News from the Galleries -- Charlotte and Charleston, Spring 2013

The galleries are busy this spring, and the gallery owners, too. Here's a sampling.

In Charlotte, the Knight Gallery at the Light Factory is opening the 6th Annuale juried show with a reception this Saturday night, June 1st, from 6 until 8 pm. The show itself is up through September 15th, 2013. 

The Annuale at the Light Factory each year features a small group of photographers' work in depth, instead of the usual juried show with one or two images from a whole slew of people.

This year's winners, winnowed down to six from over a hundred submissions by Kathleen V. Jameson, President of Charlotte’s Mint Museum of Art.

All of the six photographers whose work is on offer at the Light Factory for this year's Annuale are either from the South or have Southern roots.

They include Rachel E. Andrews (Denver, NC; see image above), Mitchell Kearney (Charlotte, NC), Susan Alta Martin (Cullowhee, NC), Timothy McCoy (Cumming, GA), and Laura Williams (Chapel Hill, NC)

Also on display is work by Jessica Naples, who now is from Ohio, but before she went off to Ohio and the MFA program at Ohio State University, she lived and worked in Charlotte.

In Charleston, also opening on June 1st at the Rebekah Jacob Gallery is a major show of Southern photographers past and present, with the title  Somewhere in the South: A Celebration of Southern Photographers. This show is up through July 31, 2013.

This show features work by distinguished Southern photographers William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Jerry Siegel, Eliot Dudik (see image above), Kathleen Robbins, Richard Sexton, Anne Rowland, and Keliy Anderson-Staley.

Highlights of the show include a rare print of William Eggleston's Red Ceilingand fifteen rare photos produced by William Christenberry in the 1960s with a Kodak Brownie Holiday camera.

There is more about this show on Jacobs' blog, here. 

Rebekah Jacob is also about the publish her first book, Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales co-authored with Julian Cox and Monica Karales.

Controversy and Hope brings us the photography of James Karales (1930-2002), a professional photojournalist who documented the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March for Voting Rights with special access to all the participants.

The New York Times called his work "a pictorial anthem of the civil rights movement."

We are deeply in Jacobs' debt for reminding us through this work of the importance of photography in documenting for all time the crises that define Southern history and culture.

I suspect there will b e more to say about this work in more detail when this new book is more generally available.