News
CPW Exhibition: Daesha Devón Harris. Just Beyond the River. A FolkTale.
hannah frieser
Apr 30, 2019
Gallery Reception: Saturday, May 4, 4-6pm
The Center for Photography at Woodstock is pleased to announce a solo exhibition featuring Daesha Devón Harris, and her thought-provoking, graceful mixed media compositions addressing the flight to freedom of African-American slaves. Poetic and moving in words and imagery alike, Harris’s one-of-a-kind pieces take an unflinching look at our history one person at a time. The true stories behind the figures depicted are lost to history. However, she breathes life back into these found images, creating new back stories that are anchored by artifacts within the frame and text that the artist has etched into the glass. Harris participated in CPW’s residency program, Woodstock AIR, in 2017. Her exhibition is part of a year-long celebration of the program’s twentieth anniversary. Woodstock AIR was created in 1999 to support photography-based artists of color, and to expand the dialogue around diversity, race and identity within the context of social justice.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Daesha Devón Harris is a Saratoga Springs, NY artist and photographer, who has spent time in Buffalo, NY, and San Francisco, CA. Both her multi-cultural family and the unexpected death of her young father have greatly shaped her life. She is a member of various organizations and plays an active role in her community as a youth advocate, social activist and cultural history preservationist.
The gentrification of her hometown and its effect on the local Black community has played a major role in both her advocacy and artwork. Most recently Harris has been an En Foco Fellowship winner, MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute Fellow, an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the recipient of an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, and named one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines. Harris was recently featured in the Smithsonian Magazine (April 2019)
CPW — Daesha Devón Harris: Just Beyond the River. A FolkTale.
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