Visitors at Middle Tennessee State University’s renowned Baldwin Photographic Gallery can view the perspectives of five multifaceted artists in a new exhibit, Shaping Identity: A Non-Linear Journey, showcasing nearly 100 examples of their work.
Shaping Identity is on display through Feb. 3 in the gallery, located in the university’s Bragg Media and Entertainment Building, at the top of the stairwell in the building’s interior courtyard. It features photos by Maggie Carson Jurow, Birthe Piontek, Serrah Russell, Aaron Turner and Irene Antonia Diane Reece. The five artists are also set to discuss their work in a public lecture on Saturday, Jan. 22, at 3 p.m. in Room 103 of the Bragg Building, followed by a reception upstairs in the gallery.
Baldwin Gallery curator Shannon Randol, also an assistant professor of photography in the Department of Media Arts, says this exhibit is part of his plan to “widen the scope” of the Baldwin’s focus and feature artists at all stages of their careers.
“We’re bringing the emerging artists, established artists, bringing people that make a living off their work and some people who do it because they love it so much,” Randol said. “This particular group, they’re all very young artists, in their age and their careers as well, so it’s nice to have a different perspective, looking at the world through those younger artists’ eyes, dealing with some contemporary issues. There’s a lot of good work in this show.”
Jurow is a senior product designer at VSCO, the Oakland, California-based social media network and photo/video editing app. Her career includes experience as an e-commerce art director, studio director and floral designer as well as an artist who works in sculpting, installations, photography and videography.
Piontek is a visual artist living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, who’s also an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. Time magazine nominated her second published project, “Abendlied,” as one of the best photo books of 2019, and her work often combines two-dimensional photographic surfaces and 3D spaces.
Reece, a Houston, Texas-based artist and visual activist, has incorporated her family’s historic photo archives into original projects that feature portraits, images, word art and other items to address civil rights, racial discrimination, police brutality and black identity.
Russell is a visual artist and independent curator in Seattle, Washington, and serves as co-director of Vignettes, a curatorial collective for emerging and under-represented artists and writers. Her projects use collage and appropriation to express the relationship between emotions and surroundings.
“Meanings of the past, 2020 (Black Alchemy: If this one thing is true)” by Aaron Turner
Turner is a photographer and educator at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he also is founder of the Center for Photographers of Color. He uses photography to understand home and resilience in two main areas of the United States—the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas—and creates still-life studies on identity, history and abstraction with a 4-inch-by-5-inch view camera.
For more information about MTSU’s Baldwin Photographic Gallery, visit baldwinphotogallery.com.
