Silver Eye

Join Raymond Thompson Jr. at The Lab @ Silver Eye Education Center for an informal conversation around his current ongoing project “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel”.

“It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel” is a photography project that utilizes archival fragments, historic ephemera, and his own images to focus on individual stories of slaves, maroons, and runaways whose existence is only now revealed through traces in the collective archive. This project works to expand narratives about the Black experience and our connection to the “American” landscape. This work has been guided by local historic archives of runaway slave ads, lynching news articles, Black folklore and other location-specific historical events.

Raymond Thompson Jr. exhibited his work at Silver Eye in Radial Survey Vol. 2 (2021). Work from that project has just been published as Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster (University Press of Kentucky, 2024).

Participating Artist

1. Raymond Thompson Jr. is an artist, educator and visual journalist based in Austin, TX. He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at University of Texas at Austin. He has received a MFA in Photography from West Virginia University and a MA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He also graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in American Studies. He has worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, The Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, Propublica, The Nature Conservancy, ACLU, WBEZ, Google, Merrell and the Associated Press.