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Bright, Sheila Pree

American, b. 1967

BiographySheila Pree Bright is frequently described as a cultural anthropologist, given her work’s focus on nuanced explorations and depictions of under-seen and under-heard people, communities, and their respective cultures. Bright’s early work was about the Gangsta rap scene in Houston, examining the relational dynamics between Hip Hop and gun culture. In 2014 and 2015, she travelled to Ferguson and Baltimore to make photographs of the protests which followed on the heels of the police murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. These photos became #1960Now, some of her most well-known work. This series, Suburbia, portrays homes in the suburbs owned by upper- and middle-class Black Americans. The images disrupt media-driven stereotypes of Black life and community, depicting everyday moments and still life settings within homes. Bright has said that she struggled early on getting this work published as curators and publishers commented that the work wasn’t black enough. Bright carefully arranges each scene, creating an intimate sense of home as sweet safe spaces, inviting bright light into the interior domestic spaces in which small details are elevated and illuminated.

Shelia Pree Bright’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History, Washington, DC; the Library of Congress, Washington DC; The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT; the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA; among many others.