Lonnie Graham

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Mary Bethune bought the beach so blacks would have a place to swim. Robben Island
was the internment site of Nelson Mandela, South African President

Lonnie Graham, a Pew Fellow and Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is former director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an urban arts organization dedicated to arts and education for at risk youth. There, Graham developed innovative pilot projects merging Arts and Academics, which were ultimately cited by, then, First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education. Graham is currently Consulting Director of the PhotoAlliance in San
Francisco, CA, and former Associate Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum. In Philadelphia. In 1996 Graham was commissioned to create the “African/American Garden Project.” which provided an exchange of disadvantaged urban single mothers in Pittsburgh, and farmers from Muguga, Kenya, to build a series of subsistence gardens.
In 2005, Graham was cited as Artist of the Year in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and presented the Governor’s Award by Governor Edward Rendell. Professor Graham served as a panel member for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC.Lonnie Graham is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts/Pew Charitable Trust TravelGrant for travel to Ghana and is a four time Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship recipient.

His book “A Conversation with the World,” has been published by Datz press in Seoul, Korea.That project seeks to reveal our  common humanity through interviews conducted by Professor Graham with
individuals throughout the world.

Other exhibitions include an exhibition of photographs at Goethe Institute, Accra Ghana; an exhibition of collaborative portraiture in Christchurch, New Zealand, a group of works at Kulttuurivoimala, Culture Silo, Meri-Toppila, Oulu, Finland, a full scale reproduction of one of the educational galleries in the Barnes Foundation shown at La Maison de Etat-Unis, Paris, France, an exhibition of larger than life photographs at the Toyota City Museum in Aichi, Japan as well as a room sized installation featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Graham’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery for American Art in Andover, MA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA