We Are Still Here: A Conversation with Photographers Jeremy Dennis & Ron Tarver

Explore the hidden history and continuity of Black and Native American communities, and the Black cowboy culture, hidden in plain sight around us, with two photographers. Jeremy Dennis, Shinnecock Native and founder of Ma’s House BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., and Ron Tarver, African American Guggenheim Fellow and Associate Professor at Swarthmore College, will discuss the histories of displacement and erasure and the persistence of marginalized constituencies in the American landscape.

Jeremy Dennis’s work explores indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. His photograph, I Could Stand Here All Night, 2021, featured in Order / Reorder, is from his Rise series of staged scenes that confront the ever-present history of colonization.

Ron Tarver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and Oklahoma native. His ongoing photo essay The Long Ride Home: The Black Cowboy Experience in America is a series on Black cowboys across the country that chronicles the Black identity and cowboy culture intentionally forgotten in the whitewashed American myth of the West.

This program is part of #HRMBlackHistoryMonth.

Image: Ron Tarver. David’s Last Ride, 1996. Courtesy of the artist. © Ron Tarver.

Sponsored by Art Bridges.