Thu, Jan 9, 2025
6:30–7:30 pm
$8 (VMFA members $5)
Leslie Cheek Theater
Livestream will be available.

Join artists Jill Frank, Tommy Kha, and José Ibarra Rizo who will be in conversation about the meaning of portraiture and identity in Southern photography. Co-curators of A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, Sarah Kennel, VMFA's Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center, and Greg Harris, High Museum of Art's Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography, will lead the discussion with these artists, whose works are featured in the special exhibition.  
 
PARTICPANTS BIOS
Jill Frank is an Atlanta-based artist and educator. She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Georgia State University. Frank was a 2021 Artadia Award recipient and a 2022 Warhol Nexus Grant recipient. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art Forum, Art in America, and The Paris Review. She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. She attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA studio art) and Bard College (BA Photography).  
 
Gregory J. Harris is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice. Since joining the High Museum in 2016, Harris has curated more than a dozen exhibitions that consider an array of topics including social justice, the intersections of photography and self-taught art, and distinct history of photography in the South. 
 
Tommy Kha, born in Memphis, Tennessee, received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is the recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo Fund, NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow.  His first major publication, Half, Full, Quarter, was published by Aperture in February 2023.  He currently teaches at Yale School of Art, and occasionally serves as a critic in the MFA photography program. His first museum show will open at the Addison Gallery of American Art in September 2025. 
 
José Ibarra Rizo is a Mexican American multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta. His work primarily focuses on identity, with an emphasis on the migrant experience in the American South. Rizo is the recipient of the inaugural MINT + ACP Emerging Artist Fellowship. He is one of three awardees for the 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awards and one of three winners of the 2023–24 Working Artist Project for MOCA GA. His work lives in the permanent collections of multiple museums, including VMFA and the High Museum of Art.