Creative Conversations/digital: Richard Frishman with Garry Reece

Wednesday, April 29 | 6PM 

This program highlights artist Richard Frishman, featured in the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition Ten by Ten, and Houston-based writer and researcher Garry Reece in conversation around the themes explored in Frishman’s series Ghosts of Segregation. The project addresses infrastructural segregation, histories of racism in the US, and cultural erasure in relation to architecture.

Ghosts of Segregation seeks to spark an honest conversation about the legacy of racial injustice in America today. All human landscape has cultural meaning. Because we rarely consider our constructions as evidence of our priorities, beliefs and desires, the testimony our landscape tells is perhaps more honest than anything we might intentionally present. Our built environment is society's autobiography writ large.

Ghosts of Segregation photographically explores the vestiges of America's racism evident in the built environment, hidden in plain sight: Schools for "colored" children, theatre entrances and restrooms for "colored people," lynching sites, juke joints, jails, hotels and bus stations. Past is prologue.

We often take our daily environments for granted, but within even the most mundane edifice may lurk an important bit of history. That stairway apparently to nowhere once went somewhere. The curious palimpsest of bricks covers something. What purpose did they serve?

Segregation is as much current events as it is history. These ghosts haunt us because they are very much alive.

Each of these images is assembled from hundreds of individual detail photographs meticulously blended to create prints of immersive detail over 4 x 8-feet in size. These limited-edition prints are available for exhibition and acquisition. Images from this project are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and a growing number of institutions. A traveling exhibit and educational material are also being developed, with the goal of engaging communities in this important discussion.

About the guests

Richard Frishman’s photography is included in a wide range of private and institutional collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Amon Carter Museum. His work has garnered dozens of prestigious awards, including two Sony World Photography Awards (2018), Communication Arts Photography Award (2018), Photo District News Photo Annual (2018), PhotoNOLA Review Award (2018), Michael H. Kellicutt Award (2013), International Photo Annual Award (2013), and Critical Mass finalist (2012, 2015). He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1983.

Born and raised in Chicago, Frishman began making photographs at age 5, when he was given a Kodak Brownie for his birthday. That simple gift sparked a lifetime passion. Photography became a language with which to explore and explain life. Studying with Reed Estabrook, Robbert Flick and Art Sinsabaugh, Frishman graduated from the University of Illinois with a BA in Communications.

Frishman worked as a newspaper photographer in Chicago and Seattle for 11 years. In 1984 he began working as a freelance photojournalist for editorial and corporate clients, including LIFE, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Microsoft, Time, and numerous others.

Frishman specializes in magnificently detailed immersive large-format prints, constructed of hundreds of individual photographs that he meticulously blends together to create a single image. His current project, "American Splendor," explores the cultural landscape of the United States. These authentic scenes reflect Frishman's background in photojournalism and his interest in history. Often there is a measure of irony, humor, or pathos in his choice of subject matter, but he primarily considers himself a visual archaeologist, documenting the future remains of a lost civilization.

Frishman lives with his family on an island outside Seattle, Washington.

Garry Reece is a writer and educator based in Houston, Texas. Reece has worked in arts education in a myriad of settings- WITS, Blaffer Gallery, Asia Society, SWAMP. His practice concerns itself with relaying the world around him with truth, compassion, insight and his own personal brand of 'swing'. His work has appeared in Multeenth, American Short Fiction, Arts Houston, The Texas Observer, Extensions, Glasstire, Gulf Coast and Art Lies.