May 8, 2021 through June 12, 2021
The Portland Museum and Kentucky Humanities in 2021 examined the nearly 250-year-old American experiment of a government “of, by, and for the people,” and how each generation since continues to question how to form “a more perfect union.” The Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit Voices and Votes: Democracy in America, which opened Saturday, May 8, focused on the action, reaction, vision, and revision that democracy demands as Americans continue to question how to shape the country.
We were pleased to showcase photographer Jon Cherry, Artist & Letterpress professional Shannon Delahanty, and poetry by Young Authors Greenhouse.
Jon Cherry (he/him) is a widely published multi-specialty photojournalist whose work spans a wide range of photographic disciplines. His work has been described as deeply romantic and joyful.
Currently, Jon is committed to documenting the community uprising, the COVID-19 pandemic, and cultural occurrences in Louisville, Kentucky, his home, and around the nation. He is dedicated to capturing moments that spark action without words and convey emotions that may be otherwise foreign to the viewer.
Jon works as a stringer with Getty Images, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg News, and Louisville Public Media, and has been published when shooting independently by TIME, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.
Shannon Delahanty (b. 1991, Louisville, KY) is multimedia artist whose work explores personal archives. Through the relationship between memory and the printed object, she investigates how knowledge is created, stored, and accessed. She received her BFA in Printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2013 where she was awarded the Hawthorne Hunt Memorial Scholarship. Along with collaborations, demonstrations, and national exhibitions, she is a 2020 Community Foundation of Louisville + Creative Capital Hadley Creatives Recipient.
Delahanty’s recent engagements explore the fixity and frailty of archives. She chooses techniques in mediums able to be copied, altered, and copied again, to express the complexity of memory and information gathering. She believes as we collectively experience a threefold pandemic of health, poverty, and racism, there is a constant information stream of hard realities. How do we trust, how do we engage, how do we respond to current emergencies given our history? Making an emotional space into an animate, physical object is a social action; the personal is political.
Young Authors Greenhouse is a Portland Louisville-based nonprofit organization that inspires students ages 6 – 18 to recognize the power of their voices and stories. They fulfill a mission through writing and publishing programs, creative partnerships with schools, and a community of engaged volunteers.
Young Authors pulled quotes that talk about voting, using your voice, and some of the issues their students have been writing a lot about this year. Shannon Delahanty has letterpressed their quotes for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibit!
Presented by:
