CONWAY, Ark. (August 26, 2013) – The Hendrix College
Department of Art will host a talk by visiting artist and documentary
photographer Deborah Luster on Monday, Sept. 09, at 6 p.m.
in Art Building A Room A110.
This event is free and open to the public. For more
information, contact Hendrix art professor Melissa Gill at 505-1562 or
gill@hendrix.edu.
Luster is best known for the series "One Big Self:
Prisoners of Louisiana," a collaboration with poet C.D. Wright. This
collection of photographic portraits portrays prisoners from three Louisiana
prisons, including the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In her 2003
monograph (One Big Self, Twin Palms Publishing), Luster writes, “I chose
to photograph each person as they presented their very own selves before my
camera on the chance that I might be fortunate enough to contact, as poet Jack
Gilbert writes ‘their hearts in their marvelous cases.’ These portraits –
painstakingly printed on 5 x 4 inch sheets of black aluminum – are
individualistic, diverse and emotionally compelling.”
Luster's work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney
Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, New Orleans Museum of
Art, and other notable public and private collections. Her awards include the
Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Prize for Documentary Photography from the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University (with C.D. Wright), an Anonymous Was
a Woman Award, The John Guttman Award, a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award, and a
Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography (Friends of Photography, San
Francisco).
Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in
engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the fifth consecutive year,
Hendrix was named one of the country’s “Up and Coming” liberal arts colleges by
U.S. News and World Report. Hendrix
is featured in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review as one of the country’s
best 377 colleges, the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change
the Way You Think about Colleges, Forbes magazine's annual
list of America's Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 edition of the
Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist
Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.
About the Image:
Title: Tooth for an Eye disarchive # 01-06
Location: Tulane Avenue at Dupree, Le Petit Motel (Mid-City)
Date: April 14, 2008 3:30 a.m.
Name: unidentified woman (20)
Notes: Gunshot wound to head.
Copyright Deborah Luster, all rights reserved, used with permission.