Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from The Do Good Fund
October 19, 2024 – February 2, 2025
In celebration of The Do Good Fund's 10th anniversary, this exhibition presents selections from its sweeping photography collection to tease apart the tangled cultural memory of the American South. This show features 125 photographs by 73 artists, ranging from Guggenheim Fellows to emerging artists.
The exhibition includes works by such renowned photographers as Debbie Fleming Caffery, William Christenberry, Gordon Parks, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Shelby Lee Adams, Sheila Pree Bright, and Chandra McCormick.
Themes of land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual, and kinship link images throughout the exhibition. Together these photographs present the enigmatic, ever-changing qualities of the South and its people - a place where despair and hope, terror and beauty, and indignity and dignity have coexisted and commingled. They picture a region that has sought restoration; they also capture communities bound together across centuries of toil and through bold acts of breathless exuberance. The Columbus Museum is the exhibition's final venue, and it is proud to welcome The Do Good Fund's collection home after an acclaimed national tour.
Founded in 2012 and located in Columbus, The Do Good Fund's collection of more than 800 images focuses on photographs taken in the American South since World War II, with a mission of making them broadly accessible through regional museums, nonprofit galleries, and nontraditional venues and to encourage complementary, community-based programming to accompany each exhibition.
Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from The Do Good Fund is organized by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. The exhibition program is supported in part by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the W.H. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation, and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art.
