The Hope Narrative: Finding Resilience in Contemporary Photography and Family Photo Archives is the signature exhibition at REFUGE, which redefines the waiting room experience of the Health Hub. Artist Emily Hanako Momohara worked with a team of youth apprentices to make artwork for and about the community at Academy of World Languages and its new adjacent Health Hub. This artwork creates a welcoming, safe, and community-reflective atmosphere for clients and patients in the lobby and hallway areas, with a public component on view in Washington Park.

The inspiration for each of the works comes from interviews and personal artifacts from Academy of World Languages families and Evanston residents. Momohara and the apprentices interviewed families representing the diverse backgrounds and familial structures of future Health Hub clients. Their stories of cultural activities and wellness practices; family photos; and heirlooms are used to create the artworks through collage. There are multiple photo collage pieces representing the interviewed families’ unique stories of how they spent time together, particularly outdoors, which highlight the similarities and connections between families. These pieces are a combination of photography, collage, and textiles specific to the community’s stories. The artworks are for, and inspired by, the community, designed to break down barriers and increase cultural connections.

The idea of communities of inspiration is highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by artist Mickalene Thomas. Serving as a companion exhibition to Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs, this mini exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own practice, these artworks contain many of the same themes central to Thomas’ works, such as references to motherhood and family.

The 10 featured artists—from older generations of artists to those who are part of Thomas’s generation or younger—include Derrick Adams, Renée Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Together, these exhibitions create a robust visual conversation about representation of the black body in today’s society and provide opportunities for visitors to reflect on how various forms of visual culture help shape their own identities and how they, too, collect and process information.

Both exhibitions acknowledge the art-historical canon and popular visual culture, while simultaneously creating an archive of artworks that stand in opposition to the traditions, reclaiming agency for both the artists and the subjects depicted.

Exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

Mickalene Thomas challenges current standards and asserts new definitions of beauty and inspiration through her groundbreaking photographs in Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and companion exhibition, tête-à-tête. Identifying photography as a touchstone for her practice, much of her work functions as an act of deconstruction and appropriation—she draws inspiration widely, borrowing various visual motifs including 1970s black-is-beautiful imagery, 19th-century French painting, and 20th-century studio portraiture.

Equally important, the photographs presented reflect a personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes Thomas herself and her mother, friends, and lovers. These muses emphasize the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work. Nearly 50 artworks are highlighted in Muse, including a three-dimensional tableau reminiscent of a seventies-era domestic space, replicating the studio installation where Thomas and her models collaborate.

Communities of inspiration are further highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by Thomas. This mini-exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works by ten artists that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own work, these artists contend with many of the same themes central to Thomas’ practice.

Together, these exhibitions create a robust visual conversation about representation of the black body in today’s society and provide opportunities for guests to reflect on how various forms of visual culture help shape their own identities and how they, too, collect and process information.

Exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

Dye Transfer: The Eastman Kodak Company ceased production of Pan Matrix Film, which was required to produce a dye transfer print in 1991 and by 1994 the company did away with all other dye transfer materials. Today, the dye transfer process is nearly a lost art. Popularized by famed photographers such as Irving Penn, William Eggleston, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the medium of dye transfer is very different from modern color print processes. Dye transfer is an incredibly detailed and exceptionally difficult process and the degree of skill required to make a successful image is unique to very few photographers working today. Utilizing the exact machine previously-owned and operated by Irving Penn, Tyler Shields uses the dye transfer process to produce an unparalleled colored image that is the absolute finest quality in color printing and attempts to create the largest dye transfer print ever made.

Platinum Palladium: In the late 19^th-century, this printing process used palladium rather than silver as the light sensitive material required to develop an image. Ed Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Strand were supporters of the technique, but due to the exorbitant material costs, palladium printing fell out of fashion. Tyler uses the palladium printing process to produce unique works that possess incredible depth and beauty. As with his dye transfer prints, Tyler hopes to create the largest palladium photographs ever made with the medium. Tyler’s ambitious work makes immortal the important processes of photography’s past.

Also on view: Interactive Dark Room Installation.

Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by featuring artists that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, and reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Today, cartography is a relic, replaced with global positioning systems that describe geography through virtual, screen-based information that appears and disappears in a keystroke. If maps have outlived their original use, what truth might they still tell? In contemporary art, maps, along with books and other printed texts, remain potent sources of inspiration for exploring the intersections of knowledge and fantasy, and of experience and imagination.

Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials, asking viewers to look and think—and question—twice. At a time when alternate facts equate to misrepresentations of truth, the alternate fictions of art may speak more honest, deeper truths. The alternative reality of the 21st-century artist’s imaginative universe may offer the ideal arena in which to confront the present and envision the future.

