© Tina Freeman
Editor’s Note: New Orleans-based Tina Freeman has been an ASMP Professional Member since 1980. See more of her work at www.tinafreeman.com.
TINA FREEMAN: LAMENTATIONS
Considering Sea Level Rise Through Wetlands and Glacial Photographs
NEW ORLEANS, LA – The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents Tina Freeman: Lamentations, on view September 12, 2019 through March 8, 2020. Over the past seven years, Tina Freeman has photographed the Louisiana wetlands and in Arctic and Antarctic locations. In Lamentations, Freeman pairs images from each place in a series of diptychs that communicate the critical narratives of climate change, ecological balance, and the connectedness of things across time and space.
“Living in south Louisiana, we are all familiar with the reality of a rising sea level and the impact that it has begun to have on our lives,” said Susan Taylor, Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “By placing images connected to our region into a larger global context, Freeman’s photographs can be appreciated not only for their compelling visual beauty, but also for the ways in which they bring to the forefront the most pressing issues of our time.”
Each diptych on view in Lamentations is chosen for the ways in which the photographs relate to one another aesthetically and practically, demonstrating, for example, how the rising waters along the coast of Louisiana are both visually and physically connected to the melting glaciers at the poles, despite the separation of vast distances. Freeman’s large, color photographs make plain the crucial, threatening, and global dialogue between water in two physical states.
“Lamentations profoundly engages with both its message and its messenger, with both the precarious existence of glaciers and wetlands and with photography itself,” said Russell Lord, NOMA’s Curator of Photographs. “The diptychs introduce a series of urgent narratives about loss, in which the meaning of each individual image is framed, provoked, and even haunted by the other.”
Exhibition Catalogue
Tina Freeman: Lamentations is accompanied by a publication of the same name, Tina Freeman Lamentations, published by the New Orleans Museum of Art and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. Featuring essays by Tina Freeman and Russell Lord, the book also includes contributions on the Louisiana wetlands by David Muth, Director, Gulf Restoration Program at the National Wildlife Federation, and on glacial activity by Brent Goehring, Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane University. It also features graphic information about glacial growth and disappearance, and the changing shape of the state of Louisiana as a result of sea-level rise.