Bessie Smith Cultural Center of Chattanooga

Swan Dreams Project: The Power of Imagery (SDP) is an exhibition that will be at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center March 1, 2013 through June 3, 2013. It is no secret that every major ballet company has a pronounced lack of African-American dancers, from the corps to the principals. As a result, African-American patronage to the ballet is conspicuously lacking. Barriers to entry, such as the cost of classes/attire, and stereotypes regarding classical ballet imagery, has left an entire population deprived of the enrichment of ballet. Ballerina Aesha Ash started the SDP to make the language and imagery of ballet more accessible to the African-American community through the exhibition. “Swan Dreams Project: The Power of Imagery” and increasing minority participation in ballet through exposure and training. Ash has been a professional ballet dancer for 13 years. She Joined the New York City Ballet at the age of 18, where she remained for eight years dancing numerous soloist and principal roles. Ash then joined the legendary Bejart Ballet, in Lausanne Switzerland, as a soloist. After enjoying success in Europe, she returned to the United states in 2005 where joined Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet. After a tremendous amount of growth and learning, Ash went freelance. She began working with Morphoses ,founded by Christopher Wheeldon. Ash has been featured in Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name a few. You will find Ash featured in the New York City Ballet Workout II, Barbie Nutcracker, as well the principal dance double for Zoe Saldana in the movie Center Stage.

Aesha Ash, Artist Statement:

My mission as a ballet dancer and in life was not only to demonstrate excellence in my beloved genre, but to conquer stereotypes, overcome labels and low expectations, as well as inspire young girls from neighborhoods like mine who are too often unacquainted with the high arts, and lack the inspiration to live up to their fullest untapped potential. This project is inspired by my experiences with doubt isolation, self-awareness, inner-resolve and perseverance, and is not only a cathartic expression, but encouragement to those chasing their dreams in sometimes cruel and unfamiliar places. The message is simple: There is hope, never give up! This project is a continuation of the mantra I carried throughout my career and sought to embody in every performance.

My hope is that this project is more than a collection of photographs. I want the message and the imagery to inspire, motivate and change consciousness regarding the potential of all young women to be beautiful, artistic and awe-inspiring. I wanted to portray elegance, sensitivity, vulnerability and artistic purity not commonly associated with many of the project’s backdrops. I chose these backdrops not to shock, but to shout the refrain that there is art and beauty to be found in all places. I hope this modest undertaking will provoke thought, inspire hope and be a catalyst for positive change.

Never stop dreaming!

About the photographer:

Paul D. Van Hoy II began his business at the age of sixteen in his Midwestern hometown of Evansville, Indiana. A native Hoosier, Van Hoy relocated his business to Western, NY in 2005, after being accepted into the prestigious graduate program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where, in 2007, he earned his MFA in Fine Art Photography.

Also, in 2007, Van Hoy received worldwide recognition as Microsoft’s “Photographer of The Year,” and just 12-months later, in 2008, Creative Quarterly Magazine awarded Van Hoy the accolade of “Photographer of The Year.”

His award winning wedding photojournalism has been featured in popular magazines such as Brides and Bridal Magazine, Wedding Style, In Style Wedding, Modern Bride, and Martha Stewart Weddings.

His poignant and compelling fine art photography has been widely published in the US and abroad; PDN, Digital Photo Pro, After Capture, Professional Photographer, CMYK, Camera Arts, and Communication Arts.

Van Hoy takes a very delicate and personal approach to apprehending decisive moments when documenting weddings, and describes his style as a mixture of disciplines that combine formalism and fine art aesthetics with an inborn photojournalistic intuition.

“Interaction with strangers through an image capture device changes the dynamic of an already ambivalent relationship. It is crucial that the photographer be improvisational not only on a technical level, but his or her spontaneity should also extend to the persuasions necessary to gain the momentary trust of a desired subject.”

Presently, Van Hoy resides in Rochester, NY where his destination wedding photography business, Fotoimpressions, is located. He documents approximately 30-40 weddings throughout the US annually and shoots advertising, stock, and travel photography during his off-season.

