The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (TCVA) is excited to announce the finalists for this year’s upcoming 22nd Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition (AMPC) exhibition. With over 500 images submitted by 76 artists, jurors selected 47 photographs to embody the theme “Making Kin: Belonging & Longing in Appalachia”.
This year’s exhibition was juried by Frances Bukovsky and Susan Patrice of Kinship Photography Collective. Through their call for entry, they were looking for “photographs and projects that show [them] how Appalachia has shaped sense[s] of kinship and belonging,” and were “…especially interested in images and projects that honor diverse roots, complex connections, and entangled relationships.”
Bukovsky, Rivergifts
Exhibition Statement
Making Kin: Belonging & Longing in Appalachia
What does it mean to belong somewhere? In Making Kin: Belonging & Longing in Appalachia, we asked photographers to show us how Appalachia shapes their sense of kinship and belonging. From across the full range of Appalachia, the artists featured here offer us moments of tenderness, resilience, and connection. Belonging is found by the rivers, in the woods, at the ancestral kitchen table, within the midst of wild-crafted families, and in the murky relationships between complicated bodies.
Belonging does not come easily and equally for everyone. Longing alone can fuel action, revolution, and change. For some, belonging becomes a dynamic and unfolding event that shifts, retreats, and advances. Sometimes, what is shared between us is painful; bearing witness takes place in silence. And sometimes sharing is so exquisitely beautiful that it defies description. As each photographer in this exhibition brings to bear their own unique qualities of creative attention, belonging echoes with luminous grace, inviting us to reimagine and broaden what it means to love.
Informed by the land and the human and more-than-human beings who live within these mountains, these photographs connect the intimately personal to the regional, inviting us to remember that Appalachia shapes us as much as we shape Appalachia.
Together, we invite you to contemplate the braided beauty of this region, the land that holds and nourishes, the complicated histories that we carry with us, the storms and floods that have shaped and devastated land and communities alike, and the intricate and tender bonds of kinship that carry us forward into the future of Appalachia.
Jurors, Susan Patrice and Frances Bukovsky of Kinship Photography Collective
Finalists
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Marcus Morris Eliza Bell Schweizbach Abigail Fritsch Alex Cox Alicia Green Ariel Shumaker-Hammond Barron Northrup Cary Hitchcock Dani Fresh Edward Williams Elizabeth Williams Erik Mace Eva Buckner Heather Cormons Isabelle Green Jesse Barber Julie Rae Powers |
Kaoly Gutierrez Kaye Savage Kelsey Ris0 Ken Barrett Laura Rudkin-Miniot Liz Lasine Lou Murrey Lynne Buchanan Marie Bongiovanni Mars Johnson Randy Redman Reed Mattison Reuben Van Hoeve Ricardo Tejeda Robert Seevers |
About the Jurors
Frances Bukovsky (they/them) is a photographer who is interested in the relationships between bodies, places, and identities, particularly within the context of chronic illness, disability, and queerness. Bukovsky was born in upstate New York and earned a BFA with honors from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2018. Since then, their work has been featured in institutions such as UC Irvine’s College of Health Sciences, The Bascom: A Center for the Arts, UGA’s Circle Gallery, and the United Nations HQ in New York City. Bukovsky is a co-founder of Kinship Photography Collective as well as a member of Women Photograph. They reside in Marshall, North Carolina. IG: @frances_bukovsky
Susan Patrice is a documentary photographer and interdisciplinary artist. Her photography and public installations focus on the Appalachian and Southern landscape and its people and feature intimate images that touch deeply into questions of place and belonging. Since 2016, her work has primarily explored the nature of visual perception and its impact on our feelings of connection and kinship with the natural world. Here, she engages in intimate gestural conversations with the land through the use of handbuilt cameras designed in response to place. She lives in Marshall, NC, where she is the director of Makers Circle and a co-founder of the Kinship Photography Collective. IG: @susanpatrice & @kinshipphotographycollective
Elizabeth Williams, “Mom and the Magnolia Tree”
Elk Mace, “Belief in the Present, Faith in the Future”
Ricardo Tejeda, “Clingmans Dome Extensive Green”
Eliza Bell Schweizbach, “Gravida 1”
Marcus Morris, “Elegance Is Refusal:Disappearing Acts”
Sarah Pfohl, “Spruce Before Mother,” 2013
The 22nd AMPC exhibition will open Friday, February 7, 2025 with a public reception that evening. People’s Choice voting will take place in-person in the gallery, and the winner will be announced at the private Awards Reception on March 22, 2025, along with the Juror’s awards of:
Best in Show
Best Single-Image
Best Series
The exhibition will be on view through May 3, 2025. Kinship Photography Collective will host a virtual practice group centered around the theme of “Making Kin” led by the jurors while the exhibition is on view (dates TBD).
Additionally, this year’s AMPC is partnering with the Appalachian Journal who will be publishing a special visual arts issue highlighting important work by Appalachian artists and researchers. This year’s AMPC jurors, as well as a selected artist from the exhibition will be featured in the journal alongside a transcription of a panel discussion held in 2021 with Appalachian photographers Clarissa Sligh, lydia see, and Megan King. Jurors Susan Patrice and Frances Bukovsky, joined by a selected 22nd AMPC photographer, will participate in an ARTtalk and panel discussion at the Turchin Center on April 4, 2025 – First Friday, followed by a reception for the release of the Appalachian Journal.
The Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition is made possible through the generous sponsorship of the Mast General Store with additional support from Appalachian Voices, Virtual Blue Ridge, Bistro Roca, the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Footsloggers Outfitters, Peabody’s, Stickboy Bread.
