Meet The Neighbors: Exhibit Focuses On Underexposed Communities

TAMPA, FL — Photographers focus on underexposed communities in the United States amid a polarizing 2020 election season and an evolving coronavirus pandemic in the newest exhibit at the USF Contemporary Art Museum.

The exhibit, "The Neighbors: Slide Shows for America," will open Monday, Aug. 24 at 10 a.m. It features photographic slide shows by artists Widline Cadet, Guy Greenberg, Curran Hatleberg, Kathya Maria Landeros and Zora J Murff, curated by CAM’s curator-at-large Christian Viveros-Fauné.

Each participating camera artist was commissioned to create a slide show of underexposed communities in the United States. For this show, less is more: the photographic portfolios installed at the USF Contemporary Art Museum are displayed using traditional slide carousels to evoke the intimacy of family and community slide shows of another age.

Lisa J. Sutcliffe, Herzfeld curator of photography and media arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum, contributed a curatorial essay.

The artists include:

Widline Cadet is a Haitian-born artist based in Syracuse, New York. Her practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, immigration and Haitian cultural identity from within the United States. She uses photography, video and installations to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hyper visibility, black feminine interiority and selfhood.

Guy Greenberg is based in New York City. He spends much of his time photographing the Hasidic communities of Williamsburg and Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Through an alternating series of street photography and portraits, he works to show strong contrast in these communities as well as their resistance to assimilation and change.

Curran Hatleberg is an American photographer based in Baltimore, Maryland. Influenced by the American tradition of road photography, Hatleberg's process entails driving throughout the United States and interacting with various strangers in different locales. “Some interactions last 30 minutes, others 30 days,” Hatleberg said. His photographs are traces of those encounters.

Kathya Maria Landeros is a Mexican-American photographer and educator. Influenced by her bi-cultural upbringing, her work of the past decade focuses on Latin communities and the exploration of history, migration, representation and belonging.

Zora J Murff lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he serves as assistant professor of art at the University of Arkansas. A distinguished voice in photography dealing with the complex intersections of race and American society, he has long combined his experience with social work (he worked briefly with incarcerated youth) and his art to explore the fraught connections between visibility and powerful social systems.

The exhibition is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Florida Department of State.

There will be a virtual, Zoom-based reception at 6 p.m. Aug. 28.

The exhibition will be available to view online through Dec. 20. USFCAM remains closed to the public pending a broader reopening by the University of South Florida. After USF reopens, reservations will be required to visit CAM.