Some of his former and current clients include Forbes, Health and Wellness Magazine, Men’s Health Magazine, Food & Wine Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, Country Living, Adidas, Barilla, DKNY, Jones New York and Fossil Inc., among others.

Van Hoy recently published his first book on wedding photography, “Wedding Photojournalism The Business of Aesthetics” which was released by Amherst Media in March of 2011 and is available at all major booksellers.

His works are managed & represented by AGE Fotostock in Barcelona Spain. His work can also be viewed on-line at www.fotoimpressions.com.

This exhibition  is made possible with funds provided by The Chattanooga Chapter of The Links, Inc. and funding from a Community Cultural Connections Grant through ArtsBuild Chattanooga.

Photo credit: Hidden Gems, Untitled I, Paul D. Van Hoy II, www.fotoimpressions.com

“Crossings” a new exhibition by artist James McKissic will be on display at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center in the Museum gallery through March 2, 2013.

Artist Statement: My work is born of a desire to use color, texture and shape in a way that invites the viewer into the painting. If you don’t want to physically touch my paintings, I feel like I haven’t been successful. My work allows me to explore on an organic, primal level my relationship to the environment and to others as an African American, Southern man.

I create non-objective paintings in mixed media that evoke my rural, agricultural, African American ancestry and often celebrate personal exploration. My sources of inspiration are varied, from a Santeria priest’s front door photographed in Havana, Cuba to the topography of my family’s farm in Meigs County, Tennessee.

Paintings just come to me in the form of images or ideas that I can’t get out of my head. It’s almost like a spirit possesses me — or like Robert Johnson sang, “a hellhound’s on my trail.” I just have to shake it off and release it. African American folk culture, folk religions, and the South hugely influence me.

On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake that originated only 15 miles from the port city, Port-au-Prince, became headline news across the world. Haiti, known as one of the poorest countries in the world, was declared unfit to manage emergency services if a disaster were to strike. Despite its undignified reputation, it has continued its effort to restore its beauty, and dissolve its image as a poverty and destruction ridden country. The spirit and cultural presence of Haiti draws primarily from its French and African influences and stands out beyond the rubble.

Free-lance photographer, Ross Oscar Knight, based out of Atlanta, mission is to research and expose his audience to cultures other than their own. Initially, he traveled to Haiti to assist in relief efforts by volunteering to help build an orphanage. Instead of focusing on the destruction, he headed north, where many orphaned children relocated, to uncover the beauty of Haiti, its children, its future. It is there in Bonneu, St. Luis du Nord, and the Island of Tortuga where he found his subjects.

The images in this series tell a story of the life and culture of Haiti beyond the stained image of destruction. The disaster only illustrates a piece of Haiti’s story, while his images offer a different perspective into the culture and spirit of its people. He has provided short stories to indulge the viewer and put them in the moments leading up to or after the photo.

Ross Oscar Knight: The Artist

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I still favor my images over adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Photography is like a language to me and it is my strongest form of communication.

My peers in grade school mocked me because I had a stuttering speech impediment. One day, a teacher gifted me a disposable film camera and I immediately began to weave visual moments together with every day characters in my surroundings. The photos, arranged chronologically as stories, prompted me to speak clearly in front of my class during “show and tell” with no shame. That’s when I fell in love with the power of photography.

Growing up in my father’s non-denominational church, memories like the smell of wooden pews, the taste of communion, and the heat generated by enthusiastic worshipers, shaped my acute sense of awareness. I witnessed the outpouring of raw emotions by people of different cultural backgrounds at religious ceremonies across the southeastern U.S. My 6 siblings and I, bunked together in 3 bedrooms, became fast friends with strangers invited home from services. The generosity of my parents allowed perceived foreigners going through hardships to live with us for months. Inevitably, through these encounters my spiritual reverence and worldly curiosity was born.

Nearly 15 years later, I left a successful, yet unfulfilling career in engineering, marketing, and small business development to start a photography business. Sparked by a genealogy search for my multiracial roots and to quell my thirst to learn about people on the opposite side of the globe, photography once again became my platform to be heard and understood.

