Spruill Gallery is pleased to announce Facing Y’all: Inclusion Through the Lens, from The Do-Good Fund Collection - A VISUAL NARRATIVE of the EVER-CHANGING AMERICAN SOUTH. Facing Y’all, curated by Spruill Gallery Director Shannon Morris, will be on view September 21 through October 29, 2023. The Gallery will host an opening reception on September 21 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Spruill Gallery will also serve as a cultural partner to Atlanta Art Week (AAW) when they host Let’s Talk on Tuesday, October 3 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. AAW is a new initiative that recognizes and supports Atlanta as a burgeoning art scene on the rise. Let’s Talk, an artists’ panel moderated by Shannon Morris, will feature Atlanta-based artists Sheila Pree Bright, Jill Frank and Jerry Siegel, who will offer insight regarding their process and engagement with the subjects of their photographs.

Facing Y'all celebrates the faces that frame the diversity of today’s South through the lens of its photographers. The exhibition presents 29 works by 18 artists from the renowned Do-Good Fund Collection, including Pinky MM Bass, Sheila Pree Bright, Harlan Bozeman, Carolyn Drake, Jill Frank, Peyton Fulford, Anna Gay, Arielle Gray, Andres Gonzalez, Titus Brooks Heagins, Kevin Kline, Brittainy Lauback, Carl Martin, Ted Partin, Jerry Siegel, Mike Smith, Michael Stipe and Vanessa Winship.

About her curatorial decisions for Facing Y’all, Morris said, “Influencing my selection of work for this exhibition was my intention for visitors to see themselves, remember a friend, a relative or someone they know and to perhaps allow themselves a moment of reflection."

Embracing the colloquial Southern phrase “y’all,” these photographs portray the region’s diverse populace. The contrasting vision of the Spruill Gallery, a Victorian-era cottage set amidst an evolving urban landscape mirrors the myriad of subjects photographed by these contemporary Southern artists.

Exhibition Event Dates
Facing Y’all: Inclusion through the Lens - On view Sept. 21 through Oct. 29, 2023
Opening Reception - Sept. 21 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Atlanta Art Week Program - Let’s Talk - Oct. 3 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Sheila Pree Bright

Sheila Pree Bright is an acclaimed International Photographic Artist who portrays large-scale works that combine a broad range of knowledge of contemporary culture. She is known for her series #1960Now, Invisible Empire, Suburbia, Plastic Bodies, and Young Americans

Bright is the author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protest, published by Chronicle Books. Her work is also included in the book and exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture. She appeared in the 2014 feature-length documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People and the 2016 feature-length documentary Election Day: Lens Across America.

Her series has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; The Leica Gallery, New York; Turner Contemporary, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; The Gallatin Gallery, New York; and the International Center of Photography, New York. The Washington Post and the New York Times have featured her work.

Bright received several nominations and awards, among them a recent commission for Picturing the South by the High Museum of Art, The Aftermath Project and the Artadia grant. In 2006, she gained national recognition when she won the Center Prize Award (ne. Santa Fe Prize) for her Suburbia series.

Her work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; The Library of Congress, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, GA; The David C. Driskell Center, College Park, MD; Center Photography, Columbia College, Chicago; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Harns Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL; Telfair Museums, Savannah and the Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA.

Jill Frank

Atlanta-based artist and educator, Jill Frank currently serves as Associate Professor of Photography at Georgia State University. Reviews of Frank’s work are published in Art Forum, Art in America, and The Paris Review. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia have presented her work in solo exhibitions.

Working primarily in photography and video, Frank explores the ideologies and aesthetics that shape teenage life. Her large-scale photographs and sound/video installations reveal the struggle to present one’s identity within unstable environmental, political, and social contexts. Diverging from traditional documentary forms, she often uses sound, scale, repetition and staging to record conquests and games, where representation plays a decisive and transformative role.

Frank earned an MFA in Studio Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Photography from Bard College.

Jerry Siegel

Jerry Siegel (1958) was born and raised in Selma, AL. Siegel graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta and was awarded the Grand Prize for Atlanta’s first Artadia Award.

Since the mid-1980s, Siegel has successfully maintained a commercial photography studio while finding time to pursue his passion working on personal projects.

Siegel’s first monograph, FACING SOUTH, Portraits of Southern Artists, was published by the University of Alabama Press and features portraits of 100 Southern artists. This body of work has been featured in six solo museum exhibitions in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.

His second book, Black Belt Color, published by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, GA, focuses his attentions on documenting the unique, cultural landscape of the Black Belt region of Alabama.
__

Facing Y’all: Inclusion through the Lens is made possible through the generous support of Northside Hospital.