The Evidence of Things Seen and Unseen

Jeanine Michna-Bales and Clarissa Sligh, artists. For more than forty years, artist Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that are all bred of a place, the American South. Using her deep love of her native land and her knowledge of its fraught history, Mann asks provocative questions—about history, identity, race, and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. On view from March 4 through May 28, 2018, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings considers how Mann’s relationship with this land has shaped her work and how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—continues to permeate American identity. On May 20, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, artists Jeanine Michna-Bales and Clarissa Sligh share their processes of reimagining and representing histories of African Americans. The program focuses on their recent projects. Michna-Bales’s Through Darkness to Light: Seeking Freedom on the Underground Railroad is a remarkable series of images taken in the dead of night that reveal historical sites, cities, and other places freedom seekers passed through, including homes of abolitionists who offered them sanctuary and a place to rest during daylight hours. Sligh’s Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book evolved from an exhibition in which the artist created sculpture by folding origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.