Mason Galemore
Contributing Writer
[email protected]

This year’s “The Magic Silver Show” celebrates the memory of the late Elena Curris, the daughter of Murray State’s sixth president Constantine Curris and his wife Jo Curris. 

“The Magic Silver Show: The Elena Diane Curris Juried Photography Exhibition” features work from regional, national and international artists.

Sherri Littlefield juried the exhibition and Director of University Galleries T. Michael Martin curated the opening on Wednesday, Sept. 8. The event is currently on display in the Clara M. Eagle Gallery of the Price Doyle Fine Arts Center. 

Forty-five photographers from across the U.S. and from international locations qualified for the event. “The Magic Silver Show” has been part of Murray State’s Fine Arts Department since the 1970s. 

Elena Curris received her Bachelor of Arts in marketing, communication and photography from the University of Alabama. She was an avid traveler and visited Kenya and Western Europe, taking photographs along the way.  

“She was really the daughter of Murray State,”  Constantine Curris said. “With her unexpected passing we thought long and hard about what we wanted to do in her memory. She had a passion for the arts, particularly in design and photography. She seemed to be a natural.”  

Littlefield was the director of the Foley Gallery in New York City from 2016 to 2019. She curated projects featured in the Pulse Art Fair, HuffPost and Whitewall Magazine. As a juror, she was in charge of viewing and qualifying submissions. 

She chose from over 800 photography and video submissions for this exhibition. She said the task was long and complicated. 

“The exhibition is meant to encourage people to work in photography,” Littlefield said. “It is such a unique artform and compared to other artforms, like painting, it is fairly new. Photography is everywhere and is ubiquitous with everyday life.”

The work featured was from several different genres including portrait, landscape, abstract and street photography. Littlefield said there was no main theme and she looked for photographs that pushed the limits conceptually and visually. 

Some photographers told stories through their images. The image “Subway Father” by Claude Beller shows a father feeding his infant child on a subway in New York City.   

Claudia Paul was featured with her “Faces of Resilience” project. The project’s focus was healthcare workers on the frontlines of COVID-19. Each photo showed the faces of doctors and nurses and depicted their experiences as workers during the pandemic.

Several artists focused on the aesthetic of photography. Todd Birdsong’s image “Currently 900” showed a tree with digital glitches to create an artistic effect. Another image “Intensity” by Steve Barger showed the Northern Lights in Norway in 2019. 

One theme explored during the exhibit was the personal aspect of photography, such as in the work photographer Deanna Dikeman’ exhibits From 1991 to 2017, Dikeman photographed her parents waving goodbye from their driveway each time she left their house.

Each photograph of the project signified the passage of time. In one photo, Dikeman’s infant son is seen riding in the back of her car as her parents are waving goodbye. In the next photo, her son is seen as an adult in 2015 waving goodbye to his grandmother.

“I never set out to make a series,” Dikeman said. “I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving. As I accumulated these photographs, I found a story about family, aging and the sorrow of saying goodbye.”

In another photograph, Sandy Miller Sasso depicted a lace dress on a backdrop of trees. According to her website, sandymillersasso.com, Sasso was born on a cattle farm in North Carolina, where she frequently visited family in the Appalachian Mountains. Her experience of living around wide fields of farmland features prominently in her work.

Littlefield ended her presentation by explaining the importance of creating. As a photographer, it is important to reach out to independent photo agencies, she said.

“The more you create the more you see what’s working,” Littlefield said. “Keep having fun with your work. It should never feel like a chore and should be something that comes from the heart.”

The exhibition will be available to the public until Oct. 18. 

The Clara M. Eagle Gallery is open on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

For more information, visit the College of Humanities and Fine Arts’s website at murraystatechfa.wordpress.com