MOCA GA / Sheila Pree Bright

Sheila Pree Bright: 1960Now

2014/2015 Working Artist Project (WAP)
Opening Reception: September 25, 2015 at 7:00 pm
Exhibition dates: September 26 – November 28, 2015
Artist Talk: November 19, 2015 at 7:00 pm | reception at 6:30 pm

MOCA GA 2014/2015 Working Artist Project selected by Siri Engberg, Senior Curator of Visual Arts Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Click here to see more work by Sheila Pree Bright in the MOCA GA Permanent Collection.

Over the past decade, Sheila Pree Bright has probed American culture through her incisive use of portrait photography in both gallery and public settings. Her latest photographic project—her most ambitious to date—celebrates a generation of leaders from Atlanta and elsewhere in the American south who became the catalyst for social change in the early 1960s. Sheila Pree Bright now is an award-winning fine-art photographer nationally known for her photographic series Young Americans, Plastic Bodies and Suburbia. Bright received national attention shortly after earning a M.F.A. in Photography from Georgia State University in 2003. She was awarded the Center Prize from the Santa Fe Center of Photography for Suburbia in 2006. In the art world, Bright is described as a “cultural Anthropologist” portraying large-scale works that combine a wide range of contemporary culture. Late 2013, she went viral on Huffington Post for her Plastic Bodies series, which was featured as a trending topic on the publication’s Art and Culture page. Plastic Bodies also appeared in an important documentary Through the Lens Darkly, which explores the important role of black photographers. The indie art documentary premiered at Sundance film festival January 2014.

Bright’s most current work, 1960Now evolved from Bright’s public art series 1960Who, a street art gallery showing epic-sized portraits of unknown youth leaders of the 1960s who where members of the Civil Rights Movement, but not widely known. The series launched 4 years ago in Atlanta which received national attention as it was covered by Huffington Post in 2013. Bright placed larger than life portraits of young people of the 1960’s on walls in downtown Atlanta. The portraits showed faces of HBCU members of the Atlanta Student Movement and Freedom Riders from Atlanta to Connecticut.