About this Exhibit

About this Exhibit

COVID-19 is the first worldwide pandemic in most people’s living memory. It has upended lives and presented unique challenges that continue even as vaccines offer hope for a more normal future. These challenges call out to artists who respond to this pandemic in multifaceted visions, reflecting how individuals and societies have responded in various ways and with differing coping skills.

Illustrating their divergent perspectives and practices, this exhibit presents four photographers from Nashville, Tennessee, USA, each with a solid foundation in photojournalism. 

Dawn Majors has worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Tennessean. She is currently with the State of Tennessee Photographic Services. Her images for this exhibit are timeless moments created with a cell phone as observed in the quotidian living of daily life, and presented in triptychs of visual poetry, offering observations and juxtapositions that invite the observer to participate in their interpretation.

John Partipilo is a veteran of The Tennessean and numerous other publications. His compelling documentary images cover the gamut of the pandemic experience in Middle TN, from church and family, to the explosive unrest of social justice protests, to state politics, the dedication of health care workers, and finally, the hope that comes from the vaccine rollout.

Joon Robin Powell has photographed for dozens of publications, including the New York Times and The Tennessean. Her photographs in this exhibit are drawn exclusively from her year at home with her children and immediate family as they navigated life in isolation, engaging with nature, making art and ritual, and carving out quiet experiences marked by light and shadow, all presented in diptychs that suggest the existence of unspoken truths and unseen mysteries. 

Bill Steber is also a veteran of The Tennessean. His approach to the pandemic has been to make portraits of his family and community using 19th-century photographic processes that require immense time and patience, linking past and present. During the time in isolation and lockdown, he has found the elasticity of time itself has become a subject and continuing presence in our daily lives.