The first major exhibition of Southern photography in more than 25 years, A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from Oct. 5, 2024, to Jan. 26, 2025.
A Long Arc comprises more than 175 years of photography from a broad swath of the American South — from Maryland to Florida to Arkansas to Texas and places in between. Visitors to the expansive exhibition will encounter everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity. The exhibition also examines the South’s critical impact on the development of photography.
“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is excited to present A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, an astounding exhibition of powerful images of our shared Southern — and American — history by many of this country’s foremost photographers,” said the museum’s Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “The exhibition also includes a number of captivating images of Richmond and the Commonwealth from the museum’s ever-growing collection of photographs.”
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 is organized by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia) and co- curated by Gregory Harris, the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography at the High Museum of Art, and Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind curator of photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at VMFA.
“A Long Arc reckons with the region’s fraught history, American identity and culture at large, asking us to consider the history of American photography with the South as its focal point,” said Dr. Kennel. “The exhibition examines the ways that photographers from the 19th century to the present have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape and culture.”
More than 180 works of historical and contemporary photography are featured in A Long Arc, which includes many from VMFA’s permanent collection.
Photographic works by more than 120 artists are featured in A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, including George N. Barnard, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Emmet Gowin, Dorothea Lange, Baldwin Lee, Tommy Kha, Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Gordon Parks, P.H. Polk, RaMell Ross and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845
from October 5, 2024, to January 26, 2025
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
200 N Arthur Ashe Blvd,
Richmond, VA 23220
www.VMFA.museum
