Graves, Kris

Kris Graves’ project American Monuments (2021) depicts Confederate monuments in Richmond, Virginia that were removed in the summer of 2020 during Black Lives Matter protests. Graves documents now empty pedestals as well as remaining graffiti-strewn statues, showing evolving public sentiments on these forms. Graves also documents a project by artists Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui, who activated still-standing monuments of Confederate General Robert E. Lee by projecting images of Black individuals killed by police onto it, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Marcus David Peters. The series captures an important era of historic protest in response to police murders of Black individuals while raising awareness on how the memorialization and glorification of the history of enslavement can perpetuate white supremacist values in the United States.

Kris Graves earned a BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College (2004). He is on the board of Blue Sky Gallery: Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland, OR, and is the Vice President of Photography at the Architectural League of New York. He has completed residencies at Aurora Photo Center Indianapolis, Indiana (2022), Center for Photography Woodstock, New York (2020), and Light Work, Syracuse, New York (2019). His work has been shown at Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021), National Portrait Gallery, London (2015), and Getty Institute, Los Angeles (2023) among others. Graves’ project Privileged Mediocrity and the Deceived Within won the Aftermath Project Grant (2021), and he has also won the Anne Wilkes Tucker Young Photographers Endowment, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (2017), the Juror’s Selection for Center Forward, Center of Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado (2015), and was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, Aperture Foundation, New York (2017).