Join us for Let’s Talk when Atlanta based artists Sheila Pree Bright, Jill Frank and Jerry Siegel discuss process and engagement with their photographic subjects in Facing Y’all: Inclusion Through the Lens on view at Spruill Gallery on Tuesday, October 3 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

Let’s Talk: Photographer Bios

Sheila Pree Bright

Sheila Pree Bright is an acclaimed International Photographic Artist who portrays large-scale works that combine a broad range of knowledge of contemporary culture. She is known for her series #1960Now, Invisible Empire, Suburbia, Plastic Bodies, and Young Americans.

Bright is the author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protest, published by Chronicle Books. Her work is also included in the book and exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture. She appeared in the 2014 feature-length documentary Through the Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People and the 2016 feature-length documentary film Election Day: Lens Across America.

Her series has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada; The Leica Gallery, New York; Turner Contemporary, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; The Gallatin Gallery, New York; and the International Center of Photography, New York. The Washington Post and the New York Times have featured her work.

Bright received several nominations and awards, among them a recent commission for Picturing the South by the High Museum of Art, The Aftermath Project and the Artadia grant. In 2006, she gained national recognition when she won the Center Prize Award (ne. Santa Fe Prize) for her Suburbia series. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; The Library of Congress, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, GA; The David C. Driskell Center, College Park, MD; Center Photography, Columbia College, Chicago; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Harns Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL; Telfair Museums, Savannah and the Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA.

Jill Frank

Atlanta-based artist and educator, Jill Frank currently serves an Associate Professor of Photography at Georgia State University. Reviews of Frank’s work are published in Art Forum, Art in America, and The Paris Review. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia have presented her work in solo exhibitions.

Working primarily in photography and video, Frank explores the ideologies and aesthetics that shape teenage life. Her large-scale photographs and sound/video installations reveal the struggle to present one’s identity within unstable environmental, political, and social contexts. Diverging from traditional documentary forms, she often uses sound, scale, repetition and staging to record conquests and games, where representation plays a decisive and transformative role. Frank earned an MFA in Studio Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Photography from Bard College.

Jerry Siegel

Jerry Siegel (1958) was born and raised in Selma, AL. Siegel graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta and was awarded the Grand Prize for Atlanta’s first Artadia Award. Since the mid-1980s, he has successfully maintained a commercial photography studio while finding time to pursue his passion working on personal projects.

Siegel’s first monograph, FACING SOUTH, Portraits of Southern Artists, was published by the University of Alabama Press and features portraits of 100 Southern artists. This body of work has been featured in 6 solo museum exhibitions in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.

His second book, Black Belt Color, published by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, GA, focuses his attentions on documenting the unique, cultural landscape of the Black Belt region of Alabama.

Siegel’s on-going series of Drag Artists, REVEAL, will be at the LSU Museum in Baton Rouge, LA, September 1, 2023.

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta, The Telfair Museum, Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, GA, Montgomery Museum of Art in Montgomery, AL, The Morris Museum in Augusta, GA, The Jule Collins Smith Museum in Auburn, AL, and The Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL. A commissioned body of work for the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia, was featured in the exhibition Now and Then, Snapshots of the South. Many private, corporate, and public collections, including the High Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Georgia Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Birmingham Museum of Art, the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center for the Arts, The Morris Museum in Augusta and many other Southeastern U.S. Museums feature his works.