In light of the recent Jackson Fine Art show celebrating the Civil Rights Movement with photographer Bruce Davidson and paying honor to the critically acclaimed exhibitions at The High Museum - Road to Freedom and After 1968 - Jackson Fine Art continues to consider race and relationships in the upcoming show Four Women curated by Charles Guice, owner and curator of Charles Guice Contemporary in Oakland, California.

Asking the question - how has the dialogue about ethnicity, family, class, gender and sexuality changed in the last 50 years, Four Women showcases the work of Kianga Ford, Jessica Ingram, Carrie Mae Weems and Deborah Willis as it investigates their perspectives on the complex relationship between family and race - specifically its ongoing evolution in the South.

		Kianga Ford works with sound and environment to question the psycho-physical dimensions of social identity formation. Her story-based installations engage the viewer in a participatory exploration of the limits between seemingly dialectical concepts such as individual and collective, intimate and public, given and contingent.
		In her series A Civil Rights Memorial, Jessica Ingram recaptures the sites of more than 18 events that occurred during the 1960s and 70s, re-contextualizing a southern landscape that at one time represented a nation's fears, its hatred and its shame. Ingram’s images include sites like Pulaski, Tennessee where the Ku Klux Klan was founded; Money, Mississippi, where 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman and Jackson, Mississippi where an activist was gunned down outside his home.
Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has examined issues such as yearning, loss, cultural identity and power during her illustrious career, which has spanned more than 25 years. Her images, which are layered provide commentary on prejudice, but also challenge the conventions of photographic history, and how these norms have shaped American attitudes toward ethnicity, gender and identity.
		For more than 30 years, Deborah Willis has pursued a dual career as a fine art photographer and a leading historian and curator. She has explored the role of photography and its impact on culture - in particular the role of the black image - and the extensive contributions made by African American photographers throughout the history of the medium. Her photographs embody collective memory and narrative.

The resulting dialogue between these four artists draws from the strength of the narrative; whether it is Ford's "Counting," an installation of 12 chalkboard pieces that outline the changing definition of race in the United States. Photographs of sites of Civil Rights era events swallowed into a southern landscape that comprise Ingram's compelling series "A Civil Rights Memorial," Gullah folk truths for safeguarding a home in Weems' "House" or the notions of pregnancy captured in Willis' "Mother Wit."

Four Women informs us that the definition of family fits within wide boundaries, that race is little more than a construct and that there is always another way of seeing. For truth lies within and outside the frame alike, and without considering both as a possible reality, we can never truly understand one another.

More About The Artists:
Kianga Ford, an accomplished scholar, earned a BA in English and Theater at Georgetown University, performed post-graduate work in film at NYU, earned an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles and is currently a doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she is completing a dissertation on articulations of race and identity in contemporary exhibition. Ford's work as been shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Jessica Ingram earned a BFA in Photography and Political Science from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her work has been published in numerous books including Saturday Night, Saturday Morning and 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers.

Carrie Mae Weems earned a BA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the University of California at San Diego. She also studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. Weems was awarded the Visual Arts Grant from the NEA and received the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship. Having exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia, Weems has had solo and group shows at The High Museum of Art, The International Center for Photography, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. She is also represented in public and private collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Deborah Willis earned a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, an MA in Art History from CUNY, an MFA from Pratt University and a BA in Photography from the Philadelphia College of Art. In 2005, Willis was named a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Her work is featured in public, private and corporate collections including the Center for Creative Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Duke University.

Works from Hank Willis Thomas' Unbranded will also be on display in the Viewing Room. Exploring race, class and history, Hank Willis Thomas' Branded series used various media to explore the language and effect of advertising in relation to the black male body within its historical text.

Jackson Fine Art will exhibit the follow-up to that series, which is titled Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America From 1968 to 2008. For this series Thomas has appropriated ads from popular periodicals of the past 40 years, choosing two examples from each year and digitally removing all of the advertising text, revealing what Roland Barthes calls "what-goes-without-saying."

Thomas earned at BFA in Photography and Africana Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Photography and an MA in Visual Criticism at the California College of the Arts. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including The Studio Museum in Harlem, Zacheta National Museum of Art in Poland and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Jackson Fine Art is located at 3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday from 10-5pm. For more information and image files, please contact Malia Stewart at malia@jacksonfineart.com.