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Wichita Falls Museum of Art Presents Michael Nye Hunger & Resilience

The Wichita Falls Museum of Art presents Michael Nye: Hunger & Resilience, Opening: January 14, 2011 8 – 10 pm Exhibition dates: January 14, 2011 – February 25, 2011

Michael Nye’s photographs literally speak to you. Accompanying his 50 emotional portraits at the Museum of Art at Midwestern State University until February 25, are headphones. Put them on, and you hear the voices of the subjects you are seeing, talking about their lives and what it is like to be hungry. Here are young women, Katrina survivors, rodeo cowboys, even apparently former middle-class people who have nearly starved.


Michael Nye Wichita Falls Museum of Art

For About Hunger & Resilience, Nye traveled all over the United States, contacting food banks, churches and charitable organizations, meeting people and listening to them. He would make a black-and-white portrait with his vintage Deardorff view camera and record four or five hours of conversation, which he would then edit down to less than five minutes for the exhibition.

The exhibition is deeply moving. It is a return to a more humanistic style of documentary photography, not influenced by formalism or advertising. Nye’s work has his own approach, similar to the spirit that moved Russell Lee. His photos are shot from the same level as his subjects, never looking down at them, literally or metaphorically. Nye explains, we need to “grow in our understanding of how difficult life is for so many in our country.”

Michael Nye lives in downtown San Antonio. He practiced law for 10 years before pursuing photography full time. Recipient of a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts grant in photography, and a Kronkosky Foundation grant, he participated in two Arts America tours in the Middle East and Asia, and has exhibited and lectured widely in museums and universities, including Morocco, India and Mexico. – www.michaelnye.org

Wichita Falls Museum of Art
at Midwestern State University
2 Eureka Circle
Wichita Falls, Texas 76308
www.mwsu.edu/wfma/

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