Photographers of Color Podcast

Geleve Grice was born on January 16, 1922, in Tamo, a small farming town located fifteen miles from Pine Bluff. At thirteen, Grice moved with his parents, Toy and Lillie, to Little Rock, where he graduated from Dunbar High School in 1942. An accomplished sportsman, Grice made the all-state football team his senior year of high school and later played for a service team during his four-year stint in the Navy. Grice entered the U.S. Navy immediately after graduation in the heat of World War II, eventually serving in the Pacific, where he guarded Japanese prisoners.

Grice began his photography career as a high school senior. L. C. and Daisy Bates, publishers of the Arkansas State Press newspaper, encouraged his journalistic interests by creating a column that featured his images and writings about fellow Dunbar classmates. While in the Navy, Grice was stationed at Great Lakes Naval Air Station in Illinois and went to Chicago on leave, where he took photos of the city’s nightlife, capturing unique images of famous black Americans like Joe Louis, Louis Armstrong, and famed guitarist T-Bone Walker.

After completing his military service on April 23, 1946, Grice enrolled at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College (AM&N College), later to be known as UAPB, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff where he majored in psychology. He also played football for the Golden Lions, served as yearbook photographer, and was eventually hired in 1947 as the campus photographer. In September 1949, Grice married his college sweetheart, Jean Bell of North Little Rock, a singer who became the first black graduate student in the music department of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. They had one son, Michael.

When he graduated in 1950, Grice had already opened the professional photography studio to earn his living for the next forty years. He frequently worked outside the studio for the Arkansas State Press and various local television stations. Grice’s photos also appeared in such national publications as Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines.

One of the highlights of Grice’s career came while still a college student in 1948, when he was asked to document the integration of the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville. As a result, Silas Hunt, accompanied by attorneys Wiley Branton and Harold Flowers, became the first black student to enroll at an all-white Southern university since Reconstruction.

In 1958, Grice photographed Martin Luther King Jr.’s commencement address at AM&N College. Because Grice was often called upon to chronicle significant happenings in the black community, his collection includes images of other notable black Americans, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Ray Charles, Thurgood Marshall, and Muhammad Ali.

In 1998, the UAPB art department sponsored an exhibit of his work, Those Who Dare to Dream: The Works of Arkansas Photographer Geleve Grice. The Old State House Museum in Little Rock followed in 2003 with a more extensive exhibition of his work, A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice. In 2003, the University of Arkansas Press published a book of the same title by Robert Cochran, featuring many of Grice’s most captivating photos.

Grice died on August 17, 2004.

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/geleve-grice-1161/

https://digitalcollections.uark.edu/digital/collection/Civilrights/id/157

https://news.uark.edu/articles/9559/diane-blair-and-geleve-grice-papers-donated-to-mullins

https://arkansasresearch.uark.edu/a-photographer-of-note-arkansas-artist-geleve-grice/

https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/english/directory/index/uid/rcochran/name/Robert-Cochran/

https://youtu.be/bUqlnPFeFew

Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard (he/ they) is a contemporary artist who uses their work to emphasize the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. Primarily working with photo-based collage, text, and drawing, they convey ideas of communal and personal identity centralized within internal conflicts. Ramos-Woodard is influenced by their direct experience with life – he is queer and African American, both of which are obvious targets for discrimination. They use their art to accent spaces of both communal understanding and disconnect between them and the viewer, specifically those of Black liberation, queer justice, and those in positions of power and privilege that lack the information to critically recognize problems within minority groups in contemporary culture. Ramos-Woodard received his BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and is currently pursuing his MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

https://www.andreramoswoodard.com/

https://www.instagram.com/andreduane/?hl=en

https://edublog.pdnonline.com/2019/07/in-a-powerful-body-of-work-mfa-candidate-andre-ramos-woodard-explores-his-anxiety-and-depression.html

https://www.inthein-between.com/andre-ramos-woodard/

http://lenscratch.com/2020/07/andre-ramos-woodard-a-mediocre-ass-nigga/

https://digitalmag.pdnedu.com/pdnedu/fall_2019/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=1523601#articleId1523601

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

Jasmine Clarke is a 25-year-old photographer born (and based) in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Bard College in 2018 with a BA in Photography. Inspired by the surreal qualities of our waking world, her images play with the tension between fiction and reality. Her images have been shown at Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan and are currently on view at Photoville in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Photo Vogue Festival in Milan, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta.

