• Keris Salmon (b. 1959, New York, NY) is a New York-based multi-media artist and award-winning broadcast journalist, whose work reckons...

    Keris Salmon (b. 1959, New York, NY) is a New York-based multi-media artist and award-winning broadcast journalist, whose work reckons with the legacies of both personal and collective histories. She earned a BS from Stanford University, CA in 1981 and completed her graduate studies in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in 1985. She has worked for major broadcasters such as ABC, NBC, and PBS.

     

    Selected solo exhibitions of her artwork have taken place at Arnika Dawkins Gallery, Atlanta, GA; as well as Minnesota Street Project and Grace Cathedral, both San Francisco, all in 2018; Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, 2014; and internationally at Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, France, 2017. She has been included in group exhibitions at the International Print Center New York in 2019,; Smith Gallery, Santa Cruz, CA; and Original Thinkers Festival, Telluride, CO, both in 2018; B-Complex Gallery, Atlanta, 2016 and 2017; Samsøñ Projects, Boston, 2017; as well as Arsenal Gallery, New York, 2015; Space Gallery, Portland, ME, 2014; and Powerhouse Arena, Brooklyn, NY, 2012. She has recently exhibited internationally at the Joost Van Den Bergh Gallery in London, 2018. Salmon is represented in the permanent collections of the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; The Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips- Andover in Andover, MA., and Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. A newly appointed Trustee of MassMOCA, Salmon’s first solo museum show, The Architecture of Slavery recently closed at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA.

  • The series title is drawn from the governor’s nuptial bequeathment to his daughter of 32 human beings “to have and to hold.” - Keris Salmon

  • Keris Salmon To Have and To Hold, 2020 Digital print with letterpress on Entrada Rag Natural 19 x 13 inches
    Keris Salmon
    To Have and To Hold, 2020
    Digital print with letterpress on Entrada Rag Natural
    19 x 13 inches
    Inquire

  • In her evolving exploration of the architecture of slavery, Keris Salmon has followed up with To Have and To Hold, a suite of eleven photographic prints with letterpress which peer into the lives of the American and Caribbean enslaved and their enslavers through the buildings and landscapes they inhabited and the words they once spoke. 

  • A multi-media storyteller, Salmon presents historical truths framed in contemporary contexts to offer deeper understandings of our place in this confounding nation. As enslaved men and women and the wealth they generated  built the nation we inhabit, her series exposes - through visual poetry - the architectural foundations of the caste system we call home. 

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  • In this series, Salmon transports us to, among other less-lofty plantations,  some of the dwellings and outbuildings of former American slave-holding presidents and antebellum legislators. Most notable is the ruined Thomas Jefferson-designed mansion of Virginia Governor William Barbour,  called “Barboursville."

  • PBS News Hour | Keris Salmon - We Have Made These Lands What They Are: The Architecture of Slavery

  • Available For Purchase: To Have and To Hold

    Keris Salmon