Monday, March 11, 2024 • 7:00 PM

Susan Paul Firestone Lecture on Contemporary Art: featuring Brian Palmer

Francis Auditorium at Mary Baldwin University, 227 E Frederick St, Staunton

The Susan Paul Firestone Lecture Series in Contemporary Art at Mary Baldwin University is pleased to announce the 2024 speaker, Brian Palmer. As an award winning photographer, journalist, advocate, and educator for over three decades, Palmer tells untold stories of the conflict and struggle, daily life, politics, and activism of everyday people of often marginalized communities candidly, and with integrity and compassion.

Palmer began his journalism career as a fact-checker at the Village Voice newspaper and freelance photographer. He served as a CNN correspondent and the Beijing Bureau Chief for US News and World Report. In 2002, he returned to freelancing. He has been published in the New York Times, the Nation, Smithsonian Magazine, New Republic, PBS, and by Reveal/Center for Investigative Reporting. Palmer has also taught undergraduate and graduate students as an adjunct (School of Visual Arts, Baruch College, Hampton University) and as a visiting professor (University of Richmond and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism).

He has been awarded numerous awards: a Peabody, a National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence, and an Online Journalism Award for the Reveal episode, “Monumental Lies”, focusing on the myth, the Lost Cause narrative, of the Civil War and slavery kept alive with confederate monuments. Additionally, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant to create a documentary, Full Disclosure, that focused on his time as a journalist in Iraq with US Marines.

In addition to his work in Iraq and on confederate monuments, he reported and produced a story for PBS on the burden of evictions of Black and Brown residents in Richmond. He was included in the International Center for Photography’s “Radical Conversation: Making American Great” series presenting on “The Image of Greatness” revealing how he saw America’s political movement within the global context.

Themes of place, politics, and community figure heavily in Palmer’s work. Through his visual journalism, Palmer strives to tell the stories and uplift the vibrant African American communities that have been devalued or erased. Working with independent curator Ashley Kistler, writer Laura Browder, and the University of Richmond Museums, Palmer photographed community members for the “Growing Up in Civil Rights Richmond” exhibition and subsequent catalog.

Since the end of 2014, he and his wife, Erin Hollaway Palmer, have been part of the volunteer effort to reclaim and document East End Cemetery, a historic African American burial ground in Henrico County, Virginia.

Most recently, in January, Palmer participated in the “Picturing the Black Racial Imaginary” Symposium at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Brian Palmer is presenting at Mary Baldwin University on March 11 at 7 pm in Francis Auditorium as part of the Susan Paul Firestone Lecture and will work with art studio students on March 12. This lecture series was initiated through the generosity of Ray A. Graham III and it honors the creative work and accomplishments of Susan Paul Firestone ’68.

► More information