Myra Greene

Myra Greene is an artist and educator who engages photography and abstraction as a means of cultural storytelling. Over the course of her career, she has used a diverse creative practice to explore depictions of race, representation, and identity politics. With the project Character Recognition (2006-2007), she employed a historic photographic process linked to the times of ethnographic classification to create unique ambrotypes. My White Friends (2007-2012 published by Keher Verlag in 2012) color photographs read as benign portraits of a cross section of white American life, yet the impetus of their creation lies in the undercurrent of racial description. By photographing friends, peers, and mentors, Greene explores if photography can capture and describe the nuances of whiteness while questioning photography’s role in the creation of stereotype, and the performance of racial identity. Greene is currently working on a new body of work that uses African textiles as a material and pattern to explore her own relationship to culture via images and quilts.

Greene's work has been featured nationally and internationally in galleries and museums including The New York Public Library, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Williams College Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Sculpture Center in New York City, and most recently at Corvi-Mora Gallery in London this past spring. She received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Photography and has completed residencies at Light Work in Syracuse, NY and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Myra currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is an Associate Professor and Director of the Photography program in the Art and Visual Culture department at Spelman College.