Kellogg Community College is exhibiting nearly two dozen photographic works by nationally renowned artist Ruth Adams through March, contemplating history through images from World War II era memorial sites.
The exhibit, titled “Conversations with the Ancestors,” consists of 20 palladium-platinum prints featuring quiet atmospheric scenes of cemeteries, crypts and memorial sites in Florence, Venice and Rome, Italy, and well as Berlin, Germany – many of them Jewish.
The prints are created through a traditional, labor-intensive process in which light-sensitive platinum and palladium are hand-applied to paper, resulting in richly toned, archival-quality images. Each print is individually crafted by hand.
In an artist’s statement, Adams says a cemetery is thought of as “a place for memorializing a loved one, a place to say goodbye, a place for reflection on one’s own mortality.”
“More interestingly, cemeteries are a place to have a conversation with an ancestor, a place to ask for advice or work out a problem,” Adams says. “These images invite communication, contemplation and connection. They remind us to take guidance from the wisdom and the energy of the ages.”
“Conversations with the Ancestors” opened Feb. 23 and runs through Thursday, March 26, in the Davidson Visual and Performing Arts Center’s Eleanor R. and Robert A. DeVries Gallery, on campus at 450 North Ave. in Battle Creek.
The exhibit is free and open to the public during regular gallery hours, which are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays.
An artist’s lecture – also free and open to the public – will be held in the gallery as part of the College’s DeVries Lecture Series beginning at 4 p.m. March 26, followed by a closing reception.
In her statement, Adams, who is of Jewish heritage, says when wandering the memorial sites featured in her images, they seemed to call to her, inviting her to listen to their stories.
“These seemed invitations to converse with the ancestors fed directly into my desire for us to remember the events and hatred that led our world into WWII and to correct the course of our current society,” she says.
Adams says such sites – whether in Italy or in Germany – provided her with solace, particularly the Jewish sites.
“In both places, people still come, they still visit and converse and hopefully learn and garner hope from the fact that as humans we survived and grew and healed even from the horrors of the Holocaust,” Adams says. “By combining the images from Italy and Germany I want to tell a story of hope that I believe we need now in this culture of division, anger and diminished respect for individual freedoms.”
For more information about the exhibit or other KCC arts events and initiatives, contact KCC’s Arts and Communication Office at 269-965-4126.
About the Artist
Ruth Adams is a nationally recognized artist, a professor of photography and was appointed director of the School of Art and Visual Studies (SA/VS) at the University of Kentucky in Fall 2023. Adams has worked at the University of Kentucky for 25 years and served in a variety of administrative roles before being named director, including director of Undergraduate Studies, Art Studio Area head and, for 11 years, associate director of SA/VS.
Adams’ research deals with issues of mindfulness, intimacy, ancestry, mortality and renewal. She is best known for her series “unremarkable: a journey through cancer, chemotherapy, radiation and recovery”; “Organic Studies: Scanner as Camera”; and “Conversations with the Ancestors.”
Adams loves combining new imaging technologies with the traditional sensibilities of a photographer and is one of the pioneers in the field of scanner art. Her main field of study is 19th century alternative photographic processes focusing on platinum/palladium printing.
Adams has exhibited nationally and internationally, has won numerous awards and grants and has presented at national and regional conferences. Her photographs hang in numerous private and public collections.
Adams holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Digital Art from the University of Miami, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Syracuse University.
An experienced photographer, digital/analog hybrid artist and educator, Adams has developed a reputation as a dynamic instructor and an innovative artist and enjoys introducing students and patrons of the arts to the ever-changing world of analog and digital photography.
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