Two former students of the late Professor Gay Burke’s have extended her legacy of photography education to the next generation. Andy Meadows (MFA 1994) founded the Booker T. Washington Magnet School Photography program in 1995 at the then Carver Creative and Performing Arts School in Montgomery. Meadows now works as Arts Education Specialist for the Alabama State Department of Education where he distributes grants to schools and works to improve arts education in Alabama. Starting out with the unheard of budget of $20,000, Meadows outfitted a darkroom equal to many college-level darkrooms of the time. Since then, hundreds of students at “BTW” have learned the art and technology of film and digital photography, as well as what Meadows thought was just as important: how to run a photography business. Since 2009, Emily Thomas — first a student of Meadows at BTW and then a BFA major in photography (2004) under Gay Burke — has led BTW’s program. Over the years, photo students at BTW have won national, regional, state and local awards and recognition, including National Scholastic Art and Writing Gold Key Portfolio awards, National Scholastic Art Award’s American Visionary Awards and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Visual Arts Achievement Statewide Exhibition, among others. In August, a devastating fire at BTW destroyed most of their photo equipment. Thomas is now teaching photography from BTW’s temporary facility at Hayneville Road Elementary School. Meadows said that among the losses were $250,000 worth of, in some cases, irreplaceable darkroom equipment, cameras and photo supplies that he and Thomas collected over two decades. Fortunately, the students aren’t starting back to school with nothing. Most of their digital work was stored in “the cloud,” and some film photos had been digitized and backed-up. And, the students have a strong legacy of skilled art instruction as one of their top resources. When the students visited UA in October, en route to exhibiting their photos at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts, they were upbeat about the future. Thomas said that she wants to pass on what she learned from her photo professor — the courage to try out new approaches. Maybe that’s just the thing to help them get back on their feet: “Gay taught me that experimentation is part of making art. Sometimes it results in a success, sometimes it results in a complete failure, but you never know until you try.” [fall18] If you would like to contribute to Booker T. Washington Magnet High School’s fund, monetary donations can be made to the FAME Foundation with the designation, “BTW Photography Magnet”: https://www.btwfameboard.org. And, they have an Amazon Wish list of equipment they need: https://www.amazon.com/registry/wishlist/2ISQHK4RJ2QY4/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_awwl_s_qvygCbT8XR0NN
Gay Burke Memorial Fellowship in Photographic Arts
The Alabama State Council on the Arts announces the creation of the Gay Burke Memorial Fellowship in Photographic Arts for individual artists living in Alabama. Applications are open January 2 through March 1, 2019. Apply online at http://www.arts.alabama.gov/grants/howtoapply.aspx. Over four decades, photographer and professor of art Gay Burke developed a distinguished art photography program in The University of Alabama’s Department of Art and Art History, all the while creating her own artwork. Burke died May 1, 2017 after inspiring generations of photographers, artists and educators. Through a generous gift, the Gay Burke Memorial Fellowship in Photographic Arts was established in 2018 to provide Fellowships to Alabama photographers to advance their artistic careers. Applications will be accepted between January 2, 2019 - March 1, 2019. The selected artists will be announced in June 2019 with their fellowship period effective October 1, 2019 - September 30, 2020. $5,000 cash awards are made to individual artists in the photographic arts based on merit of work, career achievement, career potential and service to the state. This fellowship provides awards to recognize artistic excellence as well as professional commitment and maturity and contributes to the further development of the artist and the advancement of his or her professional career. Fellowships are competitive. Quality of work and professionalism as determined by samples of work and narrative are particularly important. Provide samples of the highest quality work completed within the last five years. Eligibility: All Fellowship applicants must be legal residents of Alabama for a minimum of two years prior to the application deadline, and are expected to maintain residency during the grant award year (Oct. 1 -Sept. 30). Artists who have previously been awarded any ASCA Fellowship are eligible to apply for a second Fellowship six years after their first Fellowship. After an artist has received two Fellowships, they are no longer eligible to apply. For more information about all the Fellowships offered by the Alabama State Council on the Arts, go to http://www.arts.alabama.gov/grants/howtoapply.aspx. To read more about Professor Gay Burke, go here: https://art.ua.edu/tag/gay-burke/ Download the flyer.
