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Julee Holcombe and Charles Teenie Harris

Photography Exhibitions at Kayafas Gallery Open September 7

By: - Sep 01, 2012

Kayafas Kayafas Kayafas

Gallery Kayafas is pleased to present Julee Holcombe's first solo exhibit, Steel and Stones, Blood and Bones. These large scale photographs from her Homo Bulla series, architectural and figurative scapes, are digital collages of layer upon layer of assembled resonant images from many different places.

The views of construction and deterioration, ancient ruins erected in the midst of skyscrapers and monuments, or the reverse, create mystifying worlds with historical references to specific times, happenings and the human condition. Memory, recognition, fantasy, spring from this imaginative and convincing work!

Her figurative photographs, like the architectural compilations, are intriguing and mysterious, a collection of images and ideas, embracing interpretations of paintings, religious parables and modern street sensibility. She investigates contemporary cultures while mixing reality and fiction.

Holcombe resides in New Hampshire where she is an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of New Hampshire. Her work is in numerous private and corporate collectins.

A collection of rare Charles "Teenie" Harris (1908- 1998) photographs from his family's archive is on view before they are disseminated. Harris photographed in the Pittsburgh Hill District, the city's, and in many ways, the country's, cultural center for African-American urban life. He worked from the onset of WWII until the end of the Vietnam War. His black and white photographs, an archive of nearly 80,000 images, are considered to be one of the most complete visual documents of African-American society of any time.

Operating his own studio as well as freelancing for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American owned weekly, international newspaper, he worked and lived within his community with an awareness of and a mission to document its singularity and richness. Pittsburgh was a hub for professional athletes, performers, and politicians who often made the Iron City a second stop after New York City.  Harris met and photographed them all:  Cassius Clay, Joe Lewis, Jackie Robinson, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jack Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and the citizens of the Hill District.

Gallery Kayafas
(617) 482-0411
450 Harrison Ave, #37, Boston,