Artist Talk with Keith Morris Washington

May 17, 2018 - 7:00 PM

Join us for an Artist Talk with painter Keith Morris Washington, the artist behind our current exhibition; Within Our Gates: Site and Memory in the American Landscape.

Keith Morris Washington was inspired to create this series on lynchings in the mid-1990s. He prepared by researching at the archives of the Shomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, as well as by closely reading the book One Hundred Years of Lynchings by Ralph Ginzburg. These resources helped him to locate lynching sites, which he then traveled to and photographed, beginning in the summer of 1998. He then returned to his studio to paint from the photographs, both because he did not feel comfortable setting up his canvas in a strange place where his interest in local crimes was frequently not appreciated, and also because he is intrigued by the way people see the world through photographs. – From Basic Black, WGBH Boston

Washington is currently Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts. He received an MFA in Painting from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Massachusetts.

Read the REVIEW of Within Our Gates by Carl Mellor in the Syracuse New Times.

“Cordie Cheek, Junction of Route 50 and 50A, near Columbia, Tennessee”

This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by CNY Arts.