College of Arts and Architecture
School of Visual Arts
PHOTOGRAPHY
LONNIE GRAHAM
Assistant Professor of Art & Integrative Arts
Lonnie Graham is presently a Professor of Fine Arts at Pennsylvania State University and an instructor of special programs at the Barnes Foundation in Marion Pennsylvania. He acts as a visiting instructor of Graduate Studies at San Francisco Art Institute. He is formerly a Visiting Professor at Haverford College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mr. Graham was Curator in Residence for Three Rivers Arts Festival, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for a number of years. Graham also serves in the capacity of an active site visitor for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Formerly, Mr. Graham was director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, an arts organization dedicated to the educational development of disadvantaged urban youth. During his tenure at Manchester he developed a project driven after school Photography program using innovative pilot projects merging the Arts and Academics. One such project led to the development of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild Arts Collaborative; an interactive program between public schools and community organizations. First Lady Hillary Clinton visited these projects, which have now been officially sited by The White House as a National Model for Education. His efforts also contributed to the development of the CDC/ARI, (Community Development Corporation/Arts Resource Initiative); a multi-million dollar multi-year project funded by the Ford Foundation.
Graham attended Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and took advanced degrees at San Francisco Art Institute.
Social and political concerns have won him major commissions including one from Three Rivers Arts Festival, entitled the African/American Garden Project. That project involves a physical and cultural exchange of disadvantaged urban single mothers, an elderly African-American community, and farmers from the small farming village in Muguga, Kenya. This project garnered multiple years of funding and enlisted a number of local and international artists to continue work building urban subsistence gardens with this population.
In 1997 Mr. Graham was awarded another major commission for travel to Papua New Guinea through the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia to document the harvest of the Woowoosi tree used in the production of Tapa cloth that is fashioned into ceremonial dress and used as traditional currency by the Maisen tribes people. The Maisen have successfully blocked the efforts of foreign logging companies to win over their property rights, and have chosen to support themselves by maintaining traditional values rooted in an ancient lifestyle.
In 1998 Mr. Graham was invited by the Fairmont Park Art Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to submit a proposal to address the needs of a blighted urban community with revitalization through the arts, cultural activities and various entrepreneurial ventures. Lonnie was then awarded the commission in the year 2000, and an Artist as Catalyst grant, administered by The Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation in 2001, to support to this project
In 1999, he returned from Kampala, Uganda where he had been invited to conduct workshops in photography at The Makerere University, Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts.
In the year 2000 the first of four students received a fellowship established at North Carolina University at Chapel Hill by Graham when he returned his honorarium as part of an installation and lecture done there regarding the role of the responsible artist in today's culture. The purpose of this fellowship is to help young artists develop a social conscience demonstrated through community and cultural activism in the arts.
In 2001 Mr. Graham was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina to produce an international work addressing the arts and education. The result was a project entitled Enlightenment, Acknowledgement and Memorlization. The triptych was installed on three sites in the greater Charleston area.
The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania contacted Mr. Graham and commissioned a piece to be produced in modern media to accompany the ‘Without Sanctuary’ exhibition appearing in that Museum
Currently, Graham is active in efforts with a team of artists to build a Community Altar that will be housed at the Art Sanctuary in north Philadelphia.
Most recently Mr. Graham was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
In addition, Mr. Graham was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust Travel Grant for travels to Ghana, and is a three time Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship winner. He has also been nominated as a Dupont Fellow, and for the Cal Arts-Alpert Award in the Arts. Mr. Graham was also awarded the 1999 Creative Achievement award by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, in Pittsburgh, PA.
Mr. Graham has been included as a point of reference in the Colliers Encyclopedia.
His photo credits include co-authorship of the book, Thaddeus Mosley, African American Sculptor. Other credits include work for The National Endowment for the Arts and The Ford Foundation. Mr. Graham has designed a number of limited editions and catalogues, including an edition of his own work produced in photogravure entitled, Friendship, Strength, and Vitality. Graham also designed the catalogue for the exhibition, Countdown to Eternity, photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King by Ben Fernandez. These and other small press and rare book titles reside in local and national collections including the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the collection of the Schomberg Center in New York.
Among the exhibitions to his credit is an installation, which was featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Institution has now acquired a number of images and artifacts for circulation in their traveling exhibitions. Graham's work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington, Delaware and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.
GALLERY OF ARTWORK
