Ernest C. Withers: I'll Take You There

PHOTO/FACULTY 2026 brings photography faculty into focus as working artists, gathering 52 participants from 26 institutions across five New England states. On view from May 2 to June 14, 2026 at the PRC - Photographic Resource Center, the exhibition places teaching and artistic practice side by side, showing how many of the region’s instructors are also active contributors to contemporary photography. The second edition of the annual survey spans documentary, conceptual and experimental work, reflecting the range of approaches currently shaping the medium. The show includes faculty from Yale, RISD, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Emerson, Northeastern, UMass Boston, UMass Dartmouth, MassArt, Lesley, Endicott, Clark, Bowdoin and other schools across the region. That spread gives the exhibition a broad institutional reach, but the organizing idea remains straightforward: to present faculty members not only as teachers, but as artists with distinct bodies of work. The photographs on view move between observation, staging, abstraction and personal narrative. Some artists work in series rooted in place or memory, while others test the edges of the medium through process-driven or conceptual methods. The common thread is a direct engagement with photography as both a form of making and a form of inquiry. In this setting, the classroom and the studio appear closely linked, with teaching informed by ongoing artistic practice rather than separated from it. PHOTO/FACULTY 2026 also serves as a snapshot of photography education in New England at a moment when the field remains active across universities, art schools and colleges. The exhibition highlights the scale of that network and the influence these artists have on students entering the medium. It also gives audiences a chance to see how many different directions photography takes when viewed through the work of those who teach it every day. The result is less a single theme than a wide cross-section of current practice, shaped by artists who move between the classroom, the studio and the public exhibition space without treating those roles as separate worlds. Image: © Kathya M Landeros

Simon Silva: Madre Patria presents a personal and documentary look at Oaxaca, Mexico, through the eyes of a Houston-based photographer tracing his own roots. On view from May 21 to June 14, 2026, the exhibition follows Silva’s 2024 trip to Aquiles Serdán, where family ties, local ritual and daily life shaped the series and its accompanying zine. Silva describes the visit as his first time outside the country, but also as an experience that felt familiar from the start. That feeling of recognition runs through the work. Rather than treating Oaxaca as a distant subject, he photographs it as a place connected to memory, family and inheritance. His images focus on the life of the pueblo, including the festival honoring Señor Santiago, where his family joined neighbors in preparing tamales for the celebration. The result is a body of work that pays attention to small gestures, communal labor and the routines that hold a place together. Raised on Houston’s southwest side, Silva brings a bicultural perspective to the project. His work often centers Black and Brown communities, with an emphasis on portraiture, street scenes and candid observation. In Madre Patria, that approach extends into questions of belonging and representation. The photographs do not present Latinx life as a single image or story. Instead, they show a community through lived detail: a gathering, a ritual, a face, a street corner, a shared task. Curated by Areli Navarro Magallón, HCP Exhibitions & Programs Coordinator, the exhibition sits within Silva’s larger practice, which looks at race, spirituality and beauty through documentary photography. As the son of a Mexican immigrant and a BIPOC artist working from personal experience, he frames the work as both record and counter-narrative. What comes through most clearly is a desire to show Latinx life with care, accuracy and a sense of proximity. Madre Patria holds on to that balance between the intimate and the collective, using photography to preserve a place that feels both newly seen and deeply known. Image: © Simon Silva, courtesy of the Houston Center for Photography.

