Exhibition Dates:
August 23 – December 30, 2022
Noel and Kathryn Dickinson Wadsworth Gallery and Chi Omega – Hargis Gallery
RaMell Ross developed this series through personal connections with the people and places of Hale County, Alabama. His introduction there began more than ten years ago, teaching photography and workforce development before expanding into the role of invested observer and documentarian. He received an Academy Award™ nomination in 2018 for his film Hale County This Morning, This Evening.
This exhibition explores the Black Experience, expressed through storytelling that removes the notion of “otherness” as a condition of the white gaze. Ross considers aspects of the African American identity and its Blackness, as forged in the American South, alongside systemic racism and oppression impacting Black lives nationwide. Shaping his work, Ross states that it is a desire to “unburden the expectations of Blackness, and toy with the power of personal experience and one’s relational proximity to communities to shape observations and in turn, memories. … I want to make work that unitedly honors its participants, resists their easy consumption and judgment, and quietly asks our imagination and intellect to question the known and easy constructions of identity and place.”
Spell, Time, Practice, American, Body: The Work of RaMell Ross is curated by Richard McCabe, Curator of Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and organized by Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana.
All images courtesy of the artist.
RaMell Ross received a BA in English and Sociology from Georgetown University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited photographs in the U.S. and internationally, and appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and Oxford American while his writing has been published by Walker Arts Center, New York Times and Huffington Post. In 2015, he was part of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and was a Sundance Institute New Frontier Artist in Residence in the MIT Media Lab. In 2016 he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Arron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship. He was recently awarded a Rhode Island Foundation Robert MacColl Johnson Artist Grant. RaMell is currently a Mellon Fellow in Brown University’s Visual Arts Department.