Glenna Jennings
Photography, Social Practice, Performance
Glenna Jennings is an artist and educator whose work includes photography, curating, and socially-engaged art. She is an Associate Professor of Photography and Social Practice at the University of Dayton, Ohio, and completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Jennings holds BAs in English and Spanish (Pepperdine) and a BFA in Photography (Art Center College of Design). She has exhibited throughout the US, Mexico, Europe, and China. Recognition of her work includes several Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a Photolucida Robert Rauschenberg Award, and several project grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work resides within the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, AMNUA Museum China, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and multiple private collections. Jennings is actively involved in food justice in Ohio and beyond, and was recently awarded a University of Dayton Excellence in Teaching award and a Montgomery County Educator Food Champion award or her work with the socially-engaged art collaboration Desert Kitchen Collective.
The tables of my youth were compact, plastic, and single-serve. Meant to be folded and put away, then quickly assembled in time for dinner and prime time TV. Our dining room table’s leaf could accommodate guests, but feasts were rare in our home, where a single working mom and her only child alternated between frozen meals and homecooked stews or spaghetti. The ongoing series At Table arose from a desire to add people to these memories, to cultivate relationships across cultures and borders, to document the in-between when ordinary moments come alive through food and drink. In locations scattered throughout North America, Europe and Asia, I have used my lens to navigate from a place that is local in depth but global in breadth. My tablescapes connect friends and former strangers, creating a family album that defies traditional definition and serves as a receptacle for shared memories and cross-cultural artifacts. Though At Table focuses on places of access and abundance, the imagery often helps guide events and conversations within my work as a socially-engaged artist, food justice activist and founder of the Desert Kitchen Collective. Ultimately, this series aims to reveal aspects of the human condition that collide and converge in a shared, familiar place – the table.
champagne and soup (London, England)
30" x 20"
archival inkjet print