Noritaka Minami MFA 2011 and Ashley Hunt BA 1994 awarded Graham Foundation Grant

Graham Foundation awarded over $530,000 in grants to individuals which included Noritaka Minami MFA 2011 and Ashley Hunt BA 1994.

Ashley Hunt - Degree of Visibility

Degrees of Visibility tackles the politics of erasure and camouflage that allow mass incarceration to take place through photography, text, and community partnership. Starting with an unprecedented survey of the architecture of mass incarceration, the project juxtaposes photography of over 250 prisons across all 50 US states and territories with histories, anecdotes and numbers—presenting a meditation on race, vision, photography, history, language, and space. Following ongoing research into the post-War shift toward camouflage in contemporary prison architecture, each facility is photographed from a publicly available point of view, seeing how it is situated among architecture, land uses, and with varying degrees of visibility and concealment. The exhibition includes a national tour that partners with local organizations in each city and offers a platform for organizing, workshops, and visibility for campaigns to end mass incarceration.

Noritaka Minami - Passage Works

This research project titled Passage Works is a photographic investigation of shopping arcades that proliferated in Japan during the postwar economic miracle. Arcades became a ubiquitous architectural presence in urban environments during this period in which the nation emerged from the devastation of World War II to become an economic superpower. The commercial districts of cities across the nation were transformed into covered passages to protect consumers from inclement weather and became an important precursor to contemporary supermarkets and shopping malls. Today, arcades symbolize a historical era that has passed in Japan. Many of the structures are in disrepair or facing demolition due to changes in both the economy and population. This project will document various forms of arcades that still stand in the nation. The photographs will examine the states in which arcades exist today as they face obsolescence in the twenty-first century.