Publication Date
1-1-2022
Abstract
JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – The East Tennessee State University Department of Art & Design and Slocumb Galleries in partnership with ETSU Student Activities Allocation Committee, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Black American Studies Program, present “The Yellow Book” by Johanna Warwick, a collection of photographic works available at Slocumb Galleries through Feb. 18. Warwick will give a talk at 10 a.m. on Monday, January 24, on Zoom.
“The Yellow Book” presents two series of photographic works, “Interstate Legacy” and the “Old South Baton Rouge.” Warwick used this book, a yellow-covered publication that lists the locations of interstate highways in the 1950s, as a framework to photograph cities, revealing the consequences and outcomes of interstate construction, organizers said.
What makes the two series different from just a documentary of highways, organizers said, is Warwick sees through the lens of how the “overwhelming number of the proposed placement of the new highway system cut through thriving black communities.” As the project was created in the 1950s, Warwick said that “it directly reflects the systemic racism in city planning,” as she photographs the “physicality of the highway overshadowing communities.”
Works will be at Slocumb Galleries
“The Yellow Book” exhibition aims to “make records that weave connections between past decisions and current consequences, as these photographs are an acute look at the past as Congress writes the infrastructure bill to guide state government today,” organizers said. Warwick’s work investigates a survey of all 104 affected cities nationwide, 66 years after it was initiated. She hopes to “define the next generation of infrastructure construction concurrently as our country reckons with systemic racism,” according to the organizers.
Warwick graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with an MFA in photography in 2010, and from Ryerson University with a BFA in photography in 2006. She is a British-born, Canadian-raised photographer working and living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she is an associate professor of Art and Photography at Louisiana State University. She has exhibited in New York, Toronto and other major cities across North America. She has also been featured in The Washington Post. She had a major exhibition of “The Yellow Book: Old South Baton Rouge” at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
All events are free and open to the public and will be live simulcasted via ETSU Slocumb Galleries’ Facebook (facebook.com/slocumb.galleries) and on Zoom. The Slocumb Galleries is located on the campus of ETSU at 232 Sherrod Drive. It is open weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
To receive a Zoom link, please email contrera@etsu.edu. For more information, please visit etsu.edu/cas/art/galleries.
Document Type
News Article
