Aaron R. Turner

Aaron Turner is an artist and educator born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience; he also uses the 4x5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, abstraction, and the Archive. His most recent book, Moves from the Archive, highlights the varied approach to image making, fusing elements of still life, appropriation, and painting to comment on the complex nature of Black American history and representation.

In Moves From The Archive, Aaron Turner's work is a constant flux of images, forms, and materials. They are continually shifting, being recombined, and reconstituted in unexpected ways. This fluidity in the studio infuses his work with an incredibly dynamic quality, mirroring the complexity of the histories and ideas he pays homage to. This rearrangement process is an archival practice that productively challenges the notions of authority typically associated with Archives.

Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 2023 Individual Artist Fellowship form the Arkansas Arts Council, and a 2024 Penumbra Workspace artist-in-residence.

His work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum Of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, George Eastman Museum, Houston Center for Photography, Light Work, Penumbra Foundation, SF Cameraworks, Photo Access Australia, Filter Photo, and Center for Photography at Woodstock. 

Aaron’s artwork and writings have also been included in the following publications: TIME Magazine, the New York Times, the Smithsonian Magazine, Hyperallergic, Visual Studies Workshop Press, TIS Books, Contact Sheet, Aperture, Columbia University Press, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, Gnomic Book, Routledge, Yale University Press, Sleeper Studio, and Scale Arts Publishers Inc.

Assistant Professor  of Art (Photography/Interdisciplinary Practice)

University of Arkansas, School of Art

Director, Center for Art as Lived Experience

Research Interest: Photography as a Transformative Process to understand place, identity, abstraction, archives, and aggregation. 

Prints, books and portfolios available upon request.

Photo: Gus Aronson