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Stereo Propaganda: Deconstructing Stereotypes, Reconstructing Identity
featuring art by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier
November 11th - December 11th, 2009

Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier is an Atlanta based photographer, painter and writer. She has been documenting the people and places of the South since 1989. She has won numerous awards including a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest/Arts International Travel Fellowship (1994) that took her to Australia to document the aboriginal people of that region and a Kellogg Foundation/Fulton County Arts Council Residency in 1999 that took her to South Africa to produce prints and dialogue with women from all around the world on issues confronting the new millennium. She recently completed 5 large-scaled photobased mixed-media works for Fulton County and her work appears on the cover of Nikky Finney's new book "The World is Round".

For almost twenty years I traveled back and forth to the largest predominately African American town in the United States, Mound Bayou, Mississippi.   I’d met Milburn Crowe, self-appointed town historian in 1989, and was drawn to his collection of photographs.  I was also drawn to the history of the town.

In 1888, Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin Benjamin Greene founded Mound Bayou, which is located in the Mississippi Delta.  Montgomery and Green were former slaves of Joseph Davis, brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. I was intrigued early on by the history of the town as well as notions of self-determination and the fierce independence espoused by Mound Bayou’s founders and its citizens.  I was especially intrigued by the idea of slipping through the color line or at least attempting to do so by forming an all black community.  Of course, Mound

Bayouians could no more dodge the effects of segregation and Jim Crow than any other town in the south but the idea of skin color, race, identity, and even ritual became dominant themes as I worked on the show. I also became intrigued with the idea of re-imagining and inverting stereotypes, literally turning them inside out to further amplify racial constructs.

Stereo Propaganda uses the diary of Mary Virginia Montogmery, one of the first teachers in Mound Bayou, as a vehicle to step into an imaginal space where stereocards (photographic images attached to a 3” x 7” card and then viewed through a stereo viewer) are combined with a variety of media to examine the construct of race.  These racial stereotypes continue to resonate in contemporary culture even though we often don’t know of their origin.  There is no shortage of magic and myth, two of my favorite

vehicles, in this examination where they act as buffers to the dominant power structure.  When we consider that stereography has been likened to television in the early 19th century, the images presented here become even more significant opening the doors to further discourse on race and identity.

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