USA Projects

In partnership with the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, Wendy Ewald and Elizabeth Barret were awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Arts for Portraits and Dreams: A Revisitation.  We need to raise $20,000 to match the NEA award. Your generous donations will support the creation of new work as well as collaboration between two artists and community members in rural Appalachia. 

Over the past three decades a growing number of artists have worked as collaborators with people from outside the art world. Photographer Wendy Ewald is one of the pioneers in this approach to artmaking.  During 1975 – 1982 in the coalfields of Letcher County, Kentucky, where one-third of all families were living below the poverty level, Ewald worked as an artist in the schools.  She encouraged her young students (ages six to fourteen) to use cameras to record themselves, their families and communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams.  Material from that artistic and educational initiative was collected in the groundbreaking 1985 book Portraits and Dreams.   It was named one of the 10 best art books of that year by the American Library Association and will be republished by visual arts press Steidl Verlag.  Ewald was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1992.  Her work has been included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, and her fifth book, a retrospective documenting her projects entitled Secret Games, was published in 2000. 

Elizabeth Barret is the producer/director of the acclaimed media production Stranger With A Camera, a personal and poetic interrogation of the documentary genre that raises far-reaching questions about what it means to take pictures.  Her place-based work is carried out through Appalshop, an artist-centered organization located in the Appalachian coalfields that grew out of a War on Poverty initiative in 1969.   Barret is the recipient of a Kentucky Arts Council Fellowship in Media Arts, an NEA Southeast Media Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/ Multimedia Fellowship.  As a young filmmaker and native of east Kentucky, Barret joined Ewald in 1975 in conducting a series of photo workshops on Kingdom Come Creek at the last one-room school in Letcher County, Kentucky.   Archival videotape, audiotape, and super 8mm film created in the era when Ewald lived and worked in Appalachia is housed in the Appalshop Archive and is currently undergoing preservation measures.  The desire by Barret to further contextualize the archival materials in relation to the original images as well as to Ewald and those she encouraged grew into an opportunity to launch the project  Portraits and Dreams: A Revisitation that follows the process of re-engagement between Ewald and her former students who are now adults in their forties.    

Ewald was inspired to take on this new project when she initially reconnected via email with one of her former elementary school student collaborators Denise Dixon.  She worked with Ewald during the time she was nine to twelve years and is now a reading teacher who also operates her own video business recording local events.  The two realized how much their lives and work had been affected by their early encounter. Ewald then became interested in creating new work that draws on her former students’ experiences as children and adults as a vehicle to explore memory and reality across the passage of time. 

On Ewald’s initial trips back to Kentucky she met with the mother of Scott Huff who created a dream sequence in images during the ‘70s and now runs his own engineering company in China, Vernon Gay Cornett who still lives in the house with his parents where he took pictures in the ‘70s, Darlene Watts who is currently photographing her husband who is an avid hunter, and Gary Crase who now works at a liberal arts college and is co-advisor to the campus organization Bisexuals, Lesbians, Gay and Allies for Dignity.  Crase talked about how the photography project opened a window to the world outside his holler.  He also recalled how the cameras for each student to use and keep were to be bought for ten dollars:  I remember us having to do something to get ten dollars.  We didn’t have a lot of money.   We didn’t have a car.  I remember mother and I used to walk along the road and pick up pop bottles and sell them at the general store.  And mother would occasionally make a quilt top and sell it.   This was something really big was getting a camera and having the ability to have film and have it developed.     

Barret and her crew recorded these first emotional meetings while also locating more project participants to reconnect with for another round of videotaped visits and conversations, including:    Johnny Wilder, who is employed on a stripmining operation, and his teenage sons showing Ewald pictures that Johnny had kept from 1981 and pictures he'd made since.  The father and sons also tell the story of Johnny's former classmate Ricky Dixon who perished in an abandoned coal mine.  Sue Dixon Brashear, now an elementary school principal, reflected on the images created more than 35 years earlier:  You know, part of me, when I look at the book -- I try not to get emotional but -- We were poor, but we didn't feel that way.  And now that I'm an educator and knowing what I know about poverty..., there wasn't much expeced out of us.  That's why you were special to us.  Gave us confidence, believed in us.

As a donor, you will be supporting a specific phase of the project -- a residency and collaboration between Ewald, Barret, and the students they originally worked with. Activities will include:  conducting a workshop and giving an artist talk for the public in east Kentucky, videotaping additional contemporary conversations between Ewald and her former students, the creation of new portraits by Ewald of these adults now in their forties, gathering images taken by them during the intervening years, and locating additional print and non-print materials, objects, and ephemera for the archive relevant to the 1985 publication Portraits and Dreams and this body of work created during the mid-1970s/early 1980s.  The results will lay the groundwork for a documentary and multimedia installation as we continue to reengage with these project participants and explore the meanings behind the photographs, what is revealed about the practice of collaborative art, and the relationship of images to personal memory.