GLENNA JENNINGS - EXPOSURE INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL

The tables of my youth were compact, plastic, and single-serve. Meant to be folded and put away, then quickly reassembled in time for dinner and prime time television. Our dining room table came complete with a leaf to fit guests into holiday feasts. But these occasions were rare in our smalltown American home, where a single working mom and her only child alternated between TV dinners and homecooked stews or spaghetti. The ongoing photographic series At Table arose from a desire to add people to these tables, to cultivate relationships across cultures and borders, to document the in-between when ordinary moments come alive through gestures and expressions, food and drink. In homes, restaurants and bars scattered throughout the globe, I have used the messy contingency of plates, silverware, bottles and placemats to frame candid moments from a consistent perspective, revealing a multicultural narrative that converges and collides in a shared, familiar place – the table.

As an artist, educator and community advocate, my work often uses food culture as a means to address harder questions around social equity. At Table has served to ignite such conversation through exhibitions, community events, educational activities and site- specific installations. My own photographed experiences, in all of their awkward beauty or chaotic authenticity, have resulted from the hospitable acts of friends, family members, loved ones and mere acquaintances. I offer them as a small archive of the potential for radical hospitality, active togetherness, and the kindness of strangers to help alter the landscape of our polarized political climate. I offer them with the blatantly naïve but stubbornly fervent faith that sitting down together to share food and drink can alter hearts, minds and worlds.

BIOGRAPHY

Glenna Jennings is an artist, educator and community advocate whose work draws primarily from the history, theory and practice of photography. She completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego and holds BAs in English and Spanish (Pepperdine), and a BFA in Photography (Art Center College of Design). She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Dayton’s Department of Art and Design, where she heads up the photography program and serves as the Hanley Sustainability Institute’s Director for Engaging Communities Beyond Campus. Jennings has exhibited widely throughout the US, China, Europe, and Mexico, and her work resides in multiple public and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York and AMNUA Museum in Nanjing, China. Recognition of her work includes two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a Peter McGrath Human Rights Fellowship, a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts project grant, and a Robert Rauschenberg Award through Photolucida Critical Mass.

Jennings’ teaching, research and service inform her dynamic, transdisciplinary practice of image-making, curating and socially- engaged creation. Her work in the Dayton community focuses on food justice and social equity through collaborations with a wide range of local, regional and national partners. Glenna is indebted to friends, family and collaborators far and wide in her ongoing efforts to realize a more just, equitable and sustainable future through both hard work and purposeful play.