Wendy Ewald with Dr. MLK Jr. School students and teachers

Wendy Ewald is KSMoCA’s 2022–2023 artist in residence. For over 40 years, she has worked on photography projects around the world with children, families, women, and teachers. At Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School she collaborated on three projects with students, teachers, and Portland State University students: Reading Pictures, Retratos y Sueños (Portraits and Dreams), and The Best Part of Me.

In anticipation of the exhibitions, our PSU students created a zine to share Wendy Ewald’s work with students at Dr. MLK Jr School. 

Wendy Ewald was born in Detroit, MI, in 1951. She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She has had solo exhibitions nationally and internationally and her work is documented in books and a recent film.

Reading Pictures poster workshops

Reading Pictures explored Teaching and Learning Through Photography. It was based on Ewald’s collaboration with partners in Tanzania since 2010 to create photographic teaching materials for school curriculums. She currently works with the University of Dodoma to develop posters that are used in classrooms to connect learning through pictures. Dr. MLK Jr. School teachers and students collaborated with PSU students to make their own versions of image-based posters to use in their own learning and classrooms. 

The Best Part of Me school-wide project and exhibit

Wendy’s 2002 project with students in a Durham, North Carolina elementary school used photography and conversation to explore how children regarded their bodies. It was also a response to what she often heard in her other projects with young people who described themselves and their connections with other people in terms of parts of their bodies. Later, the students worked with their writing teacher to write about their best parts. The resulting images and text were published as The Best Part of Me: Children Talk About their Bodies in Pictures and Words.

Inspired by Wendy’s project and book, the media specialist at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School, Ms. Beth Schlegel, re-enacted Wendy’s project in early 2020 with a class of first graders. She followed Wendy’s prompt, asking each child, “What is the best part of you and why?” The students wrote their responses and Ms. Schlegel took photographs to document what each student described as their best part. She displayed the resulting photographs and texts on a bulletin board in the school’s hallway, which Wendy noticed on a site visit to KSMoCA as the 2022–2023 artist in residence. This encounter sparked the school-wide co-authored project between Ewald, Ms. Schlegel, and the 322 students at Dr. MLK Jr. School.

The resulting exhibition and catalog include the students’ responses in images and text, forming a collective portrait of Dr. MLK Jr. School. The project is installed in the hallway in front of the school’s library as part of KSMoCA’s permanent collection.

Retratos y Sueños (Portraits and Dreams) mentorship collaboration

Retratos y Sueños (Portraits and Dreams) is based on a 1991 project Wendy did in with Maya, Ladino, and Tzotzil children living in Chiapas, Mexico, guiding her students in taking their own pictures of their daily lives, dreams, desires, and fantasies. At KSMoCA, college students mentored elementary school students to take photos of their dreams and lives at home and school.

Exhibition of works by Wendy Ewald and students at Dr. MLK Jr. School