Featured Artists: Slater Bradley, Nick Brandt, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alain Declercq, Adonis Flores, Anthony Goicolea, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Ann Hamilton, Miler Lagos, Yousseff Nabil, Paolo Ventura, Federico Somi

Also on view –  Spotlight: LaToya Ruby Frazier

BasketShop Gallery presents the work of Chivas Clem. After more than a decade living in New York, where he garnered international esteem as a multi-media artist, Clem moved back to his hometown of Paris, Texas. While documenting a bookstore in the small town, he befriended many of the transient men residing there and started to form an emotional bond with them. He describes them as “…drifting through life on the fringes. They represent a kind of rugged masculinity that is connected to the myths of the American West—but what were once ‘cowboys’ have mutated into ‘rednecks’—used in the pejorative to describe a certain kind of hyper-masculine terror. It connotes racism and homophobia: a scene of jacked-up trucks covered in confederate flags.” Clem says, “I grew up gay in this place—small town, deep south—and these were the kinds of men that made my life miserable. Now they are the only people I relate to, as they are outsiders themselves. I can now reconcile the twin feelings of desire and fear that gave them so much psychic power in my youth.”

Clem’s focus is on documenting the environment around this maligned subgroup of Americans—disenfranchised, heterosexual, white men. Through their own hubris, they have had to sustain a type of social armor from a heritage that is too complex to serve them. Clem’s photography searches beyond the guarding that these men endure and adorns them with an intimate portrayal of their frailties.

The ARCHIVE [negative] project includes the work of roughly a dozen regional and/or national photographers selected by Manifest Resident Instructor and Photographer Michael Wilson. Public demonstration days led up to the exhibition allowing the public to observe and interact with Wilson in a laboratory-like collaboration. Wilson worked with the negatives provided by each participating photographer and printed them in the Manifest darkroom.

Featured Artists: Matthew Albritton, Barry Andersen, Gordon Baer, Maureen France, Melvin Grier, Barbara Houghton, Cal Kowal, Guennadi Maslov, Maurice Mattei, Nancy Rexroth, Gregory Rust, Brad Smith, Jane Alden Stevens, Connie Sullivan

Impression is an archive of photos captured during a ten-month long public installation in which participants were invited to sit in front of a mirror, reflect, look into their own eyes, lean in for a kiss, and knowingly be photographed.

The imagery in this collection is an experiment in human nature: showing people in various expressions of joy, disgust, exhibitionism, love, embarrassment, and confusion. Artists Janet Creekmore and Ben Jason Neal use a low-tech HD camera and high-tech, pixel-sensitive software for the project. This conceptual, social-practice work pushes boundaries and tests the limits of what people are willing to do in a public or a private space, evoking a voyeuristic feeling in the viewer, where the documentation of the experience and the photographic results explores ideas of sexuality, gender, self, cultures and identity.

Transitions is based on the Surrealist Game “Exquisite Corps” and features 20 local photographers creating one collaborative work of art. The process is simple: the first photographer creates a photo, the second photographer sees only the right side of that first photo and creates a work in response, the third photographer sees only the right side of the second photo and responds by creating yet another photograph. This process continues with the next seventeen photographers, each only seeing the right half of the previous image. All the photographs are then printed sequentially in one long mural and hung in the gallery, revealed as a single collaborative work of art.

Featured Artists: Paige Widman, Bryn Weller, Paul Grilli, J. Miles Wolf, Tina Gutierrez, Suz Fleming, Tom Uhlman, Helen Adams, Lisa Britton, Melvin Grier, Celene Hawkins, Irvin Madsen, Linda Gillings, Kent Krugh, Anita Douthat, Cal Kowal, Jonathan Gibson, Brad Austin Smith, Natalie Mancino, Erika Nj Allen

J. Miles Wolf brings his considerable talents to Jewish Cincinnati, which from the early 19th-century has been an important center of American Jewish life. Like Cincinnati’s general community, the Jewish community’s synagogues, cemeteries, and other institutions expanded and dispersed from downtown during the mid to late 19th-century to North Avondale by the early 20th-century, to Amberley Village and Roselawn by the second half of the 20th-century, and up the I-71 corridor to the suburbs and beyond in the early 21st-century. This exhibition seeks to provide a comprehensive photographic documentation of Jewish institutions in the Greater Cincinnati area, including current facilities and former places of worship and communal gathering that are still extant but are either unoccupied or repurposed. Concurrently, the project calls for a gathering of historic photographs from local archives and collections that depict events and ceremonies within these venues. Jewish Cincinnati offers new and inventive ways of looking at and thinking about both new photography and historical images: How might they be merged? What features of historical photographs of people and places might be incorporated into or superimposed over new photography? How can these processes be jumping-off points for conversations about repurposing buildings, respect for architectural integrity, and historic preservation?

Visitors will come away from this exhibition with a greater sense of the rich history of the Cincinnati Jewish community and the important role it has played and continues to play in the life of the Queen City.