Kinship Gatherings
At Kinship we see the community as the curriculum. Learning is rhizomatic, interconnected, and collaborative. Our weekly gatherings are built around the emerging and changing needs of our community members and feature artists’ talks, cross-disciplinary conversations, and inspiring community exchange. Attending online gatherings is a powerful way to feel connected to our emerging community while fostering new ideas and inspiration for your own practice.
Forums and Salons
Wednesday, Sept. 18th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Jade Doskow, as the Photographer-in-Residence of Freshkills Park in New York’s Staten Island, has been creating a massive photographic record of this notorious site as it transforms from the world’s largest household waste dump to one of New York’s largest parks. In today’s world, with an increasingly fraught relationship between humanity and the natural world, can an understanding start to shift of what a natural parkland looks like and how it functions?
Wednesday, Sept. 11th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join artist Brenda Spielmann as she shares her project Luminaries, a project where she photographs para-athletes and hand-embroider their images with metallic thread on photographic paper. Rooted in her personal connection to the disabled community through her son, who was born with a disability, this project emphasizes Brenda’s belief in the power of representation and the significance of diverse perspectives.
Wednesday, Sept. 4th @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our final summer peer review featuring work by Barron Northrup and Tracy Warren. Tracy will be sharing work from her newest project where she places self portraits into the landscapes she photographs. Barron will be sharing work from "Buddy you're dying and I hate that for you," which focuses on the past and present impacts of the covid pandemic. Please join us.
Wednesday, August 28th at 7 pm ET on Zoom
Join us for a practice group meet and greet, ask questions, and find the practice group that best supports your creative practice. Attendees of the open house will get early access to practice group registration.
Wednesday, August 21st @ 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Are you working on a photobook or zine and have a burning question you’d like answered? Join Erik Mace for a community skillshare on photobooks, where he’ll lead a discussion on all things book-related. Together, we’ll discuss photobook ideation, design, or production, combining the best of a Q&A and a community-driven skillshare.
Wednesday, August 14th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our fifth peer review featuring work by Chris Allen and Sasha Chapman. Chris will be sharing recent work of a multi-year project exploring the planetary element of Water in it's various phases. Sasha will be sharing her newest project that features ice as an archive and its retreat as a form of memory loss.
Wednesday, July 31st, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our fourth peer review featuring work by Greg Garner and Sara Swaty. Greg will be sharing recent work from a long-term that examines interior parking decks in natural light. Sara will be sharing her project Samakara: Bodywork a self-portrait project that documents her medical and emotional progress on a lifelong journey of a physical enigma / disability.
Wednesday, July 17th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our third peer review featuring work by Paul Wanta & Susan Patrice. As a photographer and naturalist, Paul’swell-honed skills as a tracker and wayfinder inform his photography practice, inviting photographs that are both familiar and surprising. Susan will be sharing work from her ongoing project The Land of My Body where she ponders the stories the land wants to tell and whether art can offer both healing and ecological reparation.
Wednesday, July 10th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us this week for our second summer skill-share. This week we will be exploring self portraiture. What compels us to turn the camera around and photograph ourselves? Through embodied photographic practices, what can we learn from making images of ourselves? What can emerge between us and the camera, between us and the viewer? What makes an image a self portrait? Is it the presence of the photographer in the frame, or can we make an image of ourselves where our physical body is absent? Join us as we share photographs, process, and inspiring prompts.
Wednesday, July 3rd, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for our second summer review with George Lottermoser & Frances Bukovsky. George will be sharing his project Mirror, Mirror where he places a mirror between lens and subject allowing him to document two different events and two different spaces from a singular point of view. Frances will be sharing work from their project Upheaval which seeks to unravel the complicated relationships between body, place, and memory as impacted by trauma and illness.
Wednesday, June 26th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us for an inspiring conversation with Benjamin Dimmitt about his powerful and heartbreaking book An Unflinching Look: Elegy for Wetlands that explores the salt-damaged sawgrass savannas and spring creeks of the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge on Florida’s Gulf Coast. For Benjamin, creating this book was a way of examining and reckoning with ecosystem loss in a place he knows well and loves.
Join us for our first summer review with Anna G. Norton. Anna will be sharing her long-term documentary project that features longleaf pine restoration on her family property in Baker County, GA which she is crafting into a book. Like many of us who are working on long-term projects, Anna is looking for guidance on what to keep and what to let go of. Does including a larger number of images help capture the complexity of the story or water it down? Where is the line between enough and too much?
Wednesday, June 12th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join us this week for the first in a series of Kinship skill-shares. This week we will be exploring lumen printing and showing you how to make your own prints at home. Lumen prints are photograms made by placing an object, often organic materials, on photographic paper and exposing the paper to sunlight (no darkroom is needed). This simple, open, and experimental process produces luminous, magical, and often surprising results.
Join us this summer for peer supported project and portfolio reviews. Peer reviews are not critiques but a chance to share your work within a highly supportive environment where you can ask thoughtful questions about your work in progress and receive equally thoughtful reflections in return. Photographers of all levels are invited to share work. Would you like to share your work this summer?
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, May 29th, 7 pm EDT
At Kinship, community engagement is rhizomatic, interconnected, and collaborative. Our calls-for-engagment, programs, and practice groups, are built around our community's emerging and changing needs. What would best supports your practice this summer? Please lend your voice and vision to this weeks dynamic conversation and help us shape our summer season.
Wednesday, May 22nd, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Over the past month, Kinship community members have been responding to three prompts adapted from Joanna Macy and Molly Brown’s book Coming Back to Life and recently featured on We Are The Great Turning podcast.