Acclaimed Photographer Memorialized in Exhibit
The Mother of Alabama Art Photography: Gay A. Burke Exhibition: October 5 – 26, 2018 Opening reception and reunion: October 5, 2018, 5:00-8:00 p.m. (First Friday) The Arts Council Gallery, Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center 620 Greensboro Avenue, Tuscaloosa, Alabama In many ways, Gay Burke is responsible for bringing art photography to Alabama and raising the profile of photography as an art form throughout the South. She is the “Mother of Alabama Art Photography.” –Wayne Sides, photographer and author Over four decades, photographer and professor of art Gay Burke developed a distinguished fine art photography program at The University of Alabama Department of Art and Art History, all the while creating her own photographic work. Out of this program came award-winning artists such as Miller Mobley, Janice Hathaway, Wayne Sides, Karen Graffeo, and many others. Burke’s innovative work has been exhibited in more than 80 national exhibitions including numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; the University of California, Berkeley and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Burke studied under distinguished photographer and photomontage innovator Jerry Uelsmann at the University of Florida and worked with renowned documentary photographer Walker Evans. At UA, she was the first woman to achieve full professor status in the Department of Art and Art History. She died in May of 2017. This semi-retrospective exhibition showcases forty works by Gay Burke, some never shown before. Most of the photographs are multi-negative prints. To create them, Burke shot 35mm film photographs, developed the negatives in her darkroom, and then painstakingly combined two, three or four negative images in the darkroom to produce a new image. These photographs, with their often surreal juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated objects, are a result of careful and skillful manual manipulation, long before the days of "photoshopping." None have been digitally manipulated. Please join us on opening night, Friday October 5, 2018, for a celebration of Gay Burke and a reunion of her former students from 5:00-8:00 p.m. An exhibition of photos by some of her former students, Butterfly Effect: Honoring the Legacy of Gay Burke, will be held at the same time in The University of Alabama Gallery, also in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center, sponsored by the Alabama State Council on the Arts. A one-time pop-up sale featuring hundreds of Gay Burke’s prints will immediately follow the opening reception, also in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center. All proceeds from the sale of these photos will go to fund the annual Gay Burke Memorial Fellowship in Photographic Arts, administered by the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The Arts Council Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-noon and 1-4 p.m. on weekdays and noon-8 p.m. on First Fridays. The University of Alabama Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays and noon-8 p.m. on First Fridays. Galleries are closed on weekends. Admission is free. The Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center is located at 620 Greensboro Avenue in Downtown Tuscaloosa. For more information about the CAC, The Arts Council or Bama Theatre, patrons should LIKE the Facebook page “The Arts Council – Bama Theatre – Cultural Arts Center” and follow tuscarts on Twitter. Call 205-758-5195 or visit tuscarts.org for further information.
