Work by Allison Grant

Curated by Teresa Cribelli

Climate Change—the largest environmental challenge of our time—is the result of a vision of progress forged in the nineteenth century when fossil fuels spurred industrialization on a global scale. Picturesque America, published in 1872, captured the beginning of US industrialization in lush illustrations that placed railroads and factories in expansive horizons that symbolized boundless possibility. Dark columns of smoke represented prosperity and movement into the future. Dangerous Landscapes places these nineteenth-century views of progress in dialogue with Allison Grant’s contemporary photographs of the chemical and fossil fuel industries in West Alabama.

Grant’s work gestures toward a reoriented view of these romantic nineteenth-century landscapes—one where human production and consumption have become fully entangled with the natural world. Her works suggest a narrowing of options as flora, fauna, and human populations are threatened by particulates, toxins, and heat-trapping carbon dioxide spread through the atmosphere and embedded in the terrain. Grant’s images grapple with the impact of these accumulated toxins and greenhouse gasses, and their presence in our local communities.

While the landscapes of the nineteenth century offered a bright pathway to the future, Grant’s photographs, by incorporating narratives of raising her own children, show the complexities of industry’s relationship with that legacy as we collectively face looming environmental challenges.  In these works, the dark realities of the landscape in which we live are interlaced with representations of her deep love for her children and the physical world around them—a living tapestry that her daughters are just coming to know. Climate change will undoubtedly reshape the world they inherit, and these photographs negotiate the beauty and heartbreak of raising a generation on a wondrous planet in the midst of such rapid and impactful change.

Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama. Her artworks have been widely exhibited at venues including the High Museum of Art (Atlanta); DePaul Art Museum(Chicago); Patti & Rusty Rueff Galleries at Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN); Edelman Gallery (Chicago); and the Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati), among others. She was named on the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s 2022 Silver List. Grant received the 2020 Portfolio Purchase Award from the Atlanta Photography Group, the 2019 Developed Work Fellowship from the Midwest Center for Photography and was shortlisted for the 2019 FotoFilmic Mesh Prize. Works by Grant are held in collections at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), Columbia College Chicago, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Foundation art collection, Cisco Systems Corporate Art Collection (Durham, NC), and the King County Portable Works Collection (Seattle). 

Teresa Cribelli, Ph.D. is a historian, curator, and collage artist. She taught Latin American History at the University of Alabama for 11 years, and now resides in Colorado where she teaches workshops on collage and history. She recently completed a collage project for the Civil Rights Experience exhibition at Temple Beth El in Birmingham. She has shown her collage artwork at Kolaj Fest in New Orleans, Paperworkers Local in Birmingham, and the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery in St. Paul, MN, among other venues. Her publications include Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and Press, Power, and Culture in Nineteenth-century Brazil (ed.) She received her PhD in history from The Johns Hopkins University, and her MA in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico.

PANEL DISCUSSION

April 13 @ 2-4 PM

Generous funding for this exhibition and related programming is provided by: