As a queer and nonbinary parent and artist, Jess Dugan didn’t see many families like theirs represented in the media. Now, three generations of Dugan’s family are featured in a new exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
“Diaries of Home” features work from 13 women and nonbinary artists exploring the meaning of home, family and identity.
“I’ve always used my art practice to understand myself and my place in the world,” Dugan said.
The artist has worked with photography for around 20 years and later expanded into video.
“I felt that I had run up against the limits of a still photograph,” they said at a press preview, “and I realized that there are more parts of my story that I wanted to tell.”
The passage of time is a crucial piece of this body of work, Dugan said, noting that they started this project in 2012 and chose not to exhibit any of its pieces until a decade later.
“This is the narrative about my very particular journey to parenthood and all of the parts of my identity that get brought into that,” they said. “Of course, it’s also a representation of queer parenthood, our journey to literally having a child, and then my adjustment to figuring out how to parent as a nonbinary parent, figuring out language for myself, figuring out how to parent in this very particular social space.”
Funding from benefactor Anne Marion allowed the Modern to begin collecting photography in the 1990s, said chief curator Andrea Karnes. While the neighboring Amon Carter Museum of American Art focuses on documentary photography, the Modern is not confined to documentary photography and embraces artists who add their own conceptual bent.
“Photography is a medium that is so believable to us because it looks like us, so we think that it’s real,” Karnes explained. “But every photographer sets up the shot, makes decisions, just like (writer and critic) Susan Sontag … and so many others talked about. Photography is full of the biases of the maker. And what the viewer brings to it, but we think that it is in the vernacular of the real.”
The exhibition includes nudity and some of Sally Mann’s most well-known and controversial photographs, and a placard outside of the exhibition warns of “mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.”
A collection of three series from photographer Laura Letinsky placed next to one another in the gallery show the progression of a home that is full, with a self-portrait of Letinsky and her former partner to still lifes of everyday objects and a bare apartment with blank walls.
“We really love the conversation with the three series told together because it’s like fully inhabited and wholly empty. What does home mean? Is it something active or is it just a memory?” assistant curator Clare Milliken said.
The theme of family lineage continues throughout the exhibition, including a new body of work from Fort Worth artist Letitia Huckaby.
The series of large-scale silhouettes printed on cotton fabric are an outgrowth of a project initiated by Texas Christian University’s Race & Reconciliation Initiative to pay tribute to Charley and Kate Thorp.
The Thorps, a formerly enslaved couple, were integral to the development and functioning of the university, but their contributions had gone largely unrecognized until 2022.
On Oct. 24, TCU hosted an unveiling ceremony for two portraits created by Huckaby that now hang on campus.
Fifteen new portraits of Charley and Kate’s descendants are now on view in the museum.
“Diaries of Home” opens to the public Nov. 17 and will remain on view through Feb. 2, 2025.
If you go
What: “Diaries of Home” exhibition
When: Nov. 17, 2024 – Feb. 2, 2025
Where: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth
Admission: Free on Fridays and for visitors under age 18; $10-$16 for all others. Tickets are half price on Sundays.
Marcheta Fornoff covers arts and culture for the Fort Worth Report. Reach her at marcheta.fornoff@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
