EYE TO EYE Photographs and Projects by MARY BETH MEEHAN Digital Catalog - WaterFire Providence
▻https://waterfire.org/about-the-waterfire-arts-center/exhibitions/eye-to-eye-photographs-and-projects-mary-beth-meehan-digital-catalog
The photographic gaze has been much dissected by critics and theorists. Our media-saturated social world is awash daily in casual imagery that vanishes as quickly as it arises.
Yet photography in the hands of an engaged artist can be transcendent – a silver mirror to the soul. Meehan’s photographs are the result of her radical purpose, a sincere and thoughtful engagement with the people around her, and the revelations that come from such a committed outlook. Her concern over the past two decades has been to examine her own preconceptions and to urge us into a new regard for one another – across differences of race, class, culture, or religion. Reflected in this process we are able to see ourselves more clearly.
Meehan has spent her career working in American communities, engaging them as ecosystems of interdependent individuals, often challenging the dominant narratives that valorize and celebrate a few and erase and deny the many. Meehan’s stunning portraits allow each of us to behold one another – in the formal sense of the word ‘behold,’ to see a person anew, with a kind, active and attentive regard – with the intention of achieving understanding and sharing respect. In essence, coming Eye to Eye with one another.
The WaterFire Arts Center is pleased to present work from all four of Meehan’s most recent in-depth projects – from Brockton, Massachusetts, to Providence, Rhode Island, to Newnan, Georgia, to her newest project and book on Silicon Valley, California. In these times of a much needed re-examination of our society’s failure to assure equity and justice for all, we hope these portraits can contribute to this important on-going conversation. The WaterFire Arts Center will be producing a series of talks and community discussions that will extend and amplify the ethos and impact of Mary Beth Meehan’s photographs and projects.
In 2011 in her hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts, Meehan began installing her work as large-scale banners right in the public square to prompt dialogue and engagement among the people who share space together. These public art projects continued here in Providence with a large-scale collaboration with the Providence Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism, and in Newnan, Georgia, at the invitation of the University of West Georgia. Her most recent banner was just installed in Providence in collaboration with Jessica “The Lady J” Brown, For Freedoms, and the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. We are pleased to include a sampling of her original banners here.
“Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America,” in collaboration with Fred Turner, has just be