Feature: Andrea Morales at The Center for Photographers of Color
Strange Fire Collective, January 16, 2020
This week, we are excited to feature Andrea Morales’ exhibition, Roll Down Like Water, currently on display at the Center for Photographer’s of Color at the University of Arkansas. The Center’s founder and one of our Content Contributors, Aaron Turner, interviewed Andrea about her work last November for the Center for Photographer’s of Color Podcast. Please read more below to learn about Andrea’s practice and the exhibition, and we hope you enjoy listening to the podcast.
The Center for Photographers of Color seeks to promote the advancement of emerging and under-represented artists of color working within photography, digital imaging, and other lens-based media. Our goal is to collaborate with artists from diverse backgrounds whose work challenges the monolithic historical narratives within culture and art. Through this collaborative approach, the center aims to create a sustainable creative community through the commissioning, support, oral history, and archiving of original works as a public education resource to address identity and representation. The center's programming for the University and community will explore ways of creating positive change and show examples of how to influence and inform thinking and practice in a variety of cultural and social settings. We are dedicated to diversity in art, strengthen the community, region, and state with outreach efforts that are relevant, meaningful, and have a significant impact.
Andrea Morales: Roll down like water
Center for Photographers of Color
12/12/2019—2/12/2019
University of Arkansas
1 East Center Street, Suite B41
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Roll Down Like Water is a collection of excerpts from an ongoing photographic body of work focused on everyday life in Memphis, Tennessee, five decades after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lorraine Motel. Memphis, a majority-black city with boundaries carved by the Mississippi River and positioned at the gates of the Delta South, swells with light from the people. In his Mountaintop speech at Mason Temple, Dr. King asked Memphians to “redistribute the pain” of those suffering in the community, like the striking sanitation workers who he was there to support. He invoked Amos when he asked that “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The photographs search the contours of the city’s quotidian landscape for glimpses of memory toward that call in the struggle against racism and unequal systems.
Andrea Morales (b. 1984, Lima, Peru) is a documentary photographer based in Memphis, TN and a producer at the Southern Documentary Project at the University of Mississippi. She grew up in Miami’s Little Havana and earned a B.S. in journalism from the University of Florida, as well as a M.A. in photography from Ohio University. She is currently a candidate for an MFA in documentary expression at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Study of Southern Culture.
