ARTIST LECTURE: Lonnie Graham

April 5, 2006    5:30pm
Watson Theater, Light Work, 316 Waverly Avenue, Syracuse 13244

Light Work will host a lecture on April 5, 2006 by renowned photographer Lonnie Graham, who will talk about his work and experience working on community-based photographic series and projects.

Graham produces a variety of work, including stunning portraits, large room-sized installation pieces, and public art projects that integrate the community. His work focuses on three elements--the individual, family, and community. It is his public art projects and community focus that will be the subject of his lecture at Syracuse University. According to the Fabric Workshop and Museum, "As a teacher and artist his work encourages recognition of shared experience, and the vital relationship between individual and community."  

Graham is the founder of the African/American Garden Project, a physical and cultural exchange program. This project created a cultural exchange between urban single mothers, an elderly African-American community, and farmers from a small village in Kenya. He has exhibited his work internationally, and was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, one of the largest grants for an individual artist, which supported this project. He has also received three fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant.

Graham has extensive teaching experience, and is currently a professor of visual and integrative arts at Pennsylvania State University, and an instructor of special programs at the Barnes Foundation. He studied at the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design and the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is included in the permanent collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington, DE; the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA; the Museum of African American History in Detroit, MI; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; and the Schomberg Center in New York City. He participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in 2003, and had a solo exhibition in the Light Work main gallery in 2004.

The lecture will take place on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 at 5:30pm. It is free and open to the public.   This event is co-sponsored by the Transmedia Department, the Department of African American Studies, and the Department of Fine Arts.   Light Work is a non-profit, artist-run organization dedicated to the support of artists working in photography and electronic media. For more information, please call 315-443-1300.