April 29, 2020
FotoFest invites you to join artist Richard Frishman and Houston-based writer Garry Reece for an online talk about his photographic project Ghosts of Segregation.
The third in a series of online programs presented by FotoFest, Creative Conversations/digital bring together artists, creatives, and online audiences for an in-depth conversation on social, cultural, and aesthetic issues in relation to creative praxis. Each program will be composed of a moderated conversation and a live Q&A with the online audience.
This program highlights artist Richard Frishman, featured in the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition Ten by Ten, and Houston-based writer and researcher Garry Reece in conversation around the themes explored in Frishman’s series Ghosts of Segregation. The project addresses infrastructural segregation, histories of racism in the US, and cultural erasure in relation to architecture.
Ghosts of Segregation seeks to spark an honest conversation about the legacy of racial injustice in America today. All human landscape has cultural meaning. Because we rarely consider our constructions as evidence of our priorities, beliefs and desires, the testimony our landscape tells is perhaps more honest than anything we might intentionally present. Our built environment is society’s autobiography writ large.
Ghosts of Segregation photographically explores the vestiges of America’s racism evident in the built environment, hidden in plain sight: Schools for “colored” children, theatre entrances and restrooms for “colored people,” lynching sites, juke joints, jails, hotels and bus stations. Past is prologue.
We often take our daily environments for granted, but within even the most mundane edifice may lurk an important bit of history. That stairway apparently to nowhere once went somewhere. The curious palimpsest of bricks covers something. What purpose did they serve?
Segregation is as much current events as it is history. These ghosts haunt us because they are very much alive.
Each of these images is assembled from hundreds of individual detail photographs meticulously blended to create prints of immersive detail over 4 x 8-feet in size. These limited-edition prints are available for exhibition and acquisition. Images from this project are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and a growing number of institutions. A traveling exhibit and educational material are also being developed, with the goal of engaging communities in this important discussion.
Artist talk: April 17, 2020
Silver Street Studios, 2000 Edwards Street
Houston, 77007 TX
(713) 223-5522
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