Jacqueline Tarry (b. 1963)

Jacqueline Tarry is an interdisciplinary artist whose visual, multi-media, video, and sonic works confront social injustice in American culture. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from SUNY Buffalo State and participated in the Whitney’s ISP program. Her work, which has been shown internationally, explores the historic record, particularly the raw, ugly, and often suppressed events that continue to resonate today.

This diptych was featured in Intersections, an exhibition at The Center in 2012-13. Created both individually and as a partnership of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, the works featured evocative imagery—both aesthetically pleasing and horrifyingly documentary—of their subjects, such as the Civil Rights Movement, homelessness, racial discrimination, biracial relationships, media misrepresentation, caricatures, gender roles, power and powerlessness. Their imagery is recognizable as part of a national story, as well as issues from local experiences. For this work, Tarry came back to her hometown of Buffalo for source material. She culled local newspapers from historic archives as well as the community’s photographic archives. The Part and the Whole, The One and the Many portrays her family’s portrait of her father and the mourning funeral march for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. which included her father; thus relating on levels both personal and universal.—NW