“THIRD THURSDAYS”: The monthly photography presentation and artist talk series at Mercer County Community College’s James Kerney Campus Gallery in Trenton will take place on May 19 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. This month features works by Aaron Turner and Wendel White. The public is invited in person or via Zoom. Reservations are required at JKCGallery.online.

“Third Thursdays,” the free monthly photography presentation and artist talk series at Mercer County Community College’s (MCCC’s) James Kerney Campus Gallery (JKCG) at 137 North Broad Street in Trenton, will take place May 19 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. The event, curated by Heather Palecek and Habiyb Shu’Aib, will feature work by Aaron Turner and Wendel White. Hosted by Director of the JKC Gallery, Michael Chovan-Dalton, the talk will take place live and on Zoom. All are invited to register at jkcgallery.online.

Chovan-Dalton said, “This will be the final Third Thursdays for this semester at JKC Gallery and I am pleased to present two artists who have shared their work with us in a solo show. We look forward to welcoming Wendel White and Aaron Turner on May 19.”

Turner is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. He focuses on photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. He also creates still-life photography in the studio environment on the topics of identity, history, and blackness as material and abstraction.

Turner originally pursued a career as a photojournalist working for newspapers but was eventually drawn to photography as an art form.

“I got immersed in this field due to my high level of curiosity and the desire to look at the world and environments around me differently,” Turner said. “I began to study art as my desire for what I wanted to use the camera for became broader and broader, and my interest became more of a conceptual approach.”

On May 19 Turner will speak about a series of photographs that reflects the transformative process of resilience and understanding home along with his “Black Alchemy” project which is Turner’s lens through which he “filters the world.”

He said, “It’s about the role of the Black artist within the studio environment, the history and formalities of abstraction, and the complexities of identity.”

Turner received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs and the Aperture Foundation, and 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

More about Turner can be found at aaronturner.studio.

White was born in Newark and grew up in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. His most recent projects include Red Summer; Manifest; Schools for the Colored; Village of Peace: An African American Community in Israel; and Small Towns, Black Lives among others. The recent “Schools for the Colored” exhibit at JKC Gallery integrated black and white images with digital media to depict the racially segregated school buildings and landscapes that existed in the northern states.

White has received numerous awards and fellowships including a 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnography, Harvard University; and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections across the country including The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Ill.; and the Archive of Documentary Arts, Rubenstein Library at Duke University, N.C.

More information about White can be found at wendelwhite.com.

For more information about registration and attending in person or online, visit JKCGallery.online.