SHEILA PREE BRIGHT

Sheila Pree Bright is an award-winning fine-art photographer nationally known for her photographic series, Young Americans, Plastic Bodies and Suburbia. National attention peaked shortly after Bright earned a M.F.A. in Photography from Georgia State University. In 2006, she received the Center Prize from the Santa Fe Center of Photography for Suburbia. In the art world, she is described as a “cultural anthropologist” portraying large-scale works that combine a wide-range of contemporary culture. She went viral on Huffington Post for her Plastic Bodies series, which also appeared in an important documentary, Through the Lens Darkly, which explores the important role of Black photographers in capturing identity and celebrating images that explore pay tribute to the humanity of African Americans.

Bright’s most current work, 1960Now evolved from Bright’s public art series 1960Who, a street art gallery showing epic-sized portraits of unknown youth leaders of the 60s who where members of the Civil Rights Movement, but not widely known. The series launched 4 years ago in Atlanta which received national attention as it was covered by Huffington Post in 2013. Bright placed larger than life portraits of young people of the 1960’s on walls in downtown Atlanta. The portraits showed faces of HBCU members of the Atlanta Student Movement and Freedom Riders from Atlanta to Connecticut.

Bright exhibitions include: High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Smithsonian Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C., the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Time Inc, NY, FotoFest in Houston and the Leica Gallery in New York. She has been featured in numerous publications, the recipient of numerous awards and in private and public collections to name a few; Library of Congress, Washington DC, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, Oppenheimer Collection: Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland, KS, and Sprint PCS Art Collection, Overland, KS.