WATER, on view at Carver Hill Gallery in Camden, Maine through June 14, 2026, opens the Camden Art Walk season with a group exhibition devoted to the elemental force that shapes both the human body and the coastal landscape. Bringing together photography, painting, and sculpture, the exhibition reflects on water as environment, livelihood, memory, and psychological presence. Set within one of New England’s historic maritime communities, the show draws a direct connection between artistic practice and the rhythms of life along the Maine coast. Featuring works by artists including Emily Freeman, Jim Westphalen, Whitney River, Angela Warren, Evan McGlinn, Kate Kern Mundie, Theresa Girard, Philip Frey, and Traci Harmon-Hay, the exhibition moves between literal and abstract interpretations of the subject. Some works depict harbors, tides, and weather-worn shorelines, while others approach water through gesture, atmosphere, and texture. Across the gallery, shifting tones of blue, gray, and silver evoke both tranquility and volatility, underscoring water’s ability to nourish, erode, isolate, and connect. The exhibition also reflects a broader cultural and biological fascination with water. Scientists and psychologists have increasingly explored the calming effects of oceans, lakes, and rivers, often describing the restorative mental state associated with aquatic environments as “blue mind.” In coastal Maine, where fishing, boating, tourism, and maritime traditions remain central to everyday life, water functions not only as scenery but as an economic and emotional framework. The works in WATER acknowledge this layered relationship, examining how communities continue to define themselves through proximity to the sea. For centuries, Maine’s coastline has attracted painters, photographers, and writers drawn to its distinctive light and rugged geography. This exhibition continues that artistic lineage while expanding the conversation beyond landscape representation alone. The participating artists consider water as a living and transformative presence capable of carrying memory, emotion, and ecological meaning. At moments serene and at others unsettling, the works suggest that humanity’s connection to water extends far beyond survival. In WATER, the sea becomes both subject and metaphor: a reminder of fragility, continuity, and the invisible forces linking individuals to the natural world around them. Image: Stonington Weir © Jim Westphalen

This exhibition presents an extraordinary selection of paintings and photographs from the collection of Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer, highlighting the multifaceted legacy of industrial art in the early twentieth century. Spanning from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, the works reflect a period when art and industry were deeply intertwined—each influencing how modern life, labor, and progress were imagined and represented. Through this lens, the exhibition reveals how artists found poetry in the machinery of modern existence, even amid uncertainty and transformation. At a time defined by economic struggle and rapid technological change, artists such as Harry Gottlieb, Edmund Lewandowski, and Ben Shahn depicted factories, construction sites, and workers with both critical and aesthetic precision. Their paintings capture the tension between human effort and mechanical power, offering images that are as much about endurance and adaptation as they are about innovation. Alongside these painters, photographers including Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange documented the industrial and social landscapes of the era with stark honesty and empathy, transforming real-life scenes into visual chronicles of modern America. Together, these works form a dialogue between two artistic mediums—painting and photography—that sought to interpret the same world from different vantage points. Whether through the stylized geometry of industrial forms or the unflinching realism of documentary imagery, each piece contributes to a deeper understanding of how artists responded to the shifting balance between human labor and mechanized production. The collection celebrates a pivotal moment in history when creativity became both a mirror and a critique of industrial progress, reminding us that art has always been a means to confront, interpret, and humanize the forces that shape our world. Image: Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975), Graveyard, Houses, and Steel Mills, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1935, gelatin silver print, The Shogren-Meyer Collection. © Walker Evans

John Coplans brings renewed attention to one of the most radical and uncompromising bodies of self-portraiture in the history of photography. Presented as an installation devoted entirely to his late works, the exhibition foregrounds Coplans’s sustained examination of the aging body as both subject and material. Created over several decades, these photographs reject idealization and instead insist on presence, weight, and physical truth. Coplans’s self-portraits are immediately striking for what they withhold. His face is never shown. Rather than offering expression or identity through recognizable features, he fragments his body into parts—hands, feet, torso, back—rendered at monumental scale. Wrinkles, sagging skin, scars, and folds become landscapes of lived experience. By removing the face, Coplans dismantles conventional portraiture and redirects attention toward the body as a site of time, endurance, and vulnerability. The work confronts deeply ingrained cultural anxieties surrounding aging, masculinity, and visibility. In a visual culture that privileges youth and smoothness, Coplans places his older body front and center, unembellished and unapologetic. The large prints amplify every detail, transforming what is often hidden or dismissed into something confrontational and dignified. These images do not seek sympathy or nostalgia; they assert the legitimacy of aging as a subject worthy of sustained attention. Technically rigorous and formally precise, Coplans’s photographs often consist of multiple panels that echo classical sculpture and modernist abstraction. The body becomes both sculptural and resolutely human, oscillating between form and flesh. This tension gives the work its power, situating it within broader conversations about art history, self-representation, and the limits of beauty. Installed on the Gallery’s fourth floor, John Coplans offers a rare opportunity to encounter these works in dialogue with one another, emphasizing their cumulative force. Seen together, the photographs form a sustained meditation on time’s passage and the courage required to face it directly. Coplans’s legacy endures as a reminder that honesty, rigor, and self-scrutiny remain among photography’s most enduring strengths. Image: John Coplans, Frieze, No. 4, Three Panels, 1994. Nine gelatin silver prints on board. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Robinson A. Grover, B.A. 1958, M.S.L. 1975, and Nancy D. Grover. © The John Coplans Trust

