Please join us at 5:00pm in the Selections Gallery for an opening reception, followed by at artist talk at 6:00pm in the Performing Arts room, where Lisa will discuss her work traveling along the U.S-Mexico border, documenting her experiences through photography, and volunteering with humanitarian aid organizations.  The resulting exhibition, Promised Land / Tierra Prometida, is a body of work inspired by and in contrast to the visual culture and discourse circulating about immigration in mainstream news. Promised Land interrogates the myth of the American Dream from the perspective of the borderland environs, the people seeking asylum in the United States, and the volunteers and groups who are engaged in helping migrants with vital needs such as food, shelter, health care, as well as facilitating search and rescue in the desert. In dialogue with Under the Mexican Sky, this contemporary response highlights the dramatic shift in photography’s role as a form of expressive communication, and its striking ability to capture realities, both political and aesthetic.

Lisa Elmaleh (Guggenheim Fellow, 2024) is an American visual artist, educator, and documentarian based in Hampshire County, West Virginia. She specializes in large-format work in tintype, glass negative, and celluloid film. Since 2007, she has been traveling across the US documenting American landscapes, life, and culture. Born in Miami, Florida (1984), Lisa completed a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2007, during which time she was awarded the Silas Rhodes Scholarship. Upon graduating, she received the prestigious Tierney Fellowship to work on a project that evolved into an in-depth visual documentation of the impact of climate change on the Everglades. The culmination of this project resulted in a book titled Everglades published in 2016 by Zatara Press. Elmaleh’s work has been exhibited nationwide and recognized by the Arnold Newman Prize, the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation. Her work has been published by Harper’s Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, CNN, The New York Times, National Geographic, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and NPR, among others.