Jeanine Michna-Bales

Follow the Drinking Gourd, Jefferson County, Indiana

2013

Jeanine Michna-Bales is a fine artist working in the medium of photography. Her work explores our fundamentally important relationships – to the land, to other people and to oneself – and how they impact contemporary society. Her work lives at the intersection of curiosity and knowledge, documentary and fine art, past and present, anthropology and sociology, and environmentalism and activism. Her practice is based on in-depth research – taking into account different viewpoints, causes and effects, political climates – and she often incorporates primary source material into her projects. Michna-Bales’s work is in many permanent collections including Archive of Documentary Arts, Duke University, Durham, NC; Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, PA; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Louisiana State University, Hill Memorial Library, Baton Rouge, LA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX; and University of North Texas, Denton, TX. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and online blogs, including BBC World News, CityLab from The Atlantic, Dallas Morning News, DCist.com, Feature Shoot, Geo Historie, Hyperallergic, In Sight by The Washington Post, In the In-Between, Los Angeles Times, Lenscratch, Musée Magazine, NBC4 Washington D.C., New York Times Lens Blog, Orion Magazine, O The Oprah Magazine, Oxford American Eyes on the South, pdn Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Spot Magazine, Transition from Harvard University, UK Daily Mail, Virginia Quarterly Review, WABE 90.1 Atlanta’s NPR Station, WCPN-NPR and WVIZ-PBS ideastream Cleveland, Wired Raw File, Zoom Magazine, among others. Including other honors, her work was selected for the 2016 Documentarian of The American South Collection Award from the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. She was awarded the top Portfolio Review Prize at PhotoNOLA 2015, resulting in a solo show at the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery during PhotoNOLA 2016. Michna-Bales was named to the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2014 and in 2017. She conceives and presents her projects in a way that spark curiosity about a given subject and encourage discourse among audiences of all backgrounds. Whether exploring the darkened stations along the Underground Railroad in Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad (2002 - 2016), a campaign trail for women’s votes in Standing Together: Inez Milholland’s Final Campaign for Women’s Suffrage (2016 - 2020), long-forgotten nuclear fallout shelters in Fallout: A Look Back at the Height of the Cold War in America, circa 1960 (2013 - present), or the invisible epicenters of environmental turmoil through the project Terra Fractura: A Visual Survey of Manmade Earthquakes (2015 - present), her work seeks out places that are hidden in plain sight.