Just Injust, 2021
Dear Black Son follows the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. In response to a bystander video that captured an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck, my husband and I had a conversation with our 12-year-old son, the kind of talks white families don’t have to have with their children.
Through this project, I explore conversations between Black fathers and their sons, especially about being Black in America. Each portrait is juxtaposed with a short conversation a son may have had with his father or the exchange between the father and son reading: “Dear Black Son” as a letter to him.
Celestia Cookie Morgan (b.1981) was born and raised in Birmingham Alabama. She earned her BFA in photography from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2012 and her MFA from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2017.
Morgan is currently an adjunct photography professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and works with the Birmingham City Schools assisting in Visual Arts.
Morgan’s riveting work has been exhibited in Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota; State of the Art: Discovering American Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; Alabama Artist: Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Her recent exhibitions include the National Public Housing Museum’s Undesign the Redline in Chicago, Illinois; Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s New Southern Photography curated by Richard McCabe in New Orleans, Louisiana; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art “All or Nothing” in Bentonville, Arkansas; Birmingham Public Library “Food is Work” commissioned by Southern Foodway Alliance’s. Morgan continues to work in Birmingham, Alabama as an independent artist with her husband and two children.
