The 2024 FotoFocus Biennial activates over 100 projects at museums, galleries, universities, and public spaces throughout Greater Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Dayton and Columbus, Ohio in September 2024. Each Biennial is structured around a unifying theme; for 2024 that theme, backstories, focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance. These stories offer context for what happened previously or out of view, providing narratives not yet told or presented from a new perspective. Yet once told, they shed light on current circumstances and events.
FotoFocus welcomes global artists, curators, critics, educators, and regional visitors to Cincinnati with exhibitions, talks, performances, screenings, and panel discussions during an expanded week of programming. Featuring keynote lecture, talks and panel discussions with artists, curators, and collaborators, receptions and tours, the Biennial Program is designed to inspire conversations about the world through photography, film, and lens-based art.
A catalog of works and artist statements can be accessed here.
I Was Here
Curated by April Sunami and Marcus Morris
Artist Panel: Black Women Imagemakers September 5th, 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
A panel Discussion featuring the exhibitions Curators, April Sunami and Marcus Morris in conversation with Janet George, Nina (Nine) Wells, Marissa Stewart and Alexis McCrimmon.
Opening Reception September 5th, 6:00 to 8:00 pm
About the exhibition
I Was Here is an exhibition of work by emerging and underrepresented lens-based artists, curated by April Sunami and Marcus Morris (Photography, 2011). This exhibition at Columbus College of Art & Design’s Beeler Gallery, 60 Cleveland Ave. is on view Thursday, Sept. 5–Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024 as part of the FotoFocus Biennial: backstories. I Was Here brings together the diverse mediums of photography, video, performance, collage and mixed media to explore the essential act of image-making and storytelling.
“I—(or a specific name)—was here” is a familiar declaration inscribed on the walls of shared spaces, from bathroom stalls to park benches to, yes, even gallery walls, marking a person’s time and presence in a specific place. In 2024, in a social and political climate in which complicated histories revolving around Black people face the threat of erasure, we find that sharing stories through the lens of Black creators and cultural producers is especially critical. In I Was Here, declare their presence as they delve into the myriad ways of being and of existing in our ever-complicated society. Through this perspective, artists in I Was Here offer insights on disability, gender and sexual identity, survival, imagination, aging, ancestry, community, and more. Much of the Columbus-based artists’ work in I Was Here was created for the exhibition.
Several of the Columbus-based FotoFocus presentations, including that at CCAD, are influenced by the life and work of the Harlem-based, Detroit-born artist Ming Smith. In I Was Here, curators Sunami and Morris aim for the art in the exhibition to evoke her perspective of “celebrating the struggle, the survival and finding grace in it.”
Featuring:
Dejiah Archie-Davis | Asa Featherstone | Janet George | Ira Graham | Terrence Hammonds | Iyana Hill | Asha Imani | Magnus Juliano | Alexis McCrimmon | Ky Smiley | Marissa Nicole Stewart | Tariq Tarey | Akeylah Wellington | Nina Wells | Lyn Logan Grimes |