Conversation | Portraiture and Identity in the South

Artists Jill Frank, Tommy Kha, and José Ibarra Rizo converse about the meaning of portraiture and identity in Southern photography. Co-curators of A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, Sarah Kennel, VMFA's Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center, and Greg Harris, High Museum of Art's Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography, lead the discussion with these artists, whose works are featured in the special exhibition.

PARTICPANTS BIOS

Jill Frank is an Atlanta-based artist and educator. She is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Georgia State University. Frank was a 2021 Artadia Award recipient and a 2022 Warhol Nexus Grant recipient. Reviews of her work have appeared in "Art Forum", "Art in America", and "The Paris Review". She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. She attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA studio art) and Bard College (BA Photography). Working primarily in photography and video to explore the ideologies and aesthetics that shape teenage life, her large-scale photographs and sound/video installations reveal the struggle to present one’s identity within unstable environmental, political, and social contexts. Diverging from traditional documentary forms, Frank uses sound, scale, repetition, and staging to record conquests and games, where representation plays a decisive and transformative role.

Gregory J. Harris is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice. Since joining the High Museum in 2016, Harris has curated more than a dozen exhibitions that consider an array of topics including social justice, the intersections of photography and self-taught art, and distinct history of photography in the South. He has grown the collection by more than two thousand photographs, including major acquisitions by Deana Lawson, Paul Graham, and Zanele Muholi, and commissions by Jim Goldberg, and An-My Lê. Harris was previously the Assistant Curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago and also held curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago. He earned a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tommy Kha, born in Memphis, Tennessee, received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is the recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo Fund, NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow. His work has been published in the "New York Times", the "New Yorker", and "Foam magazine". He has had solo shows at Higher Pictures Generation, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, and Blue Sky Gallery, and presented at Paris Photo curated by Holly Roussell. He joined Higher Pictures Generation in 2022. His first major publication, "Half, Full, Quarter", was published by Aperture in February 2023. He currently teaches at Yale School of Art, and occasionally serves as a critic in the MFA photography program. His first museum show will open at the Addison Gallery of American Art in September 2025.

José Ibarra Rizo is a Mexican American multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta. His work primarily focuses on identity, with an emphasis on the migrant experience in the American South. Rizo is the recipient of the inaugural MINT + ACP Emerging Artist Fellowship. He is one of three awardees for the 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awards and one of three winners of the 2023–24 Working Artist Project for MOCA GA. His work lives in the permanent collections of multiple museums, including the High Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum. His clients include Rolling Stone, Time, and the New York Times.

José Ibarra Rizo is a Mexican American multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta. His work primarily focuses on identity, with an emphasis on the migrant experience in the American South. Rizo is the recipient of the inaugural MINT + ACP Emerging Artist Fellowship. He is one of three awardees for the 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awards and one of three winners of the 2023–24 Working Artist Project for MOCA GA. His work lives in the permanent collections of multiple museums, including the High Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum. His clients include "Rolling Stone", "Time", and the "New York Times".