Sheila Pree Bright
Sheila Pree Bright is an acclaimed fine-art photographer known for her photographic series Young Americans, Plastic Bodies, and Suburbia. She received national attention shortly after earning her M.F.A. in Photography from Georgia State University, and describes herself in the art world as a visual cultural producer portraying large-scale works that combine a wide-range of contemporary culture. In recent years, Bright has documented responses to police shootings in Atlanta, Ferguson, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. She observed young social activists taking a stand against the same struggles their parents and grandparents endured during the era of Jim Crow. In 2013, while photographing under-recognized living leaders of the Civil Rights movement, she made a connection between today’s times and the climate of the 1960s that inspired her #1960Now project. Bright’s current and most ambitious project to date, #1960Now, examines race, gender, and generational divides to raise awareness of millennial perspectives on civil and human rights. #1960Now is a photographic series of emerging young leaders affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Bright’s work is included in the book and exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture (Deborah Willis, W. W. Norton, 2009). Bright’s photographs appeared in the 2014 feature-length documentary Through the Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (Director: Thomas Allen Harris). Venues that featured her work include the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Smithsonian Anacostia Museum, Washington, DC; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; FotoFest, Houston; and the Leica Gallery in New York. She is the recipient of several awards including the Santa Fe Prize (2006), and her work is included in numerous private and public collections, to name a few; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, Oppenheimer Collection: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland, KS, National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, GA, Library of Congress, Washington, DC and the University of Georgia, Athen, GA. Bright #1960Now series is now in the collection of the Smithsonian African American History and Culture Museum, Washington, DC and The Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta GA. Also, she is featured in the documentary film Election Day: Lens Across America in which seven photographers on Election Day 2016, captured images from different vantage points across America.
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