JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. – The East Tennessee State University Department of Art & Design and Slocumb Galleries in partnership with ETSU Student Activities Allocation Committee, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Black American Studies Program, present “The Yellow Book” by Johanna Warwick, a collection of photographic works available at Slocumb Galleries through Feb. 18. Warwick will give a talk at 10 a.m. on Monday, January 24, on Zoom.
“The Yellow Book” presents two series of photographic works, “Interstate Legacy” and
the “Old South Baton Rouge.” Warwick used this book, a yellow-covered publication
that lists the locations of interstate highways in the 1950s, as a framework to photograph
cities, revealing the consequences and outcomes of interstate construction, organizers
said.
What makes the two series different from just a documentary of highways, organizers
said, is Warwick sees through the lens of how the “overwhelming number of the proposed
placement of the new highway system cut through thriving black communities.” As the
project was created in the 1950s, Warwick said that “it directly reflects the systemic
racism in city planning,” as she photographs the “physicality of the highway overshadowing
communities.”
“The Yellow Book” exhibition aims to “make records that weave connections between
past decisions and current consequences, as these photographs are an acute look at
the past as Congress writes the infrastructure bill to guide state government today,”
organizers said. Warwick’s work investigates a survey of all 104 affected cities nationwide,
66 years after it was initiated. She hopes to “define the next generation of infrastructure
construction concurrently as our country reckons with systemic racism,” according
to the organizers.
Warwick graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with an MFA in photography
in 2010, and from Ryerson University with a BFA in photography in 2006. She is a British-born,
Canadian-raised photographer working and living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she
is an associate professor of Art and Photography at Louisiana State University. She
has exhibited in New York, Toronto and other major cities across North America. She
has also been featured in The Washington Post. She had a major exhibition of “The
Yellow Book: Old South Baton Rouge” at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
All events are free and open to the public and will be live simulcasted via ETSU Slocumb
Galleries’ Facebook (facebook.com/slocumb.galleries) and on Zoom. The Slocumb Galleries is located on the campus of ETSU at 232 Sherrod
Drive. It is open weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
To receive a Zoom link, please email contrera@etsu.edu. For more information, please visit etsu.edu/cas/art/galleries.