Susan Mullally

What I Keep

July 6 - September 6, 2012

I collaborate with a community of difference: many races, backgrounds, and lifestyles. Many of the people have had significant disruptions in their lives, experienced periods of homelessness or incarceration, addiction to drugs or alcohol, mental illness or profound poverty and hopelessness, or just made bad decisions. They meet on Sunday mornings at Church Under the Bridge (under Interstate 35), a non-denominational, multi-cultural church that has been gathering there for eighteen years. I ask each person what he or she keeps and why it is valued. This is a collaborative project that is in its fifth year. The work includes 70 portraits with personal statements about each choice.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Susan Mullally is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received he BA from UC Berkeley, her MA from UNC Greensboro, and her MFA from UNC Chapel Hill. She lived and worked in North Carolina for 25 years, teaching at Guilford College for nine of those years, before moving to Texas to join the Baylor University Art Department faculty in 2007.

Mullally's work addresses race, class, representation, cultural identification, value, and faith. What I Keep: Portraits and Choices continues what began as an exploration of archive and value in her online virtual museum, www.myvirtualmuseum.com.

Susan Mullally’s work has been exhibited across the country and in China. Her work has appeared in Ms. Magazine, Nation, Literary Companion, The Arts Journal, Christian Science Monitor and many southern university publications. She has photographed Maya Angelou, Rosa Guy, Pauli Murray and A.R. Ammons for their book jackets for major publishers. Her portraits of Romare Bearden, Chuck Close, Philip Pearlstein, Alfred Leslie, Jacob Lawrence, Gregory Gillespie and Alan Shields are in the permanent collection of Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, NC. Mullally has produced four books and many monographs, notably, Hope & Dignity: Older Black Women of the South, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and published by Temple University Press, (1983, 1993) and What I Keep: The New Face of Homelessness and Poverty, published by Baylor University Press, (2010). Her work is part of the Special Collections of the Wake Forest University Archive and she is a MacDowell Fellow. https://www.susanmullally.com/