, on a Fulbright Scholar Award to collaborate with nocturnal ecologist Dr. Kevin Gaston at the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter on the issues of light pollution and the implications of the rapid loss of night and darkness. 

Alex, and his daughter/editor Eliza, will preview their forthcoming book, Available Light, a family memoir told through Alex's camera. 

Alex Harris is a photographer and a founder of the Center for Documentary Studies and DoubleTake Magazine at Duke University, where he taught for four decades. His photographs of Cuba, New Mexico, Alaska, and the American South have been published and exhibited widely but this is the first time we are getting a focused look at the pictures he made of his own family over the years.

Eliza Harris is an editor and illustrator from Durham. Her interviews with poets and comic artists can be found in Catapult Magazine. Her art has been published in Catapult, Passages North, HAD, and elsewhere.

The new millennium has put a quality camera in nearly everyone’s pocket in the form of a smartphone. The camera phone and an application or two are powerful and creative tools. Students will learn a few tips and tricks that can make their creative voice sing with this little device. This workshop will review basic camera phone controls, some filmmaking and photography tips and basic editing tips. We will also do a deeper dive into a couple of post-production applications, like 8mm, Hipstamatic and Instagram, that can take images to the next level. Students should bring images previously taken and please bring your camera/phone and ideally your laptop to upload images. It is strongly recommended that students download other Photography editing applications (my preferred app is Hipstamatic).

Bryce Lankard has made images in the south as a documentary photographer for 35 years. He was a co-founder and creative director of Tribe Magazine, co-founder of the New Orleans Photo Alliance, co-founder / executive director of the Click! Photography Festival, and an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies. Exhibitions have featured work created with an iPhone. His current project, Drawn to Water, appeared in Southern Cultures.  Bryce’s solo exhibition venues include Flanders Gallery in Raleigh, NC and the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, SC. HIs work was recently featured in Across County Lines, Contemporary Photography from the Piedmont at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. 

Register at https://www.cognitoforms.com/BryceLankardPhotographis/IPhoneWorkshop

Through January 28, 2024

East Building, Level B, Photography Gallery 1 (Julian T. Baker Jr. Gallery)

Luis Rey Velasco (b. 1969) creates evocative photographs that capture labor histories, cultural traditions, and everyday people. He came of age in the San Joaquin Valley, a region of California where the history of Latinx farm labor is intrinsic to its identity. Mexican migrant workers arrived in the 1940s due to a set of agreements between the United States and Mexico. The program ended in 1964, but immigration to the region continued. Immersed in this history, Velasco moved to North Carolina in 1999 to photograph children of migrant farm workers.

Featured in this exhibition are a selection of photographs Velasco executed between 1998 and 2005, many portraying members of farm worker communities in California and North Carolina. These compelling images emphasize his longtime focus on communities, histories, and regions that are largely hidden yet integral to the American economy.

Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions. Research for this exhibition was made possible by Ann and Jim Goodnight/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund for Curatorial and Conservation Research and Travel.

Luis Rey Velasco, 104 Degrees, 1998, gelatin silver print, 17 3/8 × 11 3/4 in., Purchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art

NORTH CAROLINA
MUSEUM OF ART
2110 Blue Ridge Road

Just added! We WILL be screening An Impossible Project a film by Jens Meurer featuring Doc Kaps the man responsible for saving Polaroid film. It will premier at The Fruit on 10/8. Doors open at 6:30pm, film to show at 7:00pm. The event is free and open to the public but seating is limited. People will need to register on eventbrite: Film Screening: An Impossible Project Tickets, Sun, Oct 8, 2023 at 6:30 PM | Eventbrite

The Film Photo Award is open to all emerging, established, and student photographers based in the United States. Each award period provides three distinct grants of Kodak Professional Film and complimentary film processing by Griffin Editions to photographers who demonstrate a serious commitment to the field and are motivated to continue the development of still, film-based photography in the 21st century.

All winners of the FPA in its five year history will be celebrated in Developing Story: Five Years of the Film Photo Award at Cassilhaus. Artists include Trent Davis Bailey, Susan Worsham, Guanyu Xu, Jon Henry, Leah Schretenthaler, Jonathan Mark Jackson, Graham Dickie, Alexander Komenda, Odette England, Magda Biernat, Owen McCarter, Kristina Knipe, Simon Murphy, Saskia Baden, Chance Deville, Emma Ressel , Matthew Leifheit, Biance Surchio & riel Sturchio, and Shawn Bush. RSVPs are required to attend. Please check out the Cassilhaus website to see all programming updates.

Cassilhaus is a home, a singular piece of architecture, a lifelong arts project, and a love-filled partnership between Ellen Cassilly and Frank Konhaus. Ellen is an architect and community activist and Frank is a retired AV System Designer, Director of the Cassilhaus Artist in Residence and Exhibition Programs, and arts entrepreneur.

After a five-year land search and a three-year design process, Cassilhaus was born as dream home/art gallery/artist studio and residency in the woods between Durham and Chapel Hill, NC and has grown into an exciting nexus for arts activity and community in the Triangle region. Cassilhaus hosts a diverse exhibition program and a multi-disciplinary residency program which bring extraordinary artists from our region and around the world to pollinate and stimulate our little corner of the art world. Cassilhaus was designed by the team at Ellen Cassilly Architect.