With my camera I learn more about who I am through my discoveries of others, their cultures and the environments in which they live. The images I capture allow me to interact with people, whom under any other circumstance, I may not be able to engage. No different than Alice In Wonderland’s rabbit hole, I use the barrel of my lens to continue deeper down my own path of discovery, to forge new relationships and to frame stories, ever-present in people’s lives. It is both my pursuit of self-expression and my God-given passion to add value to the lives of others that drives me.

I taste the past with the ability to preserve the present.

“Beauty in the Face of Destruction” will be on display in the museum gallery September 3, 2012 through December 19, 2012.

We Shall Not Be Moved, a traveling exhibition developed by the Tennessee State Museum, provides an intimate look at the role Tennessee students played in shaping the modern Civil Rights Movement. Although civil rights history rightfully focuses on the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the stories of unsung heroes has remained largely untold. This exhibit lifts these important “foot soldiers” into their rightful place in history, telling their story through relevant artifacts, powerful photographic images, and exciting audio-visual media. Visitors will come away with an understanding of African-American life during Jim Crow that provided the background for the sit-ins, how students were recruited and organized for the purpose of non-violent protest, and how their efforts facilitated permanent social change. We Shall Not Be Moved will be on display at the Bessie January 12, 2013 – April 7, 2013.

We Shall Not Be Moved, is divided into four key areas:

1) Segregation and Resistance

This section provides an understanding of the lives of black Tennesseans before and during segregation, showing the tradition of resistance that led to the development of new segregation laws after Reconstruction.

2) Non-Violence

Reverends James Lawson and Kelly Miller Smith held non-violence training workshops in Nashville beginning in 1959. They recruited college students, like Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, and John Lewis from Nashville colleges. This group chose mass sit-ins as a strategy to end segregation. Downtown counters were chosen because of the humiliating experiences black women faced while shopping when they could not try on clothes before buying them and could not sit at the lunch counter. 

3) Sitting-In in Tennessee

This section covers the action phase of the sit-in movement. The Nashville students began their sit-ins in what became the model used for sit-ins across the south. Later Nashville became the first southern city to desegregate its downtown counters. Even though Memphis and Chattanooga adopted Nashville-like models, each area exhibited a localized flavor. Uniquely, the Knoxville group was apparently influenced very little by the Nashville template.

4) Direct Action and the Civil Rights Movement

An unusual number of Tennessee students went on to become leaders in the national civil rights struggle. This portion highlights their involvement in later events as the movement progressed to demonstrate the importance of Tennessee in the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these leaders continue to be active even today.

Why did the music of an oppressed people take over the world? The answer lies in the great individuals of the music; they gave voice to a range of emotions and feelings that touched a chord in the universal human psyche. The triumph of black music is the triumph of these individuals, who produced art that was unique to them and yet appealed worldwide. The musical styles that these great musicians drew from developed in a southern U.S. slave culture that had its own music. Between the end of slavery after the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, a variety of influences–church music, work songs, folk ballads, African and European dances, military and marching band music–combined to create, very broadly, three streams that, although they intermingled, were identifiable and distinct.

SONGS FROM THE SOUL contains iconic portraits in America’s music history–Jazz, Rythm & Blues, Gospel, Soul, and Rock and Roll–their influences are found throughout our popular culture and the Civil Rights Movement. Based upon 37 large format, original illustrations by award-winning, international portrait artist Wolfram Schramm of Gerlingen, Germany, and historic black and white photographs from the William P. Gotlieb Collection, SONGS FROM THE SOUL is a newest traveling exhibit from the award-winning archives of ArtVision Exhibitions, LLC.

Visitors of all ages will flock to see the electrifying portraits that seem to come to life: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat “King” Cole, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, B.B. King, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson, Bo Diddley, Marvin Gaye, Quincy Jones, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, Mariah Carey, Patti LaBelle, and Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of the Motown record label, the Apollo Theatre, Cotton Cub, Soul Train and more.

SONGS FROM THE SOUL is on display at the Bessie in the museum gallery June 1, 2012 – August 24, 2012.