Photography Students of Gay Burke Honor Her Legacy
Butterfly Effect: Honoring the Legacy of Gay Burke October 5-26, 2018 Reception: Friday, October 5, 5–8 p.m. The exhibition Butterfly Effect: Honoring the Legacy of Gay Burke features the work of more than 20 artists who studied under Professor Gay Burke over the course of Burke's 42-year career teaching photography in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Alabama. Burke passed away in 2017. An opening reception will be held on First Friday, October 5, 5:30-8:00 p.m. The opening will be a homecoming and reunion for Gay Burke’s students and colleagues. Former students Elliot Knight and Andy Meadows identified twelve former students of Gay Burke's spanning the years from 1973 until Gay’s retirement in 2015. Each artist was asked to invite at least two additional photographers to participate. The exhibition will feature work that the artists created during their college years learning from Gay, as well as work they created more recently. The exhibitors include Sarah Ann Austin, Barbara Lee Black, Wanrudee Buranakorn, Breanna Conley, Kathleen Fetters, Jenny Fine, Karen Graffeo, Johnny Goodwin, Ad Kanyalak, Elliot A. Knight, Jim Lockhart, Kristen Mance, Kathryn Joy Mayo, Andy Meadows, Sarah Cusimano Miles, Michael E. Palmer, Ben Rigsby, Laura Shill, Wayne Sides, Emily Thomas, Terrell Taylor and Jerri Wilson. The exhibition will run in conjunction with Gay Burke: The Mother of Alabama Art Photography, an exhibition of 40 works by Gay Burke in The Arts Council Gallery, Oct. 5-26. The University of Alabama Gallery is located at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center, 620 Greensboro Avenue, Tuscaloosa, AL. Hours are Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.-noon and 1 – 4 p.m. on weekdays and noon – 8 p.m. on the first Friday of the month. For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in studio art and art history, go here: https://art.ua.edu/academics/.
Two Exhibitions In Memory of Professor Gay Burke
Over four decades, photographer and professor of art Gay Burke developed a distinguished art photography program in The University of Alabama’s Department of Art and Art History, all the while creating her own artwork. Burke died May 1, 2017. For the month of October, two exhibitions, of Burke's work and the work of her students, will be on display in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center in downtown Tuscaloosa. A semi-retrospective exhibition, Gay Burke: The Mother of Alabama Art Photography, will be on display in The Arts Council Gallery. The Alabama State Council on the Arts is assisting with the curation and exhibition of Burke’s former students' works, Butterfly Effect, which will be held in The University of Alabama Gallery. An opening reception for both exhibitions will be held on First Friday, October 5, 5:30-8:00 p.m. The opening will be a homecoming and reunion for Gay Burke's students and colleagues. More details about both exhibitions will be forthcoming.
Honored Photography Professor Passes Away
TUSCALOOSA - Gay Ann Burke, born December 30, 1946 in Brownwood, Texas, died May 1, 2017 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Gay was the first female full professor in the University of Alabama Department of Art and Art History. There, she developed a distinguished fine art photography program. She taught fine art photography to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Alabama for 42 years before retiring in 2015. When she began her career, photography was not yet accepted as "art". Some call her the "Mother of Alabama Art Photography" and say she is responsible for raising the profile of photography as an art form throughout the South. Many say her teaching skills were exceptional and that her talent for teaching even showed when she was an undergraduate student herself working with underserved children in San Antonio. At the University of Alabama, she nurtured many students through their studies and then also helped them establish their careers as artists and teachers. Gay allowed others to be themselves while always remaining true to herself. She was kind and fair with a great sense of humor and an unforgettable laugh. The world is a brighter place for her having been here. She will be deeply missed by those lucky enough to have had her as a friend. She is preceded in death by her parents, Macyl and Fleta Maddox Burke; and her brother, Macyl Aubrey Burke. She is survived by her niece, Lauren Burke; two great nieces, Scarlett Maddox Dedini and Zola Dedini; and many friends and former students across the country who loved her dearly. Those wishing to honor Gay can make a contribution to any charitable organization working to preserve democracy and social justice in America. Reprinted from the Tuscaloosa News.
