Acclaimed fine-art photographer Sheila Pree Bright will add her voice and art to Telfair Museums’ exhibit, Complex Uncertainties: Artists in Postwar America, on June 4, 6:00 pm at the Jepson Center. Her lecture will focus on civic engagement through her photographic series, Young Americans. As part of the event, her artwork will be installed in theComplex Uncertainties exhibit through December 10, 2018, along with a new rotation of works that are going on view from Telfair Museums’ permanent collection.

The Young Americans series, exhibited previously as a solo exhibit at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, examines the attitudes and values of Generation Y related to their American citizenship. The series shows diverse young Americans, who are new to the voting system, and explores ideas of what it means to be American. The sitters expressed their perspectives in a statement and posed in their chosen stance with the American flag.
 
In 2012 Bright took the Young Americans portraits to the streets of Art Basel Miami, wheat pasting eleven images in the Coconut Grove neighborhood on buildings and abandoned homes that often go unnoticed in the urban landscape. “Artists have always been at the forefront of social response,” said Rachel Reese, Telfair Museums’ Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Over the past two years, we have been looking at how artists respond to the times in which they live through art making and visual culture and all of the intersectional spaces that can occupy. Sheila’s lecture and art will add another exciting and ‘of-the-moment’ element to that discussion.”
 
The Jepson Center’s Complex Uncertainties is an evolving exhibition grounded by works from the Telfair’s modern and contemporary collection that sheds light on these responses and reveals some of the ways in which historic events challenge artists to explore unknowns, construct narratives, and react to power. Through this ongoing installation, visitors explore the impact of artistic responses to specific historical events, as well as palpably empathize with the growing sense of uncertainty that artists address throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
 
Bright earned her M.F.A. in photography from Georgia State University and describes herself as a fine art photographer and a visual cultural producer creating large-scale works on a wide-range of contemporary subjects. In 2013, while photographing under-recognized living leaders of the Civil Rights movement, she made a connection between today’s times and the climate of the 1960s that inspired her #1960Now project. 1960Now, examines race, gender and generational divides to raise awareness of millennial perspectives on civil and human rights and will be published by Chronicle Books October in 2018. The 1960Now series also will be discussed as part of the lecture.
 
The lecture is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Coastal Georgia. Serving the community as a nonpartisan political organization, the League has organized a series of programs to inform and activate the public on issues across the local political spectrum. This event at the Jepson Center culminates the newly formed League’s first year. League members are invited to a post-lecture reception with the artist. The League presents unbiased information about elections, the voting process, and vital issues affecting the region. “How citizens participate in American democracy as shown in Sheila’s work fits perfectly with the League’s purpose of informing and educating the American electorate,” said Cuffy Sullivan, the League’s president.
 
The Program

Exploring What It Means to be an American, lecture presented by Sheila Pree Bright, fine art photographer and a visual cultural producer creating large-scale works on a wide-range of contemporary subjects.
 
June 4, 6:00pm / Jepson Center
Free to members of Telfair Museums and the League of Women Voters of Coastal Georgia. Non-members: $8.
Pre-registration required at telfair.org/event/bright-lecture