Exhibition: Everyday Culture: Seven Projects by Documentary Arts

Culture is synonymous with the practices of everyday life, discovered in the multitude of daily rituals and objects passed on from one generation to the next. This exhibition explores aspects of everyday culture via seven key projects of the pioneering cultural organization Documentary Arts. The seven projects embody a unique approach to using film and photography to record and document marginalized cultural forms such as tattooing, blues music, traditional artisanal skills, and community photography.

Founded in Dallas in 1985 by writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker Alan Govenar, Documentary Arts mines a broad range of media to catalyze creative activity, energize community engagement, and initiate social change around diverse cultures and regional heritage. It has organized folk festivals, field recordings, radio shows, museum exhibitions, artist-in-schools residencies, public art projects, and off-Broadway musical theatre productions.

A key question these seven projects raise in our era of artificial intelligence is: What is “documentary” today? Can revitalized documentary approaches to traditional cultures restore socially engaged, reality-based rules of truth, evidence, and witness? With its out-of-the-box, at times maverick approach, Documentary Arts is adapting and nurturing a public discourse that expands, humanizes, and illuminates our connection to everyday culture.

A book, Everyday Culture: Seven Projects by Documentary Arts by Brian Wallis and Alan Govenar, published by CPW, will accompany the exhibition.

IMAGE: The grandparents of Esequiel Hernández Jr. at his gravesite, Redford, Texas, 1997. Photograph by Alan Govenar.