Southern Rites
Through July 4, 2022
Asheville Art Museum
Asheville, North Carolina
www.ashevilleart.org
American photographer Gillian Laub (born New York, 1975) has spent the last two decades investigating political conflicts, exploring family relationships, and challenging assumptions about cultural identity.
In 2002, Laub was sent on a magazine assignment to Mount Vernon, GA, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. The town, nestled among fields of Vidalia onions, symbolized the archetype of pastoral, small-town American life. The Montgomery County residents Laub encountered were warm, polite, protective of their neighbors, and proud of their history. Yet, Laub learned that the joyful adolescent rites of passage celebrated in this rural countryside—high school homecomings and proms—were still racially segregated.
In “Southern Rites,” Laub engages her skills as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual activist to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are simultaneously painful and essential to understanding the American consciousness.
[Image: Gillian Laub, Amber and Reggie, Mount Vernon, Georgia, 2011, inkjet print, 40 × 50 inches. © Gillian Laub, courtesy of Benrubi Gallery.]
