"Virtual Brown Bag:" Vernacular Photographies, Graduate Presentations with talks by Morgan Byrd and Taylor Kowgios

This Thursday at 12 o’clock noon PT, we are thrilled to host a "Virtual Brown Bag" with talks by Morgan Byrd and Taylor Kowgios, both graduate students in UArizona's Art History division. Byrd and Kowgios will present their final research projects for Dr. Jeehey Kim's graduate seminar "Vernacular Photographies," an expansive conversation about photography made for purposes other than fine art. This event is free and open to the public via Zoom here. 

12:00PT - Welcome

12:05 - 12:25 - Morgan Byrd, "Gris-Gris: How Voodoo Photographs Function as Representations of New Orleans"

12:25 - 12:45 - Taylor Kowgios, "Control of the Narrative: The Role of the Photographic Archive in Nazi Germany"

12:45 - 1PT - Q&A with Dr. Jeehey Kim, Morgan Byrd, and Taylor Kowgios 

About Morgan Byrd:

Morgan Byrd is an MA Candidate in Art History with a focus in the History of Photography at the University of Arizona. After receiving her BFA in Photography from Georgia State University in 2015, she worked for many organizations such as ART PAPERS Magazine, The Do Good Fund Photography Collection, the Atlanta Contemporary, and Marcia Wood Gallery. She has also curated several exhibitions including SPECTER, exploring the representation of death in art, at ArtLab Gallery at Columbus State University, and Creature of What You Are, the inaugural exhibition at Day & Nights Projects in Atlanta, GA. Most recently, she co-curated FEMME, an all-female exhibition in Tucson, AZ. 

About Taylor Kowgios:

Taylor Kowgios is an Art History Masters student at the University of Arizona and she is the recipient of the Graduate Assistantship in Art History and the Ellwood C. Parry III Endowed Award in Art History. Kowgios received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Lafayette College in English Literature and Art with a concentration in Photography and Art History. Graduating Summa Cum Laude, she fulfilled her undergraduate thesis in Art History while also completing an (unofficial) Studio Photography thesis. At Lafayette College, she was the recipient of the Creative and Performing Arts Scholarship in Studio Art, the Dorian Scholarship in Art History, and the Charles A. Dana Foundation Scholarship for merit-based achievement. 

About Dr. Jeehey Kim:

Jeehey Kim's research encompasses the history of photography, visual culture, and film studies in East Asia. Kim is currently working on two book projects: Imagining Korea through Photography, on the history of photography in Korea, and Photography and Death: Funerary Photo-Portraiture in East Asia. She also has been writing articles on vernacular photographic practices as well as on documentary films and visual culture in relation to the Cold War and to gender politics in East Asia. 

As a curator, Kim has organized exhibitions such as the recent “Pyongyang Bookstore,” at Seoul Metropolitan Library, which presented North Korean artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation on funerary portrait photography in East Asia. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.