 When I look in the mirror, I want to believe that what I am seeing is an extension of myself even though I know that it isn’t. I’m seeing a reflection (an illusion) of me and my world. I can never quite trust a mirror. 

 A picture creates a similar false sense of reality. The nature of photography tells us that what we are seeing is true, but it’s not. It is a selective truth, or even a fiction.

One night in Jamaica, as my father and I drove through the mountains, he described a recurring dream: he is in his hometown, Saint Mary's, at a certain winding road that’s shaped like an N, trying to catch the bus. He misses it and has to run up the mountain through the bush and slide down the other side to catch it. This is his only dream set in Jamaica. He told me as we approached the N. I listened while chewing on my sugar cane. It’s strange hearing about a dreamscape while physically going through it—like déjà vu. 

I feel this sense of familiarity driving through my father’s dream. But what’s more overwhelming is the sensation of jamais vu: foreignness in what should be known. The moon you see, the air you breathe, and the flowers you smell are all suddenly unfamiliar. You’ve moved, traveled—maybe even transcended—although you don’t know to where. You look in the mirror and see yourself, but can’t be sure that it’s the same reflection you saw yesterday.

This is why I photograph: to capture a trace of the unexplainable. My pictures are where dreams meet the physical world and earthly things take on higher meaning. I search for the uncanny. I uncover what is hidden. An obscured face, a wet flower, a dark shadow.

http://jasmine-clarke.com/

https://www.instagram.com/jasmineclarke0/?hl=en

https://www.bard.edu/news/guardian-spotlights-work-by-grad-jasmine-clarke-18-in-photo-vogue-2020-11-10

https://www.vogue.it/fotografia/article/photo-vogue-festival-2020-all-in-this-together-30-photographers-exhibition

https://photoville.nyc/the-lit-list-2020-photographers-to-watch-exhibit-hire/

https://www.blueskygallery.org/upcoming-exhibitions

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/?hl=en

https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/art/

https://www.instagram.com/uarkart/?hl=en

Raymond Thompson Jr. is a photographer whose work focuses on race, identity and contested histories. He currently works as a Multimedia Producer at West Virginia University where is is also pursuing his MFA in photography. He received his MA in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in American studies from the University of Mary Washington. His freelance clients include The New York Times, ProPublica, Google, Buzzfeed News, Merrell, NBC News, and the Associated Press. 

In the 1930s, migrant laborers came from all over the region to work on the construction of a 3-mile tunnel to divert the New River near Fayetteville, WV. During the process, workers were exposed to pure silica dust due to improper drilling techniques. Many developed a lung disease known as silicosis, which is estimated to have caused the death of nearly 800 workers. Up to two-thirds of those workers were African American. Besides a small plaque at the Hawks Nest State Park, which lists a significantly lower number than the actual number killed, there is very little to mark the site. There is also sparse visual documentation available about the event. There has been an effort to erase this tragic moment in history from the memory of West Virginia.

In Appalachian Ghosts, I explore visual possibilities of what that time and place looked like, using primary-source materials to recreate the workers’ experiences in photographs. I have also recontextualized and re-presented archive photographs, originally made to document the construction of the Hawks Nest Tunnel dam and powerhouse. The few people caught in the photographic archive were often nameless and voiceless workers. Specifically, I’m looking at what has been left out of African-American visual history, which to date has mainly been documented with a colonial gaze. From this standpoint, I have sought to re/create work that has been informed by and made from historical documents and photographs.

My research also focused on working with non-visual resources that inspired the creation of new works. I researched news clips, letters, poetry and other cultural resources looking for information that described the experience of working in the tunnel. I was particularly struck by a poem from Muriel Rukeyser’s book The Book of the Dead called “George Robinson: Blues:”

As dark as I am. when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night

with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white.

The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.

-Muriel Rukeyser “The Book of the Dead”

Rukeyser’s book, along with other primary-source documents, inspired a series of images that focuses on the silica dust that covered everything at the work site.

http://www.raymondthompsonjr.com/

https://www.rustbeltbiennial.com/#winners

http://lenscratch.com/2020/07/raymond-thompson-jr-the-the-2020-lenscratch-student-prize-1st-place-winner/

https://vimeo.com/376951187

https://www.epistemmag.com/reclaiming-the-black-image-in-nature-and-in-photography/

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

Bowman’s work investigates the histories of people left out of the grand historical narratives with which we are more familiar. Previous to this project, she photographed monuments, artifacts of antiquity, and landscapes of historical significance in the U.S. In What Had Happened, Bowman returns to where she grew up (the Baldwin Hills, Inglewood, and Crenshaw neighborhoods of Los Angeles, CA), opening her own history to ask questions about the role location and landscape play in personal evolution. 