Wayne Sides: Collecting Four Decades of Photos – Part Two
Wayne Sides, 1975 New College alumnus in visual and performing arts, is in the process of scanning his entire photographic oeuvre of more than four decades. As part of this project, he is displaying more and more of those pieces on his new website. Part Two of our feature on artists digitizing their work outlines how he has organized the project, including the workflow, storage and the website. Read Part One here. Sides said that he set certain general parameters according to archiving standards and adapted others for what works best for his purposes. From the beginning, organizing is key. Sides stores his film negatives in pages in binders and boxes. Prints are mostly in print storage boxes. “During the digitization process, negatives were cleaned and then stored in number-coded negative storage pages and correspondingly cataloged in a document file database," Sides explained, "The entire negative page collection was also scanned, to generate a low-resolution digital reference – a contact sheet – for each. For images that are chosen from the negative collection, each film frame is cleaned, prepared, then scanned and the resulting high-resolution file is then stored on hard drives.” The high-resolution versions of the digitized images are stored on multiple professional external hard drives on- and off-site. Regarding “cloud” storage, Sides said, “There have been interesting developments in the realm of cloud storage options, but for now I use cloud-based options only for reference needs with low-resolution images or collaborative works where an author or publisher also needs to have access.” Sides works with a professional photographer, a former student who has expertise in scanning and setting up what archivists term the workflow process in large digitizing projects. He also has a broad understanding of the traditional darkroom process and methods, with experience with the various film stocks and chemical processes that were used to create the negatives. For this type of scanning project, experience in film photography helps in understanding what the final digital image should look like. Sides explained, “The different film emulsions, grain structures, and chemistry which I have experimented with over the years for different projects or looks, make it difficult to adjust to all the variables to get consistent and matching results of how the digital image should look as if it is in a traditional darkroom environment. I very much treat the current archiving approach as a “digitization” with the traditional darkroom approach in mind.” The high-resolution images contain the relevant standard information parameters for metadata, or embedded file information. For the time being, Sides has left off titles and other information from the website images, preferring, he said, “to let the viewer’s imagination think about the image rather than speak of specific places and such. I do plan to add some background contextual information and titles in the future.” Sides estimates that more than 2000 images of his photographic work have been digitized and only about twenty percent remains to scan. Only a very small representation of the complete body is on the website now. “Of course the intention was never to put all the images online, as some will be used in other projects, shows and publications. The website will be just a sampling of the work from the archive, which will exhibit a variety of works in the future.” His idea is that the website will evolve over time, explaining, “I will probably shift over to a more fully responsive website design as things progress, and also adapt to new and evolving portable technologies, to add more functionality over time.” As with any life-encompassing project, there can be a slow incubation process before it’s actually begun. Sides said, “It is a lot to organize and perhaps I should have started this a couple years back before I did, however it is really great to start having access to the images and sharing the work through digital means as well.” Wayne Sides' website: http://www.waynesides.com/. Read Part One of this article: http://art.ua.edu/loupe/wayne-sides-collecting-four-decades-of-photos/ IMAGE CREDITS: top right: Wayne Sides, courtesy the artist. middle right: Wayne Sides, photograph from Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, 1990. two "galleries": screenshots from the website: http://www.waynesides.com/work/gallery-vii/ featured image: Wayne Sides, photograph from Sideshow, page 24, 1979. Location: Decatur, Ala., 1978. [s16] If YOU have begun a digitizing project of your own or have just begun thinking about it, we’d like to hear from you. Please write or call Rachel Dobson, even if it’s just to let me know you’re interested and are going to think on it. We believe this is a significant and developing story about how artists live in the 21st century and we hope this will be a semi-regular feature of The Loupe.
