Breaking Barriers: Through Our Lens

Hours: Thursday 10:00am – 8:00pm; Friday 10:00am – 5:00pm; Free admission.

For more info call 813-974-4133, email caminfo@usf.edu, or visit the Breaking Barriers website.

USF Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present the exhibition Breaking Barriers: Through Our Lens as part of arts programming for military veterans. Breaking Barriers: Through Our Lens brings together the art of sixteen U.S. veterans and family members. The exhibition includes a selection of forty-seven photographs from two intensive artist-lead photography workshops, including both a beginning and an advanced section. Through the artist’s lens, we are offered an intimate and close look at the quotidian, personal places and spaces, memories, and narratives by means of objects and landscapes. The artwork represents a vast range of photographic experience, from learning to use a camera, to professional photographers accomplished with film but starting fresh with digital technology, as well as those who have no prior art experience at all. Unique to this exhibition is the fact that all the photographs were created and edited with the artists’ own cellphone cameras.

Artists in the exhibition include Jarrett Gafford, Dawn S. Hargrett, Rebekka Huneke, Ramonita Rosa, Kimberlee Nicole Smith, Monika Sutton, and Karl Young II from the beginning section, and James Alexander, Manfredo Bobadilla, Wildalys Class, Agustin Collazo Jr., Amanda Dodd, Evan Fountain, Mikko Maki, Alicia Morales, and RaeAnne Swanson from the advanced section. We are deeply grateful to all the veterans and family members who were courageous and persistent enough to engage in the workshops and create their own photographic images. Their artwork creates a visual platform that changes the culture of the “silent veteran,” into a storyteller, a witness, and amplifies the veteran voice within a larger community.

 Breaking Barriers is a project by USFCAM in collaboration with the USF School of Art and Art History, with Support from the USF Office of Veterans Success, Community Arts Impact Grant Program of the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, Love IV Lawrence 2020 Waves of Change Grant, and additional support from the ACE Arts for Community Engagement Fund and the Florida Department of State.