The images recall the events, objects, and sites that mold us in order to explore themes of displacement, family history, and notions of home. Bowman asks how we remember what has marked us in a place we once called home and how that place informs who we are in the present.

Memories of place are nuanced, emotional, atmospheric, historical, and geographical; when we return to these sites they are never exactly as remembered and fail to fully complete the retelling of history. 

In these photographs the passing of time reveals itself in the shadows drifting over a backyard, in a carpeted staircase worn by years of feet treading its fibers, in the shifting earth cracking the sidewalk that lays over it. The double exposures and repeated imagery draw attention to the way that time alters our perception of locations. Collectively the images render parts of ourselves and the place we once called home lost to time.

Dannielle Bowman received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where she was awarded the 2018 Richard Benson Prize. She was recently awarded the 2020 Aperture Portfolio Prize and was a contributor to the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project. Bowman has been an artist in residence at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York; The Center for Photography at Woodstock; and PICTURE BERLIN. 

https://danniellebowman.com/

https://www.baxterst.org/what-had-happened/

https://aperture.org/blog/2020-portfolio-prize-dannielle-bowman/

https://pdnonline.com/photography-business/photo-clients/editorial-photography/behind-the-lens-picturing-slaverys-history-for-1619-project-of-new-york-times-magazine/

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/

https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/art/

Thumbnail Image: ©Kathy Ryan 

Sama Alshaibi’s practice examines the mechanisms displacement and fragmentation in the aftermath of war and exile. Her photographs, videos and immersive installations features the body, often her own, as either a gendered site or a geographic device, resisting oppressive political and social conditions. Alshaibi’s monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In (New York: Aperture, 2015) presents her Silsila series, which probes the human dimensions of migration, borders, and environmental demise.

Alshaibi has been featured in several prominent biennials including the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy), the 13th Cairo International Biennale (Egypt, 2019), the 2017 Honolulu Biennial (Hawaii), the 2016 Qalandia International Biennial (Haifa), and FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2014). Alshaibi's recently held solo exhibitions at Ayyam Gallery (Dubai, 2019) and at Artpace, where she was participated as the National Artist in Residence (San Antonio, 2019). Alshaibi received the 2019 Project Development Award from the Center (Santa Fe), 2018 Artist Grant from the Arizona Commission on The Arts, and the 2017 Visual Arts Grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut). Alshaibi was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in 2014-2015 as part of a year long residency at the Palestine Museum in Ramallah, where she developed an education program while conducting independent research.

Alshaibi has exhibited her work in over 20 national and international solo exhibitions including Artpace, Texas (2019), Ayyam Gallery (2019), NYU Abu Dhabi (2019), the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, NY (2017), Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona (2016); Ayyam Gallery, Dubai (2015); Ayyam Gallery, London (2015); Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai (2011) and Selma Feriani Gallery, London (2010). Her over 150 group exhibitions include Pen + Brush Gallery (NYC, 2019), American University Museum (Washington D.C., 2018), 2018 Breda Photo Festival (Netherlands), Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona (2017); Marta Herford Museum of Art, Germany (2017), CCS Bard Hessel Museum and Galleries, New York (2017); Museum De Wieger, The Netherlands (2017); Palais De La Culture Constantine, Algeria (2015); Pirineos Sur Festival, Spain (2015); Arab American National Museum, Michigan (2015); Abu Dhabi Festival (2015); Photo Shanghai (2014); Venice Art Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); University of Southampton (2013); Edge of Arabia, London (2012); HilgerBROTKunsthalle, Vienna (2012); Institut Du Monde Arabe, Paris (2012); Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2012); and Headlands Center for the Arts, California (2011). She has also exhibited at the Bronx Museum in NYC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO. Her over 40 time-based works (video art and films) have screened in numerous film festivals internationally, including Mapping Subjectivity, MoMA (NYC), 24th Instants Video Festival (Mexico and France), Madrid Palestine Film Festival, Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Greece) and DOKUFEST (Kosovo). Her art residencies include Artpace International Artist Residency (San Antonio), Darat al Funun (Amman), A.M. Qattan Foundation (Ramallah) and Lightwork (NY).

