What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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JANUARY 29-FEBRUARY 4, 2023 WHAT'S UP! 9 FAQ 'Andrew Kilgore: 100 Photographs' WHEN — Through March 19; gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday-Friday and one hour before most perfor- mances WHERE — Joy Pratt Markham Gallery at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville COST — Free INFO — waltonartscenter.org; private tours may be scheduled by emailing visualarts@waltonartscenter.org BONUS — There will be a conversation with Kilgore at 6 p.m. Feb. 26, in Joy Pratt Markham Gallery. This conver- sation is free and open to the public. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS — This project is supported in part by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Exhibition underwriters are Hershey and Denise Garner. "Sunrise," the photograph that Andrew Kilgore calls the "signature piece" in the current "Andrew Kilgore: 100 Photographs" exhibit at WAC, was taken during the time he was in Austin, Texas, "working on a special project with institutionalized children who were both blind and medically diagnosed with what at the time was termed 'severe mental retardation' in the state school for people with developmental disabilities," he remembers. "I started taking my camera out and photographing the kids." (Courtesy Images/Andrew Kilgore) This image is from "Arkansas people" in 1986. Austin, Texas, in 1969, and the trajectory of his artistic career was set. "I was working on a special project with institutionalized children who were both blind and medically diagnosed with what at the time was termed 'severe mental retardation' in the state school for people with developmental disabilities," Kilgore remembers. "I started taking my camera out and photographing the kids. Two of those pictures are in this exhibition. One of them is the signature piece." In 1971, following his stay in Austin, Kilgore was on his way to San Francisco, the Arkansas Encyclopedia chronicles, and stopped in Fayetteville to visit friends. "I came here by accident, but after I was here for about six months I sat down and made a very deliberate choice to stay here and spend my life and career here," the Encyclopedia quotes Kilgore as saying. "I knew it might not have the rewards of a broader reputation as a photographer but that it would give me a great deal of freedom and a population of people that I had really come to love and respect. "My first few years in Fayetteville, I was an itinerant hippie," he adds in an interview for this story. "In 1973, I was hired to teach photography in the art department at the University. I was fired from that job in 1977 because I had never taken any art courses when I was in college. So they hired somebody who had a degree in it. I started working on a special project called the Fayetteville Townsfolk Portfolio Project in 1976. That was when I began to develop my particular way of photographing people." His projects, according to the Encyclopedia, have also included "We Drew a Circle," consisting of 80 images of the developmentally disabled, funded by Stephens Inc. and the National Endowment for the Humanities and exhibited around the nation; "Keeping In Touch," which was a project for the Arkansas AIDS Foundation; "Arkansas People," a project for the Arkansas Sesquicentennial in 1986, spawning a book of the same name; "Healing Changes," a series of images of the mentally ill; and "Community Meals (A Reluctance to Engage)," a series of photographs of the homeless/jobless in which Kilgore exchanged a $20 bill for the right to take a subject's photograph. "His cumulative work fosters a sense of belonging for all who sat in front of his camera and those who view the resulting photographs," says WAC spokeswoman Jennifer Wilson. "[And] in planning for the exhibition, our team realized that adding an audio component would bring the pictures of these individuals to life. We knew several of the people in the pictures had been featured in KUAF stories, and we thought giving KUAF the opportunity to talk to Andrew about several of the photos in the exhibit would give people a chance to hear from him directly. So we partnered with KUAF for this show." See Kilgore Page 39