ALT TAMPA, on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts from April 29 through June 14, 2026, turns its lens toward a side of the city that rarely appears in promotional imagery. Moving beyond the polished surface of waterfront developments and tourist landmarks, the exhibition reveals a layered cultural landscape shaped by music, nightlife, and decades of alternative expression. At its center is the work of Jesi Cason, whose portraits bring visibility to communities that have long existed at the margins. Tampa’s reputation as a crucible for death metal forms part of this story, but the exhibition extends further, encompassing a wide network of subcultures—from goth and punk scenes to rave communities and independent creatives. These groups, often overlapping, have cultivated their own spaces, rituals, and aesthetics, forming what might be described as a parallel city. Cason’s photographs approach these environments not as curiosities, but as vital ecosystems grounded in identity and belonging. Working in a direct and intimate style, Cason produces portraits that emphasize individuality while acknowledging a shared cultural framework. Her subjects meet the camera with confidence, vulnerability, or defiance, each image reflecting a personal negotiation with visibility. The use of vivid color and deliberate staging reinforces this sense of agency, suggesting that self-presentation itself becomes a form of authorship. At the same time, ALT TAMPA does not overlook the broader forces shaping the city. Rapid development and rising costs increasingly place pressure on the informal venues and neighborhoods that have sustained these communities. In this context, the photographs take on an additional layer of urgency, documenting not only people but also the fragile infrastructures that support their ways of life. By foregrounding voices and spaces often excluded from dominant narratives, the exhibition expands the understanding of what defines a city. Cason’s work insists that culture does not reside solely in official institutions or sanctioned histories, but also in the lived experiences of those who create meaning on their own terms. Image: Jesi Cason, Eliana, 2026 © Jesi Cason

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, on view at the Getty Center from February 24 through June 14, 2026, examines the vital role photography played in shaping a distinctly Black visual culture during a period of profound social transformation. Installed in the Museum’s West Pavilion, the exhibition traces how artists across the United States and the Afro-Atlantic diaspora used the camera as a tool for self-definition, political assertion, and community building amid the civil rights era and the rise of Pan-African thought. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, and other lens-based practices. It marks the first major museum presentation to center photography within the broader Black Arts Movement, a cultural force often compared in scope and ambition to the Harlem Renaissance. Studio portraits, street scenes, experimental compositions, and activist graphics reveal how images circulated through newspapers, posters, community centers, and independent publications, forging connections between art and lived experience. Works by artists such as Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson underscore the diversity of approaches that defined the period. Some photographers documented protests and neighborhood life with lyrical intensity; others constructed conceptual works that interrogated representation itself. Together, they articulated a Black aesthetic grounded in pride, resilience, and cultural memory. By situating American practices alongside works from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain, the exhibition highlights a global exchange of ideas about liberation and identity. Presented in both English and Spanish, Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 affirms the enduring power of images to galvanize dialogue and preserve histories shaped by struggle and creativity. In revisiting this pivotal era, the exhibition illuminates foundations that continue to inform socially engaged art today. Image: Protest Car, Los Angeles 1962; printed 2024, Harry Adams. Inkjet print. Harry Adams Archive, Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge. © Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected

Streetwise, presented at the Bronx Documentary Center from April 9 to June 14, 2026, offers a vivid immersion into the layered realities of urban life as seen through the lens of Martha Cooper. Widely recognized for her early documentation of graffiti and Hip Hop culture in New York, Cooper expands that narrative here, revealing a practice rooted in curiosity, proximity, and long-term engagement with communities often overlooked or misunderstood. The exhibition brings together images that trace the vitality of the Bronx across decades. From the improvised architecture of casitas—hand-built structures that reflect cultural memory and communal pride—to the kinetic energy of street racing and BMX riding, Cooper captures a city defined by invention and resilience. Her photographs of breaking and graffiti retain their historical significance, yet they also feel immediate, grounded in the lived experience of those who shaped these movements from within. Cooper’s approach remains direct and unembellished. She photographs at street level, often in close proximity to her subjects, allowing moments to unfold naturally. This method fosters a sense of trust and familiarity, evident in the candid expressions and gestures that populate her images. Whether documenting artists at work, children at play, or gatherings in shared spaces, she emphasizes participation over spectacle, revealing the rhythms of everyday life. Beyond New York, the exhibition extends to other urban environments, including scenes from Southwest Baltimore and early work made in Tokyo. These photographs echo similar themes of subculture, identity, and creative expression, suggesting connections that transcend geography. Across continents, Cooper observes how individuals claim space, transform their surroundings, and leave marks—both temporary and enduring. Streetwise stands as a testament to a lifetime of attentive looking. It affirms photography’s ability to preserve fleeting moments while honoring the communities that give them meaning, offering a record that is at once historical, personal, and deeply human. Image: © Martha Cooper

At the Block Museum of Art, Hamdia Traoré’s “Des marabouts de Djenné” and Muslim Portraiture in Mali brings into focus a living tradition rooted in one of West Africa’s most historically significant cities. Djenné, long recognized as a center of Islamic scholarship, provides both the backdrop and the subject for Traoré’s quietly compelling portraits, produced in close dialogue with the community he knows intimately. The series centers on marabouts—religious teachers and spiritual guides whose roles extend beyond instruction to include healing and mediation. Seated in composed, frontal poses, each figure appears surrounded by the tools of his practice: Qur’anic tablets, prayer beads, manuscripts, and protective amulets. The repetition of this visual structure establishes a sense of continuity and shared purpose, while subtle variations in posture, expression, and setting affirm the individuality of each subject. The earthen architecture of Djenné, with its distinctive textures and light, frames these encounters, grounding them in a specific cultural and geographic context. Produced during a period marked by political instability in Mali, the photographs carry an added weight. They do not document crisis directly, but instead foreground endurance. The marabouts’ presence, calm and assured, suggests the persistence of knowledge systems and spiritual practices that have weathered generations of upheaval. In this sense, the work operates as both portraiture and testimony, offering a counterpoint to narratives that often reduce the region to conflict alone. The exhibition expands this dialogue by placing Traoré’s color images alongside mid-20th-century black-and-white portraits drawn from the Archive of Malian Photography. Works by Mamadou Cissé, Abdourahmane Sakaly, and Tijani Sitou echo similar compositional strategies, revealing a lineage of representation that spans decades. Seen together, these photographs trace shifts in style and context while underscoring the enduring significance of the marabout figure. Rather than presenting a fixed ethnographic view, the exhibition opens a space for reflection on authorship, continuity, and cultural self-representation. Through Traoré’s lens, portraiture becomes a means of affirming identity while engaging a broader visual history that continues to evolve. Image: Hamdia Traoré (Malian, born 1992), Yelpha Djiété, Marabout et Maître Coranique. Il est Imam de la Grande Mosquée de Djenné-Konofia (Yelpha Djiété, Marabout and Qur’anic Teacher. He is Imam of the Great Mosque of Jenne-Konofia), from the series Des marabouts de Djenné (Marabouts of Jenne), September 2018, printed 2023, Inkjet print, pigment-based. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Irwin and Andra S. Press Collection Endowment Fund purchase. 2022.17.20. Image courtesy of the artist.

Melanie Walker, Nomadic Dreamer is on view from May 16 through June 14, 2026 at the Center for Photographic Art, presented in conjunction with PhotoLucida. The exhibition marks the solo presentation of the 2024 Critical Mass Award recipient, bringing to Carmel an immersive installation that expands the boundaries of contemporary photographic practice. Known for championing artists who push the medium in unexpected directions, the Center offers an apt setting for Walker’s ambitious and allegorical project. In Nomadic Dreamer: A Modern Myth of Shelter and Passage, Walker constructs a universe where architecture and identity merge. Figures appear with houses in place of heads, their bodies grounded in landscapes that feel at once theatrical and psychologically charged. The house operates as mask, sanctuary, burden, and inheritance. Through this symbolic fusion, Walker considers how memory, lineage, and environment shape the self. Home no longer functions as backdrop; it becomes inseparable from the individual, carried visibly and insistently as part of one’s being. A third-generation photographic artist, Walker draws on decades of experience with alternative processes and installation-based work. Her practice reflects a deep respect for historic techniques while embracing constructed imagery and spatial intervention. Having received honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Aaron Siskind Award, she maintains a commitment to photography as both craft and inquiry. Collections such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Musée National d’Art Moderne Luxembourg hold her work, affirming its resonance across contexts. At its core, Nomadic Dreamer reflects on migration as a defining human condition. Movement, dislocation, and reinvention shape personal and collective histories. Walker’s constructed world acknowledges this instability while proposing an imaginative space of reconstruction. The installation invites viewers to reconsider the distinction between house and home, asking how structures contain us and how, in turn, we carry them forward—visible emblems of passage within an unfinished story. Image: © Melanie Walker

Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill, presented at the Block Museum of Art, revisits one of the most visible environmental disasters in recent American history through a lens that is both intimate and expansive. A decade after the 2015 Gold King Mine spill sent millions of gallons of toxic wastewater coursing through the Animas and San Juan Rivers, artist and anthropologist Teresa Montoya retraces the path of contamination, revealing its enduring imprint across landscapes and communities. Montoya’s project begins as a journey, following the flow of polluted water from Colorado into New Mexico, but it quickly unfolds into a layered examination of consequence. Her photographs do not settle for documentation alone. They register subtle traces of damage—discolorations, altered terrains, and quiet moments of disruption—while also capturing the resilience of the communities who continue to live with these conditions. In doing so, the work resists the spectacle often associated with environmental catastrophe, focusing instead on its prolonged aftermath. What distinguishes Tó Łitso is its interdisciplinary approach. Photographic images are presented alongside sound recordings, water samples, and mapping data, creating a dense network of information and perception. This combination underscores water as more than a resource; it becomes a carrier of memory, culture, and harm. For Indigenous communities, particularly within the Navajo Nation, water holds deep spiritual significance, and its contamination reverberates far beyond physical health, touching identity, tradition, and continuity. Montoya’s work challenges conventional narratives of environmental damage by foregrounding Indigenous knowledge systems and lived experience. Rather than isolating the spill as a singular घटना, the exhibition situates it within a broader history of extraction and neglect in the American Southwest. The images, at times strikingly beautiful, at others unsettling, reflect this tension between visibility and invisibility—between what can be seen and what persists beneath the surface. Ten years on, Tó Łitso offers neither closure nor resolution. Instead, it insists on attention, asking viewers to consider how environmental crises continue to unfold over time, and how their effects remain embedded in both land and life. Image: Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984), Tó Łitso #22 (Yellow Water #22), from the series Tó Łitso (Yellow Water), 2016, Inkjet print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase. Image courtesy of the artist

At Robin Rice Gallery, José Picayo: 35 Years in Photographs offers a wide-ranging survey of an artist whose practice resists easy categorization. On view from April 9 to June 15, 2026, the exhibition marks Picayo’s tenth solo presentation with the gallery, bringing together works produced between 1991 and 2025. The selection traces a career defined by technical rigor and a distinctive sensibility that merges formal elegance with an undercurrent of wit. Born in Havana in 1959 and shaped by a life that spans Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States, José Picayo developed a photographic language grounded in both discipline and experimentation. After settling in New York and studying at Parsons School of Design, he established himself within the editorial world, contributing to publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. His images, often poised between severity and playfulness, reveal a careful orchestration of composition, light, and gesture. Picayo’s commitment to analog processes remains central to his work. Rejecting digital manipulation in his personal practice, he relies on film, including large-format cameras and Polaroid formats, to create images that feel both timeless and materially grounded. This approach lends his photographs a tactile presence, reinforcing his belief in photography as a medium capable of transforming reality rather than simply recording it. The resulting works carry a sense of ambiguity, evoking earlier eras while remaining detached from any fixed moment in time. Beyond photography, Picayo’s recent engagement with textile practices extends his interest in craft and process. His exploration of weaving, taught in various New York institutions, reflects a continuity in his approach to making, where precision and materiality remain essential. At Robin Rice Gallery, 35 Years in Photographs stands as both a retrospective and a reaffirmation of an artist committed to the enduring possibilities of traditional photographic methods. Image: DEREK #1, 1995 © José Picayo, courtesy of the Robin Rice Gallery