Join us as Kinship community members share the photographs and reflections that arose in response to the prompts.
Wednesday, May 15th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Many of us yearn to deepen our intimacy and connection with the world. Please join us as seven photographers explore and contemplate the role that photography can play as a tool for deep listening and intimate conversing.
Wednesday, May 8th, 7 pm EDT on Zoom
The Goodall Visiting Fellows Program in Glendale, SC invites creative responses to our landscape in a former textile mill village. We’ll hear from the 2023-24 residents about their experiences at six natural, cultural, and historical reflection sites in the Preserve and neighboring village as we look at and listen to their work.
May 1st @ 7 pm EDT via Zoom
Is there a visual language for loss and grief? Can photography capture what is already lost or prepare us for future losses? In this two-part practice group, we've been exploring our unique experiences with loss and grief by paying attention to light, abstraction, emotion and our embodied experiences. The deeper we go, the more we play.
Wednesday, April 24th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Join artist Anna Rotty as she shares her recent work titled How We Hold the Sun where she explores the transformational and relational qualities of light and water in motion. Anna’s work invites movement through space and physical engagement, helping us slow down, pay attention, and shift perception, presenting imagery as physical prints, light-etched mirrors, or through motorized rippled water from the river, evaporating and projecting onto the ground.
April 17th @ 7 pm EDT via Zoom
Where do our bodies end and other bodies begin? How does our understanding of the edges of our being influence us? Join us for a practice group circle back that will ponder these questions and more as participants share their explorations of what we consider bodies.
Wednesday, April 10th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
For his latest exhibition Fragmented Reality, Erik Mace mined his photography archive, seeing images only as raw data to be manipulated. His technique breaks down digital photographs to their binary code, using that code to render new images that are no longer explicitly tied to the original material. The pictures that result from the process are suggestive of landscapes, at once unsettling and hypnotizing, placing viewers in a broad set of alternate realities, each created from hundreds of small, compounding modifications to a single piece of information.
Wednesday, April 3rd, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Can we bend time back on itself through image, text, and narrative? Photographer Raymond Thompson Jr is aspiring to do just that. Join us for our third behind-the-scenes look at his unfolding process and photographic practice. For Part III Raymond shares new questions, photographs, and creative revelations that have emerged since our last conversations, including thoughts on transforming this work from the studio to the gallery walls. With Raymond as our guide, we will explore how photography can help us engage in personal and cultural explorations of our own family histories.
Wednesday, March 27th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
As we continue our exploration and inquiry into collaborative making, we hope you will join us for a conversation on collaborative bookmaking with Ramble Editions co-founders Kristen Welles Bartley and Erik Mace and collaborators Olga Ginzburg, Evan Simko-Bednarski, Anna Gage Norton, and Frances Bukovsky. Ramble Editions is a publishing collective rooted in experimentation through collaboration. Individual artists’ projects are unified by a quarterly theme, and books are made through a generous exchange of ideas, critique, and support throughout the publishing process.
Wednesday, March 20th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom
Do you have a hankering to collaborate with a writer or poet? Join us for an intimate conversation between the photographer Eliza Bell and poet Meghan Sterling as they share their images, poems and collaborative process. A year ago, photographer Eliza and Meghan started a creative project that was originally designed to be a gift to a friend. Every week Eliza would mail a photograph to Meghan in Maine, she would respond with a poem, and then mail both photo + poem to a another dear friend. Since, this touching gift has become a Substack and will eventually be a book.
March 13th @ 7 pm EDT via Zoom
Have you ever gotten stuck in your head or started spiraling aound all the creative decisions one has to make? Did it bring your practice to a standstill? This practice group circle back will help you rethink those standstill moments. Join eleven image makers as they celebrate randomness and collaboration through prompts that were designed to stir the imagination and blur the roles of artist, editor/curator and audience. Together we will explore and share fresh ways to liberate our creative practice.
Wednesday, March 6th, at 7 pm ET on Zoom
Join us for a conversation with Choctaw multimedia artist Tricia Rainwater, whose beautifully embodied work delves into the exploration of identity and grief. Using various mediums, particularly photography, she investigates the embodiment of displacement and how individuals can confront loss by revisiting ancestral wounds. In her self-portraits Tricia captures the journey of recovery. Over five years of photographing herself in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, her images evolve, reflecting the changes in her life. Through self-reflection, she explores her needs, areas requiring healing, and the path to self-care and recovery, inviting the audience to join her on this journey of witnessing and being seen.
Wednesday, February 28th, at 7 pm EST on Zoom
For this months makers in conversation with makers, we will be celebrating the 44.4 Mother/Artist Collective and speaking with them about their upcoming exhibition Nobody Sees A Flower opening March 1st at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
The 44.4 Mother/Artist Collective is a growing group of women artists bridging motherhood and art, their collective shares knowledge, supports creative self-actualization, and empowers professional advancement and collaborate on unique exhibitions while exploring their unique lived experiences as Mother/Artists.
Wednesday, February 21st, at 7 pm ET on Zoom
As we move deeper into Between Bodies, we are excited for a multidimensional conversation with Ally Christmas about artmaking as a process of healing. Ally’s intricate, ritualistic images ask questions about how our experience of embodiment changes based on environmental and sociocultural factors. Ally will share how the cyclical process of filling and emptying guides her work.
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, February 14th, 7 pm ET
Love comes in many forms and is expressed in so many ways. This Valentine’s Day, we will be having a community conversation about photography and love. As photographers, we bring such beautiful attention to the subjects of our affection. Is creative attention a form of love? In what ways do your photographs help you pay your love forward into the world? Is a photograph a love letter?