Silver Eye

Archives shape our understanding of the past and influence how we imagine the future. Aware of this power, the artists featured in this exhibition engage with archives to craft powerful counter-narratives. Their authored stories reveal the transformative potential of critique and reinterpretation. Their art creates space for undetermined futures while honoring ancestral lineages, kinship, and resilience.

Harrison D. Walker draws on his interests in space exploration to critique its technologies and explore the complex boundaries between visibility and invisibility, knowledge and understanding. Calista Lyon’s site-specific installation Remembering Future reflects on the industrial and ecological history of the Indigenous Box-Ironbark forest and woodland of Victoria, Australia. Savannah Wood delves into her ancestral connections to the land through filmmaking and assemblage works that unite the past, present, and future.

Raymond Thompson Jr. uses his own photographs alongside archival fragments and historical ephemera to expand narratives about the Black experience in the American landscape, restoring individual stories of survival from slavery. In a visceral critique of contemporary injustice, Andre Bradley’s Where’s Walter was created in response to the killing of Walter Scott (1965–2015) by a local police officer in North Charleston, SC. Through this interactive multimedia piece, Bradley creates a haunting depiction of police violence as told through the movement of the Black body within the contemporary American landscape.

Together, these artists offer diverse perspectives on the archive as a tool for liberation. This exhibition invites us into a space of critical reflection, encouraging empathy and a collective commitment to address seen and unseen histories.

The Archive as Liberation exhibition is co-curated with Aaron R. Turner, Assistant Professor of Art (Photography/Interdisciplinary Practice), University of Arkansas, School of Art and Director, Center for Art as Lived Experience. Turner is the author and organizer of The Archive as Liberation book publication, which will be published by Light Work (Syracuse University), where a second iteration of this project will be presented in Summer 2025.

Participating Artists

1. Andre Bradley is based in Philadelphia and uses photography, curatorial practice and publishing to explore the subjects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the Black community, race, photographic representation and narrative space. Bradley utilizes photography, installation, and experimental lectures as forms of ideological resistance that foreground lived experiences of Blackness against the background of art. Bradley graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Image Text Ithaca and the Rhode Island School of Design's photography M.F.A. programs. While at Rhode Island School of Design, he received the T.C. Colley Award for photographic excellence. While at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Bradley was named a George Ciscle Scholar in curatorial practice. Bradley's first photo-book, Dark Archives, I-41, was shortlisted for the Photo-Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles and the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First Photo Book Award.

2. Calista Lyon (she/her) is an Australian-born artist and educator based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Using a research-informed expanded photographic practice, she constructs installations, performances and community-engaged works that investigate knowledge and memory as a form of critical resistance in our time of neoliberal colonial-capitalism. In 2023, Lyon was shortlisted for the Loose Joints and Mahler & LeWitt Studios Publishing Award in Spoleto, Italy and was nominated by the Ohio Advisory Group of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC to participate in A New World: Ohio Women to Watch 2023, an exhibition touring to five venues across Ohio in 2023/24. Lyon has previously held teaching positions at the University of Denver, Kenyon College, University of Virginia and Ohio State University. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Photography & Expanded Media at the University of Arkansas.

3. 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.

4. Harrison D. Walker is an artist based in the Greater Boston area. Walker earned his MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA and his BFA in Studio Art from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Walker currently works at the Harvard Art Museums as the Manager of Studio Operations for the Digital Imaging and Visual Resources Department. Walker’s work can be found at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine and Candela Books + Gallery, Richmond, Virginia.

5. Savannah Wood Savannah Wood is an artist with deep roots in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Wood works primarily in photography, text and installation to explore how spirituality, domesticity, and our relationships to place shape our identities. Her projects reconnect people with the everyday beauty of our world and the histories that lie hidden below the surface. As the Executive Director of Afro Charities, Wood is leading the charge to increase access to the 130+-year-old AFRO American Newspapers’ extensive archives. In this role, she has shepherded the organization through a period of historic growth, initiated new programming, and attracted support from national funders including the Mellon Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Wood is a graduate cum laude of the University of Southern California. She is a 2025 Johns Hopkins University Tabb Center Public Humanities Fellow; a 2024 Blue Light Junction Artist in Residence; a member of the 2023 class of The Leadership Baltimore; a 2022 Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellow; 2022 Creative Capital finalist; and a 2019 - 2021 Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Fellow. Like four generations of ancestors before her, she lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, sharing and preserving Black stories.