Jennifer Garza-Cuen
Jennifer Garza-Cuen is an artist / educator and Associate Professor of Photography in the Department of Art + Design at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. She received her MFA in photography and MA in the History of Art and Visual Culture with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her BA summa cum laude in comparative literature was completed at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
Garza-Cuen is the recipient of numerous awards including: the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Photography, Photo Lucida’s Robert Rauschenberg Residency Award, Light Work A-I-R, and the British Journal of Photography & 1854 Media’s Female in Focus Award. She has received fellowships to attend residencies at the Arctic Circle, Ucross, Oxbow, Hambidge, Brush Creek, and the Vermont Studio Center. Public collections include: the RISD Museum, MOMA, Light Work, the Do Good Fund, the New Mexico History Museum, Art Museum of South Texas and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited internationally and published in contemporary photographic journals such as Dear Dave, Contact Sheet, Musée, Papiers Paris, Blink, PDN, NR Magazine UK, Der Greif Germany, The Photo Review, and Conveyor as well as on-line journals such as: i-D, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, Fubiz, iGNANT, Dazed, and Juxtapoz.
Garza-Cuen’s monograph, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg, in collaboration with Odette England was published by Radius Books 2021 and received a Rauschenberg Foundation Publication Grant. She is the editor of These Americans published by Schilt 2023.
Artist Statement
Our society treats place as a central identifying characteristic, second only to name and followed closely by profession. We all have a catalogue of images in our mind that we call upon when a city, town, or country's name is mentioned and those images help us to form an opinion of place, and those we meet from there.
What is it that makes us ‘of’ a place? As a former American expatriate and one who has lived my adult life essentially placeless this is a central question in my work. In my ongoing project Imag[in]ing America, I am interested in investigating national, regional, and local identities as well as ideas of otherness as they relate to place and documentary photography in America.
Photographs have the ability to expand and compress time. They speak of what was, what is, and what will be. We look to photographs to remember and often reenact what we see, pushing old images into the future. Imag[in]ing America depicts a series of locations in the United States as a residue of cultural memory, an inheritance. It is a metaphorical memoir, a narrative re-telling of facts and fictions and a discovery of the dreamland that still is America.
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Release Date: December 6, 2024
Untitled, Woman in the Snow, Detroit, MI, 2012