THE CENTER AWARDS: Project Development Grant: Maximilian Thuemler
©Maximilian Thuemler, Self-Portrait at the Wanderer Landing Site, Jekyll Island, Georgia, 2019
Congratulations to Maximilian Thuemler for being selected for CENTER’s Project Development Grant recognizing his project, Born From the Limb. The Project Development Grant provides financial support to fine art, documentary, or photojournalistic works in progress. Assisting a photographer to help complete their project, the grant provides platforms for professional development in the work’s final stages. The Grant includes a $5,000 cash award, Professional Development Workshop Admission, Complimentary participation and presentation at Review Santa Fe, Group Exhibition of Award & Grant Winners at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts Project Publication in Lenscratch & Feature Shoot, and inclusion in the CENTER Image Library & Archive.
JUROR: Karen Irvine, Chief Curator & Deputy Director, Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago shares her thoughts on this selection:
Perhaps due to the trauma of the past two years and the current moment, the works I found to be the most interesting in the 511 applications I reviewed for CENTER’s Project Development Grant were those that addressed topics of immediate, critical importance, such as climate change, racism, the pandemic, migration, LGBTQ visibility, illness, the abuse of power, and mental health. With that in mind, I would like to start by thanking all the artists who submitted to the Grant and for sharing their creative work, which offered important views of the world that are different from what we learn from the media and other sources. Making art and putting it out in public is a gesture of generosity. Much of the work I reviewed was bold and inspiring.
For this year’s Grant, I selected the work of Maximilian Thuemler as I found his project Born From the Limb to be a riveting meditation on race in the United States. Shooting along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia “the vaguely defined point of black origin,” as the artist explains, Thuemler combines self-portraits, still lifes, archival materials, and landscapes to probe the disconnect between long-standing narratives and histories that are too often suppressed. Using his body to execute grueling and evocative performances for his camera, Thuemler underscores the tension between romanticized history, regional lore, and blemished landscapes that hold traces of violence. I could not stop thinking about this work after viewing it. His images are exquisite and spellbinding.
©Maximilian Thuemler, Libation, St. Simons Island, Georgia, 2021
Karen Irvine is Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She has organized over fifty-five exhibitions of contemporary photography at the MoCP and other venues and specializes in exhibitions with a justice focus. She has contributed her writings to numerous art magazines, anthologies, and monographs.
Maximilian Thuemler was born in Berlin, Germany and received a BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design. His work has appeared in Fraction Magazine, Tabula Rasa Magazine, Office Magazine, Ain’t Bad Magazine, and Accessible Objects among others. It is also part of the Yuko Nii Foundation Collection in Brooklyn, NY. He is a recipient of the 2021 Creator Labs Photo Fund and the 2020 Lucie Foundation Emerging Artist Scholarship, both awarded for his ongoing project Born From the Limb. He is also among the 2021 Critical Mass Top 50. Recent group exhibitions include Corona Culture at Alte Muenze in Berlin, Salon #1 at New Collectors in New York, Tabula Rasa Magazine Volume IV: Performance at Usagi NY, and Thank You, Have a Nice Day. at Galerienhaus Berlin. He is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Follow Maximilian on Instagram: @maximilianthuemler
© Miria-Sabina Maciągiewicz, Portrait of Maximilian Thuemler
Born From the Limb
Maximilian Thuemler utilizes photography and its boundless archive to engage the medium’s uniquely complex and fraught relationship to historical narratives of power, race, and recognition. The collecting and recontextualizing of archival materials forms project specific conglomerates of evidence, which interrogate historical modes of representation, while simultaneously anchoring Thuemler’s photographic image production and performative practice.
His ongoing project Born From the Limb is invested in the correlation of labor, land, and migration. Focusing on the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, the work touches ground at a vaguely defined point of black origin in the United States. Utilizing a combination of self-portraiture, still life, and landscape imagery, the pictures filter popular culture, folklore, myth, and art history in search of fragments related to the historic and contemporary narratives surrounding our understanding of blackness within the context of Americana. By referencing and reproducing found images of regional romanticism and combining them with photographic traces of a scarred landscape, the work seeks to highlight the discrepancy of local legacies. The interweaving of archival materials sets the landscape of memory inherent to the narrative of Born From the Limb and further amplifies the historic layering of space and time through which Thuemler and his audience move. The performative self-portraits reinvigorate a silent expanse of land with gestures derived from history’s Eurocentric relationship to blackness. Thuemler’s body is employed as a medium and catalyst of memory to the point of exhaustion, addressing the emblematic social and political concerns of a forgotten terrain, while reflecting on the complexities of America’s relationship to its collective past. Drawing from at times competing sources, the work understands narrative creation in spaces of omission and the presentation of splintered evidence as measures of congruent importance. While the project may focus on the narratives of specific geographies within African American coastal legacies, its broad aim is to explore the possibilities of reading and evaluating expansive image landscapes that allow for a critical assessment of official histories, archival narratives, and vernacular traditions.
©Maximilian Thuemler, Self-Portrait Topppled Over Our Back, Glynn County, Georgia, 2020
©Maximilian Thuemler, Lap of Heads, Charleston, South Carolina, 2021
©Maximilian Thuemler, Self-Portrait Wrestling Mud (Diptych), Folly Beach, South Caroline, 2018
©Maximilian Thuemler, John C. Calhoun Monument, Charleston, South Carolina, 2020
©Maximilian Thuemler, Indifferent Landscape, Charleston, South Carolina, 2021
©Maximilian Thuemler, Gadsden’s Wharf, Charleston, South Carolina, 2020
©Maximilian Thuemler, Circumambulating / Running Myself Into the Ground, Tybee Island, Georgia, 2020
©Maximilian Thuemler, Wall Arrangement (Born From the Limb), December 2021
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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)
