July 4 – September 6, 2021
Karl Baden, Edie Bresler, Bill Burke, Steven DiRado, Eliot Dudik,
Kristen Joy Emack, David Hilliard, Michael Hintlian, Stella Johnson,
Peter Kayafas, Brian McSwain, David Oxton, Harry Scales
Curated by Erin Carey
“…The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people.” – Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Inspired by the poet Walt Whitman, curator Erin Carey’s Let America is a collection of photographs which celebrate the diversity of the American experience: the toil, the triumph, the work, the hope, the dreams. From Hollywood to rural Kentucky and the shores of the eastern seaboard, Let America introduces us to disparate realities which draw parallels between generations and geography. These photographers reminds us that the story of America is being written every day: while we are mowing the lawn, buying a lottery ticket, and falling sleep on a park bench. We are the living history, the living proof, the living hope that the experiment which is America is still underway:
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
— Langston Hughes “Let America be American Again”
Erin Carey is an independent curator, educator and artist based in New England, having earned her B.A. in Art History and Criticism from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. in Studio Arts from Tufts University and SMFA Boston. She is the former Academic Director and Gallery Director at New England School of Photography, where she had the privilege of working with more than one hundred artists from around the U.S and Europe, exhibiting diverse photographic projects and collaborating on public programming with regional institutions and educators. Erin is a regular contributor to regional portfolio reviews for emerging professionals and undergrads in Boston and has been featured as a juror at Photoville’s The Fence (2016 and 2019) , Dodho Magazine of Barcelona (2020) and currently serves on the Board of Directors at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Her photographic work explores the nuances of the American landscape and its vernacular and has been exhibited regionally, in New York and online. Her most recent project, A Spring that Love Remembered, debuted in the summer of 2020 and addresses the landscape of loss and the experience of ecstatic time.