Your ticket to A Long Arc will also grant you admission to American, born Hungary.
Take an epic journey through the American South from 1845 to today. In A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, encounter the everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity and its critical impact on the development of photography. This is the first major exhibition in more than 25 years to explore photography in and about the South.
A Long Arc explores the American South’s distinct, evolving, and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how photographers working in the region have reckoned with the South’s fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces the South’s shifting identity in more than two hundred photographs made over more than 175 years.
The exhibition’s individual sections delve into the themes of photography before, during, and after the Civil War; documentary photography of the 1930s and ’40s; images of a post–World War II South in economic, racial, and psychic dissonance with the nation; photography as catalyst for change during the civil rights movement; reflective narrative photography of the late 20th century; and contemporary photography examining social, environmental, and economic issues.
A Long Arc presents a richly layered archive that captures the region’s beauty and complexity. Offering a full visual accounting of the South’s role in shaping American history, identity and culture, the exhibition includes photographs by Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, P.H. Polk, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby, Ernest Withers, Williams Eggleston, William Christenberry, Baldwin Lee, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Worsham, Carolyn Drake, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross, and others.
The exhibition is co-curated by Sarah Kennel, PhD, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center, with Gregory J. Harris, The Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
DIRECTLY ABOVE DeFuniak Springs, Florida, 1984, Baldwin S. Lee (American, born 1951), gelatin silver print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2022.48
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Exhibition Endowment
Julia Louise Reynolds Fund
Elizabeth Shelton Gottwald Fund
Mr. and Mrs. Charles N. Whitaker
Carol Ann Bischoff and Mike Regan
Nancy and Wayne Chasen
Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond
Anne and Gus Edwards
Tibby and David Ford
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Garner, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. William V. Garner
Richard S. Reynolds Foundation
Virginia Sargeant Reynolds Foundation
Mary and Don Shockey
YouDecide
Kate Neale Cooper and Matt Cooper
Anne Battle and Leonard Slater
Kate Neale Cooper and Matt Cooper
Birch Douglass
Gray-Nyerges Charitable Fund
Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc.
James W. Klaus
James Ludwig and Cynthia Cobbs
Alexandria Rogers McGrath
Teri Craig Miles
Peachtree House Foundation
Tom Williamson and Janet Brown
An Anonymous Donor
Anonymous Donors | Ann B. Carpenter | Page and John Corey | Drs. Ronald and Betty Neal Crutcher | Dana Foundation, Inc. | Christopher English and Meda Lane | Eucharia “Ukay” and Richard Jackson, M. D. | Tammy and Brian Jackson | Arnel Manalo | Nancy and Tom L. McCandlish | John McGurl and Michelle Gluck | Dr. and Mrs. Kent Minichiello | John and Michelle Nestler | Candace H. Osdene | Dr. and Mrs. Carl Patow | Celia Rafalko and Rick Sample* | Ellen Ray, Main Street Law Offices | Reynolds Gallery | Deborah and Mark Wlaz
Marketing support is provided by the Charles G. Thalhimer Fund. This list reflects sponsors as of July 9, 2024.
TOP OF PAGE Jackson, Mississippi, 1972, printed 1986, William Eggleston (American, born 1939), dry transfer print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, funds provided by the Museum Purchase Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, matching funds provided by the Volunteer Committees of Art Museums, 89.50. © artist or artist’s estate