Groundbreaking Photography Professor Retires
GAY BURKE, the first female full professor in the Department of Art and Art History, retired this summer after forty-two years of service to The University of Alabama. In 1973, Burke was hired to teach photography when it was still not quite accepted as a fine art medium. She had earned her MFA from the University of Florida in 1972 where she studied under renowned photographer and photomontage innovator Jerry Uelsmann. After she came to Alabama, she worked with Walker Evans at the end of his career and brought Evans, along with alumnus and former UA instructor WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY (BFA 1958, MA 1959), to visit her classes. WAYNE SIDES was a student in that class and photographed this unique intergenerational meeting of art photographers (right) who have influenced countless artists since. Sides, a renowned photographer in his own right, credits Burke with raising the profile of photography as an art form in the South. Considered one of our notable faculty, she has exhibited her celebrated and acclaimed work in over 80 national exhibitions including numerous solo shows at venues such as University of Nevada at Las Vegas, University of California at Berkeley and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. A collection of photographs by Burke is in the Walker Evans Archive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Wayne Sides’ essay, “Gay Burke and Alabama Art Photography,” is here. The spring 2013 issue of The Loupe featured many of Burke’s former students’ memories of her teaching. [loupe fall 2015]
Wayne Sides: Collecting Four Decades of Photos – Part One
More and more artists are undertaking projects to record, display, catalog and/or store their artwork, both digital-born and material. In this semi-regular series, we are featuring some of our UA art community who are, to find out more about how they approach it and what their experiences are along the way. If YOU have begun a project of your own or have just begun thinking about it, we’d like to hear from you. Please write or call Rachel Dobson, even if it’s just to let me know you’re interested and are going to think on it. We believe this is a significant and developing story about how artists live in the 21st century and we hope this will be an ongoing feature of The Loupe. Part Two of our interview with Wayne Sides coming soon! Wayne Sides, 1975 New College alumnus in visual and performing arts, is building a new website for his photographic works of more than four decades. The current Professor of Art at the University of North Alabama in Florence has begun a long-range project of scanning, organizing and displaying his vast collection of mostly 35-millimeter black and white film photography. The site currently is divided into seven “galleries” of photos, which will evolve as he adds new work. Says Sides,“The site is going to be a real living, breathing entity, with many functions.” A video on the website’s About page introduces Sides’ abstract vision and the variety of work that will be displayed on the site in the future. Over time, the range of subject matter will expand to include documentary-historical, landscapes, photographic art interpretations and series. He will also add new work as it develops. He explained, “The vast majority of the work will be photography, but, outside of photography, I have always used images, texts, symbols and found objects to incorporate into physical collages as well. I plan to have a separate section on the site to share images of work that fall into such a category.” Sides commented that building the website “has pretty much consumed my life” while also teaching at UNA, traveling and taking photographs. In the next couple of years, he plans to get back to exhibiting his new work and possibly older work that he says the public has never seen before, as well as book projects. He added, “I have periodically collaborated with writers and other creatives using my photographs, which I plan to continue. A future section that includes examples of these collaborations and other book-related media will also probably be added to the site at some point, not only to share my photographic work, but to highlight their writing and works as well.” At UA, Wayne Sides concentrated in photography under professors Jim Barnes and Gay Burke. In 1975, he received a BS from UA’s New College in visual and performing arts. Sides gained national recognition in the late 1970s and the 1980s for his powerful photographs of the Ku Klux Klan. He is also recognized for his collaborative work with musicians, poets, and other performing artists and for the wide range of subject matter in his photography. His work is in numerous private and public collections and he exhibits and lectures at regional, national and international venues. Among his photographic publications are Sideshow (1979); Litany for a Vanishing Landscape with Jeanie Thompson (Hiram Douglas Trust of Florence, AL, 1992); Photographs by Guy Martin (Thunderhouse, 1979); Brambu Drezi by Jake Berry and Wayne Sides (Pantograph Press, 1998). His website address is http://www.waynesides.com. Read Part Two of this article: http://art.ua.edu/loupe/wayne-sides-collecting-part-two/ IMAGE CREDITS top left: Wayne Sides, Left Behind, 2010, mixed media photo collage, 40 x 40 inches. From the exhibition, Wayne Sides Human Traces/Tracce Umane, 2010, Pietrasanta, Italy. above left: Wayne Sides, photograph from Sideshow, page 14, 1979. Location: Mobile, Ala., 1976. above middle: Wayne Sides, photograph from Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, 1990. above right: Wayne Sides, photograph from Sideshow, page 24, 1979. Location: Decatur, Ala., 1978. [f15]