Tue, Jun 18, 2024,67:30
The Lab @ Silver Eye Education Center
5228 Penn Avenue, #201
Pittsburgh, PA 15224
Meet and Greet
Meet and Greet with Raymond Thompson Jr.
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
Raymond Thompson Jr. is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and visual journalist based in Austin, TX. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic journey includes an MFA in Photography from West Virginia University, an MA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and a degree in American Studies from the University of Mary Washington. Raymond explores how race, memory, representation, and place combine to shape the Black environmental imagination of the North American landscape. He won the 1619 Aftermath Grant (2023) and the 2021 Lenscratch Student Prize (2021). Raymond has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions, including the Fotofest Biennial - Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2022-23 (2024). His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Raymond is the author of Appalachian Ghost, published in 2024 by the University Press of Kentucky.