The Center Awards: Director’s Choice 2nd Place Winner: Tara Cronin
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Every 3 Months
Congratulations to Tara Cronin for her Second Place win in CENTER’S Director’s Choice Award for her project, Thens. The Choice Awards recognize outstanding photographers working in all processes and subject matter. Images can be singular or part of a series. Winners receive admission to Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews and participation in a winner’s exhibition at Pictura Gallery in Bloomington, IN.
Monica Allende, Artistic Director, Getxo Photo and Independent Curator shares her insights:
I have been very impressed by the overall quality of the submissions. The works represented a wide range of visual narratives, conceptual perspectives and thought processes. It was inspiring to see stories artistically reframing topics at the core of human inquiry and quotidianity contributing to their originality.
The winner “The Maria Project” by Lesia Maruschak is a visual response to the Holodomor in Ukraine where millions died of famine in 1932-33 following the implementation of Stalin’s agricultural policies. Maruschak’s work reflects on the visual memory of history, and the role of the artist in the decolonization of narratives which are critical issues in photography debate.
It has been an enriching experience to discover previously unknown works which are now firmly included in my knowledge vault.
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Gauze and Tape and Time
Monica Allende is an independent curator, consultant, strategist and educator. She is the Artistic Director of GetxoPhoto Photo Festival and Landskrona Foto Festival she has collaborated with WeTransfer as a Creative Producer and Consultant, she was the director of FORMAT17 International Photography Festival, she collaborated with Screen Projects and is producing and curating several multidisciplinary projects with artists and digital platforms worldwide.
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Counting Vials
Thens
For nearly a century, within psychiatric and medical establishments, members of the LGBTQ community were characterized within the psychiatric diagnostic manual, the DSM, as mentally ill, and treated as such by the community at large. I myself, have also been characterized as mentally ill, and have suffered through a number of the same mental institutions which were once used to house members of the LGBTQ community.
This project highlights the history of mischaracterizing LGBTQ members as mentally ill, psychotic, unstable, unhinged, and “crazy” so that society can remember what this community had to struggle through to reach their current status of equality.
It also touches on the winding road of any healing process and addresses the societal stigmas toward real mental instability, further obstructing individuals from finding their path toward a peace.
©Tara Cronin, Thens – LostTara
Tara Anne Cronin is an artist and writer focusing on photography, works on paper, installation and book-arts. She received a BA in Writing from New School University, an MFA from the International Center of Photography (ICP)/Bard Program, and has Twice-earned the ICP Director’s Fellowship Award.
Having exhibited throughout New York City, North America and internationally, recent exhibitions include a group show at Foley Gallery in New York, NY with PDN Magazine in 2016, a group show at the Kahilu Theatre in Waimea, HI, in 2018, and placing as a Finalist in the FRESH 2018 prize with Klompching Gallery in DUMBO, NY. Tara recently was awarded 2nd Place for the Director’s Choice Award 2019 with CENTER at Santa Fe.
Tara and her partner Ed took on the oldest Organically Certified Kona coffee farm in 2015 to apply their agricultural technology and she is now a coffee roaster and farmer as well. She sits on the board of directors of the Society for Kona’s Education and Art and has helped teach with International Center of Photography, Donkey Mill Art Center on Big Island, HI, and also is a member of Donkey Mill’s Exhibitions Committee.
Tara is nomadic, working between New York, New Jersey, and primarily in Hawai’i in the United States.
©Tara Cronin, Thens – 4AM
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Tracing
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Safe
©Tara Cronin, Thens – 6 Hours
©Tara Cronin, Thens – 30 Days
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Entry
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Self Portrait 2001
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Since
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Just
©Tara Cronin, Thens – 445AM
©Tara Cronin, Thens – Notetaking
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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)
