FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Anna Van Lenten
anna@cpw.org
347-254-0009
Center for Photography at Woodstock Opens New, Multi-generational Exhibition, “Upstate Girls to Grown Upstate: Unraveling Collar City 2004–23” by Brenda Ann Kenneally
Kingston, NY, August 7, 2023–The Center for Photography at Woodstock (CPW) is pleased to open “Upstate Girls to Grown Upstate: Unraveling Collar City” (2004–23), a new exhibition of photography, video, and text by Brenda Ann Kenneally. This extraordinary project is one of the most fully realized documentary projects to trace the roots of intergenerational, community trauma to wealth and class inequity in America. The opening will happen at CPW, 474 Broadway, Kingston, on Saturday, August 19, 2023, 5–7 PM.
The CPW exhibition tracks what happened to Kenneally’s Upstate Girls community after her sold-out book Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City 2004–2013 (Regan Arts, 2018). When Kenneally began to realize that the crippling effects of internalized marginalization were being cemented in the young adults whose births and childhoods she was witnessing, she and her Upstate Girls community used those images as rallying points to create a counter narrative. In the summer of 2021, they all embarked on a road trip to the American West. The resulting work contrasts constricted, post-industrial cityscapes of the young people’s home town with expansive, wide-open landscapes of the West. The West’s vistas mirror a new possibility in the young people’s psyches, in which experiencing awe is life-saving, and magnificent horizons are a visceral space for change.
The origins of this project began when Kenneally, a native of Troy, NY, started photographing in 2004 by applying her laser-sharp, loving focus onto a group of girls from three extended families as they came of age on one block in North Troy. Early on, the people she was photographing became collaborators. Together, they expanded the project, ultimately building a multimedia, participatory epic. In this epic, we meet the fragile-strong networks of family and friends that form, dissolve and re-form: babies who as teens have babies, teens who graduate into prison, parents who take in other children, caretakers who parent stray young parents, siblings, cousins who have kids with friends, lovers who become friends who move in and leave, and move in again years later as lovers again.
Upstate Girls connects the origins of the systems shaping this community today back to the distinctly tiered class structure that, at the turn of the century, powered Troy, a small city known as the “prototype” for the industrialization of America. Kenneally’s multigenerational collaboration has produced a visceral record of the abandonment of our working class and an indictment of public policies that perpetuate it.
“We are proud to present the work of Brenda Ann Kenneally, one of America’s leading documentary photographers,” said Brian Wallis, CPW’s Executive Director. “Her meticulous, eye-opening twenty-year coverage of the daily lives of several families on a single block in Troy, NY, facing low-paying jobs, food scarcity, housing issues, serial incarceration, challenging relationships, teenage pregnancies, and single motherhood demonstrates how the oppression of working-class families pervades U.S. social, economic, educational, and legal systems.”
About the Center for Photography at Woodstock
Founded in 1977, the Center for Photography at Woodstock is a not-for-profit arts organization with a two-fold mission: to support artists working in photography and related media; and to engage audiences through creation, discovery, and learning. At the heart of CPW’s mission is programming that is community-based, artist-centered, and collaborative. To foster public conversation around critical issues in photography, CPW provides exhibitions, workshops, artists’ residencies, and access to a digital media lab. In 2022, CPW relocated from Woodstock to 474 Broadway in Kingston.
Press images and interview requests
To request high resolution images for press reproduction and interviews, please contact CPW by clicking here.
Banner image credit: Brenda Ann Kenneally, Sisters, Ellie and Rosie, Troy NY, 2023.