Photography

While the Bolivar Art Gallery has temporarily closed its doors to visitors and converted its galleries to classroom space, we remain committed to our mission to engage students and the public in contemporary themes and issues meaningfully impacting artistic and curatorial practices.

While the Bolivar Art Gallery has temporarily closed its doors to visitors and converted its galleries to classroom space, we remain committed to our mission to engage students and the public in contemporary themes and issues meaningfully impacting artistic and curatorial practices.

As a photojournalist, Lynsey Addario has chosen a profession that leads her directly into the midst war zones and humanitarian crises around the world, including Afghanistan, the Congo, Darfur, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria. She has been kidnapped twice: once for a day in Fallujah; another time she was held for a week in Libya. Both times she thought she would be killed. “I believe in these stories; I believe they have to be told. And so I force myself to go to these places. It's not an adrenaline rush and it's not an addiction,” Addario says.

As the supervisory curator of photography and film at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Dr. Rhea Combs understands the power of images to tell stories and to write histories. She unearths film and photographs made by both professionals and amateurs, ranging from fine art and documentary photos, to home movies, family portraits, and commercial imagery and uses all of these to help “reclaim stories that are fundamentally American, but are lost or forgotten.” 

While the Bolivar Art Gallery has temporarily closed its doors to visitors and converted its galleries to classroom space, we remain committed to our mission to engage students and the public in contemporary themes and issues meaningfully impacting artistic and curatorial practices.

Currently, we are thrilled to host virtual shows from talented BFA graduates Maggie Simic, Meredith Coffey, and Marissa Braccia. Check back throughout the fall for student exhibitions and events in the visiting artist series.

We would like to announce the launch of the University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies Digital Senior Exhibition “Experience in Amateur Hour.” This exhibition is a presentation of capstone research which began classrooms and studios and finished online via zoom meetings—with work completed in students' kitchens, bedrooms, and living rooms across the nation.

KITRA CAHANA
Friday, February 21, 4 – 5 pm
Bill Gatton Student Center, Worsham Cinema

Photojournalist Erika Larsen embeds herself in communities that maintain a close relationship with nature and traditional culture to gain an intimate and visceral knowledge of their way of life. This ranges from a four-year project with the Sámi people—a hunter-gatherer society that moves with the reindeer in the Scandinavian Arctic—to an exploration of the significance of the horse in contemporary Native American culture.

University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies will bring excitement to campus again this December with the university’s most popular visual arts event, Open Studio.Open Studio, which is free and open to the public, will run from 6-9 p.m. Friday, Dec. 6, in the Art and Visual Studies Building. 

This annual event showcases the talent of the university's students and celebrated art faculty. Studios of graduates and select undergraduates will be open with the young artists present to talk about their ongoing projects.

SARAH LEWIS
Friday, December 6, 4 – 5 pm
Bill Gatton Student Center, Worsham Cinema