In Their Own Light: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools by Melissa Ann Pinney

In Their Own Light: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools relates the story of Melissa Ann Pinney’s five-year artist residency in Chicago Public Schools, from a largely White elementary school to several mostly Black and Latinx high schools. When Pinney began this work in 2018, she had no idea of what was to come. Here, we see how the project evolved and shifted as Pinney found opportunities to deepen connections with students even through an ongoing global pandemic, escalating racial and gender inequities and continuing gun violence. Throughout, Pinney shows us an astonishing range of identities revealed amid friendships and school rituals.

Melissa Ann Pinney is the author of Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women & Girls (2003), Girl Ascending (2010) and TWO (2015). She has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Photography. Pinney’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco MOMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.