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Alonso Nichols Headshot

Biography

Alonso Nichols is a photographer and intermedia artist. He is the Chief of Photography for Tufts University Communications and Marketing. Leading While Black at Tufts, a series of living portraits, video interviews and archival materials recognizing the rich legacy of Black executive leadership at Tufts University, is installed at Tisch Library until August 2022. Nichols’ current project, How the Future Happened (Or) The Cost of Integration, is an exploration of Smoketown: Louisville, Kentucky’s oldest Black neighborhood built by emancipated slaves in the 1860s. He is a recipient of the Silver Medal in Photography from the Region I Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, Multicultural Service Award, Tufts University, and other honors. Nichols is bilingual (English and Spanish) with conversational and reading competency in Portuguese. 

Artist Statement

Louisville, Kentucky’s Smoketown was born of the promise of Reconstruction and blighted by segregation and urban renewal. Political scientist Harold Lasswell defines politics as "Who gets what, when, and how.", and Smoketown is American politics written upon the landscape. Gentrification is a politics of location. What happens when the power of whiteness is not encountered when you leave your community, but when it invades and deconstructs your community? Even as striking images of the dismantling of Confederate monuments across the South have received international attention, the steady dismantling of Black communities continues unabated.

This work visualizes both the process of gentrification and gives form to consider the racial, geographic, and historical context of Black-American space. Meaning, like memory, is a construction informed by facts, dialogue, and the stories we tell ourselves about the world around us and our place within it. In my work, I arrange the fragments of time recorded in photographs as assemblages in which images overlap and abut along the edges of temporality. The viewer’s gaze is limited to the landscape to avoid subjecting the residents of Smoketown to the gaze of gallery visitors. The resulting collage of time, space, and images encapsulates the past, present, and future, rendering visible the stark changes in the landscape and is juxtaposed with archival and personal family photos creating complex and subtle layers of meaning of the landscape in the context of human lives, and questioning the notions of progress, development, and urban renewal. 

Instagram: @alonsonichols 
 

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Alonso Nichols - Gone by the Way of Fat Sam
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Digital Collage, 2022
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Alonso Nichols - Gone By The Way of Fat Sam 2
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Digital Collage, 2022
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Alonso Nichols - Gone by the Way of Fat Sam
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Digital Collage, 2022
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Alonso Nichols - Gone By the Way of Fat Sam
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Digital Collage, 2022
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Alonso Nichols - Lampton Street
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Digital Collage, 2022
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