Modern Art Notes Podcast Live with artist Sheila Pree Bright

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is a weekly, roughly hour-long interview program that is the most listened-to audio program about art in the English language. Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee called it “one of the great archives of the art of our time,” and the BBC named the program one of the world’s top 25 cultural podcasts. Producer and host Tyler Green, an award-winning author, historian and critic, will interview photographer Sheila Pree Bright, whose work is featured in the exhibition “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund.” The program will be recorded and distributed as an episode of the podcast.

Bright is a highly acclaimed, award-winning photographer. Born in Waycross, Georgia, she grew up in a military family, spending her formative years between Germany and the United States. A photography class during her senior year at the University of Missouri sparked her passion for the medium. In 1988, she moved to Atlanta, where she would later earn a master of fine arts degree from Georgia State University. Her work is often described as being anthropological in nature. She is fascinated by “unseen” communities throughout the world. Through her images, she gives voice to those who live unheard and aims to challenge the traditional narratives and power structures of Western thought that have traditionally informed the academy. Bright’s “#1960Now” photographic series reflects on the fight for racial equality from 1960 to the present day and combines portraits of social justice activists past and present with documentary images from recent protests in the United States. The project seeks to employ photography as a medium for protest, sheds light on the continuities between the 1960s civil rights movement and the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement and demonstrates that the fight for justice is not yet over.

Green’s most recent book is “Emerson's Nature and the Artists,” which examines how Ralph Waldo Emerson’s landmark 1836 book “Nature” was informed by Emerson’s experiences of art and, in turn, how it informed American art well into the 20th century. The book also looks at how Emerson joined his Anglo-Saxon race theory to his ideas about nature in ways that baked whiteness into the American landscape tradition. In 2014, the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) awarded Green one of its two inaugural awards for art criticism, including a citation for the podcast. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is available over iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud, Stitcher and all other podcatchers.