WELLESLEY, MASS.- Sovereign Memory: Photography, Remembrance, and Displaced Histories, a new exhibition on view at the Davis Museum, explores photography as a strategy for healing. The artists each employ the photograph as a connective tissue, stitching together individuals, families, and communities to severed histories and identities.

About 40 works are on view from February 7 to June 1, 2025, along with two other new exhibitions at the Davis Museum, all highlighting new acquisitions.

“Sovereign Memory reflects on how artists employ the medium of photography to reimagine the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present,” said Jessica Orzulak, Associate Curator and Curatorial Affairs Manager at the Asheville Art Museum and former Linda Wyatt Gruber ‘66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Davis Museum who curated Sovereign Memory. “Photographs can capture intimate moments of our individual lived experiences, but they also have the capacity to share a more complicated portrait of collective life and histories from a myriad of perspectives.”

All of the artists in Sovereign Memory share a concern with how images profoundly shape the stories of where we come from–and who we are. Orzulak believes photography has revolutionized how we represent our histories, solidifying architectures of personal and collective memory through archives born of visual technologies. Photography also has a darker history as a colonial machine producing images in support of empires.

For communities who endured generations of colonialism and continue to navigate legacies of its violence, histories told through the lens of photography can re implement a colonial gaze, enacting a series of erasures. The multiplicity of personal and collective experiences becomes distilled into a single, simplified story told from an exterior perspective.

Featuring a transnational selection of photographic works from the Davis’s collections, this exhibition expands that single, false story into many sovereign memories. These artworks have become emblems for reconnecting to known and unknown histories, enacting memory as an emancipatory strategy.

Curated by Orzulak, this exhibition is supported with funds given through the generosity of Linda Wyatt Gruber (Class of 1966).