Photos pass a family’s stories from one generation to another.
Donna M. Meeks is exhibiting her work in the exhibition, “American Dream,” at Galveston College Art Gallery through Dec. 1.
Meeks, Lamar professor of painting and drawing, has been working on the exhibition since 2017. “American Dream” explores her family photos through a series of paintings.
“All the imagery in ‘American Dream’ is based on family photo albums and images of my familial history, not necessarily my personal history,” Meeks said. “It’s also kind of a reconstruction of things that never happened.”
In the collection, “American Dream 19” features images of photos of Meeks, her grandmother and her mother from different time periods.
“In that image, my grandmother is about 17-18 years old, my mom is about that age, and then I’m about seven, eight years old,” Meeks said. “There was never a time in history when we could have been young together.”
Meeks is using photos and combining the, to make images of the past that never existed, using AI functions in Photoshop. She then paints over them.
“I’m lifting the figures from other photographs, and I’m putting them into a new space,” she said. “Then I’m using linear perspective in my knowledge of drawing to create believability using these tools.”
Her research consisted of going through the family’s photos, but sometimes Meeks had to go further, she said. “American Dream 3” features her grandmother with two pilots at Bowman Field in Louisville, KY, in 1919. Her research revealed that the airmen were Eddie Rickenbacker and Bert Acosta.
“They were the two most famous World War One American pilots in the war,”Meeks said. “Then in 1919, they invented this thing called Air Mail.”
Air mail was used to fly letters that could be sent overseas. Rickenbacker and Acosta flew the first transcontinental air mail flight, making a stop in Louisville that isn’t documented, Meeks said.
“Except in my grandmother’s photo album, there’s two photos,” Meeks said. “There’s her with the pilots, and there’s a photo of the plane parked at the newly made airfield. On the back, it says, ‘Rickenbacker and Acosta just flew a transcontinental flight in this plane.’”
Memories show up not just in the finished paintings, but also revealed themselves as Meeks created the work. Another version of “American Dream 3” features embossed stars, a memory from Meeks’ childhood
“My grandfather was a printer,” she said. “When I was five or six years old, his gift to me was one of those rubber stamp print sets to inspire me to be a printer. I remember playing with it, so when I bring back embossed stamps, that’s kind of me remembering that first gift.”
Meeks said she views this show more as a motivating factor than a challenge.
“I’m a goal-oriented person, and when I have a goal, I meet a goal,” she said. “I’ve known about the show for more than a year, and so that gave me something to work towards.”
This “American Dream” series has been something Meeks has thought about for a long time.
“I was having dreams about people standing up, people who are gone, and getting together in a single image,” Meeks said. “So, I was dreaming about it long before I made it happen.”
By combining the landscapes, buildings and people from the past, Meeks has intertwined her family’s long history.
Galveston College Art Gallery is located in FA-31, 4015 Ave. Q in Galveston. Admission is free.
For more, visit gc.edu/artgallery. For more about Meeks’ art, visit donnammeeks.com.
