(Re)Framing Protest : design + hope has been extended through September 25, 2022
Creative expression and design – both directly and indirectly – influenced Richmond activists, artists, organizers, and others who mobilized during the summer of 2020 to collectively respond to communal trauma, systemic racism, and amplify the Black Lives Matter movement. In their creative output, we see the anger and anguish of a city, but also the vibrant and visceral hope for healing.
(re)Framing Protest – in partnership with Richmond Free Press photojournalists Regina H. Boone and Sandra Sellars,– offers a framework to explore how tactics such as graffiti and graphic design can give voice to traumatic social unrest while also becoming a transformative blueprint for unexpected placemaking and community building.
Regina H. Boone, is an award-winning photojournalist, who has spent more than 20 years documenting human resiliency in her hometown of Richmond, Va. working for her family’s weekly newspaper, the Richmond Free Press, to Detroit where she worked for nearly 14 years at the Detroit Free Press.
In 2016, Time magazine chose a portrait of hers as its cover image documenting the Flint water crisis. This same photograph, a toddler afflicted by the contaminated water, has made CNN’s 2020 list of “100 Photos that Defined the Decade.” Following graduation from Roland Park Country School in Baltimore in 1988, she attended Spelman College. After receiving a BA in Political Science in 1992 Regina taught English on the JET Program while living in Osaka for three years. Once her time in Japan was over Regina backpacked solo through Thailand, Indonesia, India, Nepal, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Egypt and Holland. Later she studied photojournalism as a graduate student at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication.
In 2018, she completed the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she began researching her paternal Japanese grandfather, Tsuruju Miyazaki, and his wrongful arrest on December 7, 1941 in Suffolk, Va. along with other Japanese Americans across the country. Her father, Raymond H. Boone was just three-years-old and gave her this last assignment to find out more about the father he never knew during his last days while fighting pancreatic cancer.
Sandra Sellars is an award-winning photojournalist with the Richmond Free Press Newspaper earning Best in Show, Best News, Best Spot News, Best Pictorial, and Best Photo Essay honors in State and National photography competitions throughout her more than 20-years as a visual storyteller.
In 2020 she and Regina Boone won Best In Show for their coverage of the Summer of 2020 protests in the Virginia Press Association’s annual news and advertising contests. In 2021 Sandra and a team that included a Lead Curator, Archivists and Researchers received an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators in the category of Online Resource Development for the Louis Draper Archival Portal for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts where she is the Special Projects and Events Photographer.
Sandra is also a custom B&W photography printer. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Mass Communications from Virginia Commonwealth University.
