Exhibitions
ANDREA MORALES: ROLL DOWN LIKE WATER
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art / 1934 Poplar Ave. September 5, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Andrea Morales
Roll Down Like Water features sixty-five photographs spanning a decade of work by the Memphis-based, Peruvian-American photographer Andrea Morales. These images reflect the collective change of Memphis and the surrounding region over time, a place that often just eludes definition by the many storytellers, poets, and songwriters that have lived in or passed through this area. Morales’s talent is looking directly, earnestly, while creating space for the essence of this place–the magic of it–to enter her lens.
Her approach is informed by Movement Journalism–an emerging, ethical, and community-oriented journalistic framework–and anchored in the historic legacies of activism in the American South. Titled after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech of his life in Memphis, in which he said “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” the images in this exhibition course through and around the structural issues and legacies in society, while documenting how those structures can be forever altered by an individual, a moment, or the strength of a community. The result is a complex and tender portrait of this region.
This exhibition represents Morales’s first major museum exhibition and catalogue, and the first museum exhibition dedicated to Movement Journalism. Through her captivating images of the South in moments of turbulence, stillness, darkness, and beauty, Morales charts new paths in sustainable journalism, while reflecting upon identity, community, and the power of storytelling.
In the interactive gallery of this exhibition, a monitor features visitors’ photographs of Memphis. You can add yours to the monitor by visiting the link below.
When you upload your image, it will be added to our community folder.
New images will be added to the monitor’s slideshow every other week.
Image: Andrea Morales, Kaylin McCain and Jakayla Davis wait for their grandmother to sign up for the Affordable Care Act at Impact Baptist Church in Frayser, a Memphis, Tennessee, neighborhood, in February 2015.
