CENTER AWARDS: Exhibitors Choice: Jennifer Greenburg
©Jennifer Greenburg, Diving off the shores of Lake Michigan, 2012
Congratulations to Jennifer Greenburg for her third place win in CENTER’s Exhibitors Choice Awards. Her continuing series, Revising History, allows her to visit the past as she inserts herself into vernacular photographs. As she states, “My intervention in these found vernaculars is how I hope the series engages the audience in a conversation about the way we interpret the media, record personal memories, and establish collective history”. Currently, Jennifer has a solo exhibition at jdc Fine Art in San Diego, CA running through May 28, 2016, curated by Jennifer DeCarlo.
Jennifer Greenburg is an Associate Professor at Indiana University Northwest.She holds an MFA from The University of Chicago and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Hyde Park Art Center, The Print Center, and many other places. Greenburg’s work has been included in numerous national and international group exhibitions. Light Work awarded her an Artist in Residency in 2005. Her work is part of the permanent collections of Light Work, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Photographic Arts. Jennifer Greenburg’s monograph, The Rockabillies, was published by the Center for American places in 2009
©Jennifer Greenburg, I’ve never been good at handling unwarranted attention, 2015
EXHIBITOR’S CHOICE: Juror’s Statement
Rixon Reed, Director & Founder, Photo-eye Gallery, Photo-eye Bookstore
The overall quality of the submissions to Center’s Awards this year made it extremely challenging to choose only three bodies of work for the new Exhibitions Choice Awards. Each of the following projects could easily capture a viewer’s attention and spark their imagination when shown in galleries or on museum walls. In Reviving History, Jennifer Greenburg seamlessly inserts pictures of herself into old family photos lending a little humor to our troubling times. It’s a new kind of fantasy performance art that is deftly done.
These artists are smart in their approaches and have conceptually and aesthetically compelling projects. It’s work that can be returned to again and again. Additionally, I’d like to acknowledge the following artists whose work I also found particularly engaging, thus making it difficult to narrow it down to three primary choices. Michael Courvoisier, Alejandro Durán, Klaus Enrique, Jennifer Greenburg, John Hathaway, Kevin Horan, Isabel Magowan, Ben Marcin, Justyna Mielnikiewicz, Jessica Eve Rattner, J.P. Terlizzi and Marta Zgierska.
©Jennifer Greenburg, I have always preferred my own birthday, 2015
Revising History is a study on photography, the nature of the vernacular image, and its role in creating cultural allegories. The work intends to create a dialogue about the photograph as simulacrum- the moment versus the referent. To engage these layered truths I replace the central figure in found midcentury (1940’s –1960’s) vernacular photographs with an image of myself. In doing so I effectively hijack the memory and create a “counterfeit” image. Most do not stop to think about the ubiquitous nature of the camera or the impact of pictures, but snapshots now intervene in almost every aspect of life – the pinnacle and the banal. The danger in this is we seem to have forgotten that the picture liberates the moment from reality, erases vantage, and is inevitable susceptible to co-opted or underwritten fantasy.
©Jennifer Greenburg, I was not the thinnest, nor the prettiest, but I was the winner! 2015
Early works in Revising History speak to idealized moments. I become something of a period heroine graduating from finishing school, singing at a St. Patrick’s Day party, performing a perfect swan dive, and more. Recent additions to the series begin to break these conventions, and include awkward moments or point to historical oversight. Mid-century America is often idealized as a purer, simpler time, when it ought to be remembered for its inequity and stirring unrest. Images help us remember selectively, and the myth around the period perpetuates, in part, via collective vernacular contributions.
©Jennifer Greenburg, When they lifted me on to the piano, I had no choice but to oblidge, 2016
My studies of vernacular photography lead me to conclude that we share nearly identical visual narratives. Documented moments are parallel if not nearly identical. I have further discovered that conventions of composition, lighting, and expression are closely followed without much variation. If such visual conventions underpin vernacular photographs, then it is reasonable to infer that the end result is not particularly unique to the person or place represented within the image. The end result is merely a duplicate of all other similar image-types. It is as if we are making these images to prove not only existence but also to testify belonging, happiness, and our accomplishments. However, these images prove our conformity more than our uniqueness. The purpose of transforming the “originals” is to underline existing and universally understood allegories. The creation of the “counterfeit” transmogrifies the “original” into an iconic symbolization of a type of moment. My intervention in these found vernaculars is how I hope the series engages the audience in a conversation about the way we interpret the media, record personal memories, and establish collective history.
©Jennifer Greenburg, Napping with Floyd, 2011
©Jennifer Greenburg, My coworker was always jealous of my blonde hair, 2013
©Jennifer Greenburg, Two years later, I was drunk enough to sing at the St. Pat’s Party. How embarrassing! 2014
©Jennifer Greenburg, Of course we all wanted to look like Peggy Castle at the Wagon West party, 2014
©Jennifer Greenburg, My dreams came true the day I did hair for a fashion show, 2013
©Jennifer Greenburg, It was finally my day! 2015
©Jennier Greenburg, Something funny happened in the kitchen, 2011
©Jennifer Greenburg, My funeral, 2012
©Jennifer Greenburg, Our first joint task as a married couple, 2013
©Jennifer Greenburg, Sadie Cohen was upset that I got to model in the Hasassah fashion show. She didn’t speak to me for weeks! 2015
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
