Photographers in the Garden: In conversation with with Lonnie Graham

Since the invention of the medium, photographers have been drawn by the allure of flowers. This group exhibition is excerpted from the book The Photographer in the Garden, co-published by Aperture and the George Eastman Museum, celebrating the rich history of artists working in the garden as a site of inspiration and reinvention.

During the course of the exhibition, the museum is proud to present a series of virtual panel discussions. This is the first of four panel discussions.

–

In Conversation with Lonnie Graham on Community Gardens

Lonnie Graham is a Pew Fellow and Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is former director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an urban arts organization dedicated to arts and education for at risk youth. There, Graham developed innovative pilot projects merging Arts and Academics, which were ultimately cited by, then, First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education.

In 1996 Graham was commissioned to create the “African/American Garden Project,” which provided a physical and cultural exchange of disadvantaged urban single mothers in Pittsburgh, and farmers from Muguga, a small farming village in Kenya, to build a series of urban subsistence gardens.

Lonnie Graham is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant for travel to Ghana and is a four time Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship recipient.

His book “A Conversation with the World,” has been published by Datz press in Seoul, Korea.That project seeks to reveal our common humanity through interviews conducted by Professor Graham with individuals through out the world.

Other exhibitions include an exhibition of photographs at Goethe Institute, Accra Ghana; an exhibition of collaborative portraiture in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of works at Kulttuurivoimala, Culture Silo, Meri-Toppila, Oulu, Finland, a full scale reproduction of one of the educational galleries in the Barnes Foundation shown at La Maison de Etat-Unis, Paris, France, an exhibition of larger than life photographs at the Toyota City Museum in Aichi, Japan as well as a room sized installation featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Graham’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery for American Art in Andover, MA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA.