Aaron Turner, Assistant Professor of Art (Photography/Interdisciplinary Practice), University of Arkansas, School of Art and Director, Center for Art as Lived Experience
Aaron Turner is an artist and educator born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience; he also uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, Blackness as material, abstraction, and the archive. His most recent book, Moves from the Archive, highlights his varied approach to image-making, fusing elements of still life, appropriation, and painting to comment on the complex nature of history and representation.
Turner received an MA from Ohio University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work artist-in-residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space artist-in-residence, 2020 Artists 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance grant recipient, 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship recipient, 2021 Creator Labs Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs and Aperture, 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship grant recipient from the Arkansas Arts Council, and 2024 Penumbra Workspace artist-in-residence.