Curatorial Projects
Collaborating with kelly kristin jones and local Kingston youth to produce images that hide or cover local monuments in Academy Green May 2023.
Approach
The model laid out by scholars Laura Wexler, Ariella Azoulay, and others in their recent book Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography is the approach I bring to my curatorial work. Collaboration, as described in the text, can be both a “theoretical proposition and a pedagogical tool” for studying photography. Through this lens, the editors invite the reader to understand the technology and its use “under different terms” than its histories of violence and indifference suggest. My curation has, and will continue to be, collaborative as defined by these conditions.Recent projects
In the Room, the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, January–February 2025;
The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Kingston, New York, June–July 2023
In my most recent curatorial project, In the Room, I brought together four photo-based artists whose works exploit the medium of photography to challenge the ways we document and remember. Using still photography, archival research, family histories, and digital-editing tools, the artists explore the relationships between personal and collective memories and how they are made, challenged, and remade. Through the critical interventions by Kelly Kristin Jones, Jonathan Mark Jackson, Allie Tsubota, and Ashley M. Freeby, we can better understand how photographs function as social objects that perpetuate the power held by the people who made them. This exhibition originated at the Center for Photography of Woodstock in Kingston in 2023 and is traveled to the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College in 2025.
Read the exhibition brochure online.
Installation views of In the Room at The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center, 2025. Courtesy McKinzie Trotta.
Kelly Kristin Jones, nice white ladies, installation of unique found photographs.
Current exhibitions
The Middle Distance, the Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, Jan–April 2025
The middle ground or middle distance in the composition of an image is neither background nor foreground, neither very close nor very far away. It is a depth within the frame at which past and future are implied. While the middle ground is the most common framing and considered a “respectful” distance (especially in documentary photography) it is also often criticized as causing a scene to appear flat or static.
For The middle distance, artist Kelly Kristin Jones explores the idea of a social “middle ground,” a place where one can gain status while avoiding accountability, what historian Laura Wexler might call the “averted eye.” White women in particular have historically maintained a posture at middle distance: Always just close enough to exert influence but never putting themselves or their reputations in harm’s way. In Nice white ladies, installed in the center of the gallery, Jones has collected hundreds of vernacular images that showcase the lengths white women will go to access power at a remove.
This exhibition is funded through a grant by the Mellon Foundation.