Alshaibi's works have been collected by public institutions internationally, including the Center for Creative Photography (Tuscon), the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell (NY), The Houston Museum of Art (Texas), Nadour (Germany), the Barjeel Collection (Sharjah), En Foco (NYC), and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Tunis (Tunisia). She has been featured in Photo District News, L’Oile de la Photographie, The Washington Post, Lensculture, NY Times, Ibraaz, Bluin Artinfo, Contact Sheet, Contemporary Practices, Harpar’s Bazaar, The Guardian, CNN, Huffington Post and Hysteria.

Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Sama Alshaibi is based in the United States where she is Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Alshaibi holds a BA in Photography from Columbia College and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Media Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Alshaibi is represented by Ayyam Gallery.
 

http://www.samaalshaibi.com/

http://www.ayyamgallery.com/artists/sama-alshaibi

https://crystalbridges.org/exhibitions/state-of-the-art-2/

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/sama-alshaibi-the-cessation

https://www.artpace.org/works/iair/iair_spring_2019/until-total-liberation

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/

https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/art/

Lonnie Graham, is an artist, photographer and cultural activist whose work addresses the integral role of the artist in society and seeks to re-establish artists as creative problem solvers. Lonnie Graham is a Pew Fellow and Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Graham is formerly Acting Associate Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Graham also served as Director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an urban arts organization dedicated to arts and education for at risk youth. There, Graham developed innovative pilot projects merging Arts and Academics, which were ultimately cited by, then, First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education. Professor Graham also served as instructor of special projects and oral historian for the Original Barnes Foundation in Merion Pennsylvania. in 1986 Prof. Graham authored a project entitled, "A Conversation with the World" which has been commissioned in various iterations in a number of countries around the world.

https://conversationwiththeworldcalgary.org/

https://sova.psu.edu/profile/lonniegraham

https://www.lightwork.org/archive/lonnie-graham/

https://www.datzpress.kr/publications/aconverstationwiththeworld

Episode thumbnail image: by Erin Hall

Jamal Cyrus (born 1973, Houston, TX) received his BFA from the University of Houston in 2004 and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. In 2005 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and in 2010 he was an Artist in Residence at Artpace San Antonio. Cyrus has won several awards, including the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; a BMW Art Journy; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; the Artadia Houston Award, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He has participated in national and international exhibitions, including Direct Message: Art, Language and Power at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2019); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 – Now, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (traveled to ICA Philadelphia, 2016); Arresting Patterns, ArtSpace, New Haven, CT (traveled to the African American Museum in Philadelphia, 2016); two exhibitions at the Studio Museum, Harlem (both 2013); the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2012); the New Museum, New York (2011); The Kitchen, New York (2009); the Museum of London Docklands, London (2009); and The Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp (2007). In 2006 Cyrus was included in Day for Night, the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Cyrus is also a member of the artist collective Otabenga Jones and Associates. As a member of the collective, Cyrus has exhibited at Lawndale Art Center, Houston (2014), Project Row Houses, Houston (2014), the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2008), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC (2008), the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2008), the Menil Collection, Houston (2007), the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and Clementine Gallery, New York (2006). Cyrus’s and Otabenga Jones's work has been reviewed in Artlies, The Houston Chronicle, Houston Magazine, and The New York Times. Cyrus participated in the New Orleans triennial, Prospect.4, with Otabanga Jones.

Jamal Cyrus lives and works in Houston, TX.

https://inmangallery.com/index.html

https://inmangallery.com/artists/cyrus_jamal/bio.html

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/?hl=en

https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/art/

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

Andrea Morales (b. 1984, Lima, Peru) is a documentary photographer based in Memphis, TN and a producer at the Southern Documentary Project at the University of Mississippi. She grew up in Miami’s Little Havana and earned a B.S. in journalism from the University of Florida, as well as a M.A. in photography from Ohio University. She is currently a candidate for an MFA in documentary expression at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Study of Southern Culture.

Before the South, she moved around the country in between while working for different newspapers, including the El Sentinel (in South Florida) and The New York Times. Most recently, she was on staff as a photographer at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, where she covered barn dances, ox pulls and presidential elections, all with equal joy.

http://www.andreamoralesphoto.com/

https://www.instagram.com/_andrea_morales/

https://southdocs.org/

https://www.photographersofcolor.org/

https://twitter.com/photogsofcolor

https://www.instagram.com/photogsofcolor/