Tiffany Goes to Harvard

One of the greatest things about social media, is that you are literally connected with people from all over the world. It’s even more splendid when those people are in close proximity to you, and had it not been for technology, you may have never crossed paths.

I met photographer, Tiffany J. Sutton, via Instagram. I don’t remember how, or why, we started following each other, but I do remember the moment I became a fan of her work. It was when I saw her Girls with Fruit series. 

Sure, we’ve seen girls with fruit since...Adam and Eve! But this was something different.

It was so different, it was intriguing. Needless to say, I shamelessly stalked the rest of her work - and to my delight, I got the same feeling from more of her photographs. The overall tone was quirky, but it was also deeply intimate, and oddly relatable.

Girls with Fruit

“The seemingly endless connections between the binary is what drew me to create portraits of women, eating, peeling and posing with fruit,”

— Sutton explains the series in her Artist Statement.

“My photographs of women aren’t about their performance for me and the audience as with a male gaze. I’m telling a collective narrative about women's complexities and emotions and that has become a feminist statement for which I am still exploring,” she continues.

“I create narratives about all women regardless of their ethnicity, age and body type. Creating these images is an act of love for myself and my female friends,” Sutton says about her work.

“I want people to see the embodiment of themselves. It’s all about the environment for me, and a lot of [what goes into] modeling comes from being comfortable...and I like creating that atmosphere for my models. In this space, you’re good.” 

Although Sutton began her career as a general photographer, over the last 20 years she's honed in on perfecting her craft through experimentation, trial and error, as well as combining attributes of her favorite artists. 

“What I learned in school was so technical, but most of my knowledge comes from reading books, and other artists telling their stories. A lot of what I do is self taught.”

“Why can I identify a Carrie Mae Weems picture? How do I know a Mickalene Thomas as soon as I see it? [As an artist] it takes a while to figure that out. But after so long; trying different methods, having to work through difficult situations, you start finding things you like, and things that work for you.”

You find your style.

“The essence of me as Tiffany has been comic relief - serious, but also funny and comfortable - and that shows in my work. So it warms my heart to have someone say, ‘that's a Tiffany Sutton print’, or ‘I know that one, because it looks like her work’, or ‘that looks like her eye and no one else's’.”

Tiffany J. Sutton photographed by Carrie M. Becker.

The last few months have been exciting for her career, in November she was awarded a grant from St. Louis’ Regional Arts Commission, and right after Christmas, she and six other local artists, found out they’d been awarded a fellowship to Harvard University. 

“How the opportunity came about is actually a wonderful story,” she laughed. “I was feeling insecure, I wasn't sure if my work was being seen by the right people...then I randomly got an email from De Nichols, a Harvard Loeb Fellow, to apply for The Commonwealth Project’s first #InTheCity Visual Arts Fellowship. 

She mentioned that there were some students interested in working with local St. Louis artist. Come to find out, they have a class at Harvard all about St. Louis; the dynamics of the city, and the interesting socio political life of St. Louisans. It totally blew my mind that someone at Harvard thought to have an entire semester about St. Louis! So when I got this email, I knew it was something I had to do.”

Despite her initial excitement about the opportunity, she waffled the idea for weeks, and almost talked herself out of it. But as fate would have it, on November 18th at 11:59pm, she ultimately decided to submit her application. 

And she got it.

The six fellows are tasked with capturing different parts of the city in response to the question “What is St. Louis to you?” A question Sutton plans on answering with the faces and voices of black women.

“The qualifications for this project were that you had to be black, and you had to be an artist. It just so happens that we’re all lens based artists. Yet the spectrum of our work, and our personalities is perfect! My work focuses on the complexities of black women; Colin Elliot’s work focuses on loss; Shabez Jamal’s work focuses on the complexities of queer black men...it’s like a mosaic of the city.

“I don’t know if it was kismet, or maybe they really looked into our work,” she laughed. “But it’s beautiful.”

[From left to right] Shabez Jamal, Nyara Williams, Alana Flowers, Sutton. Photo courtesy of Shabez Jamal.

“I’m excited about being around black people, especially black artists. Especially black photographers and filmmakers.

“I'm a 90’s girl, so everything I did was like, ‘you can’t like rolling stones and listen to Michael Jackson’, ‘you can’t do anything that's contradictory’. It’s really like black was a monolith.”

So now, to have a group of people who are all different, is amazing. You have me, the nerdy black girl; a married woman; a queer man, and literally everything in between...we’re all just black, and we’re so supportive of each other, and that's not at all what I experienced in the 90’s. Everyone talked a good game, but it wasn't like that. This team is heaven sent and I’m excited to see what else comes of this,” she paused.

“I went from not finishing college, to being a fellow at Harvard.”

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More on The Commonwealth Project

Courtesy of Harvard University

The Commonwealth Project at Harvard University models a new way for universities to engage with social problems through mutuality, service and collaboration. Taking root in the Midwestern region of St. Louis, professors and students cooperate with cultural producers, activists, attorneys and local politicians on community-led justice initiatives and historical research.

The city of St. Louis presents the challenge of the present moment in the history of the United States in extremis. By virtually any standard measure the city is a byword for urban decay. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the population of the city declined by almost two-thirds; the city today is smaller than it has been at any time since 1870. St. Louis is one of the ten most segregated cities in the United States, and has the highest rate of police shootings (of both armed and unarmed targets) in the United States.

And yet the city of St. Louis also presents a long history of Black genius, resistance, and flourishing. It is the city where W. C. Handy first heard the syncopated rag-time music that took root in the blues. It is the city of Maya Angelou, Miles Davis, and Chuck Berry. Of Ike and Tina Turner. Of Nelly and Chingy. It is also a city that has produced a trenchant critique of the racial aspects of American inequality. The Pan-Africanist radicals Claudine Jones and C. L. R. James both traveled to the city in the 1940s to learn from the example of its Black radicals.  From Hershel Walker in the 1930s and 1940s to Ivory Perry and Percy Green in the 1950s and 1960s down to the Organization for Black Struggle and Hands Up United today, the city has produced a singular and enduring critique of racial segregation and inequality.

The residence of the St. Louis artist and activist Tef Poe at the Charles Warren Center during 2016-2017 and at the Hutchins Center during 2017-2018 provided a unique opportunity for a sustained interchange of eyewitness and academic knowledge about the city of St. Louis. Out of that interchange emerged the idea of the Commonwealth Project. Our mission is to be thoroughly mutual: to bring frontline knowledge into the university and university know-how into the community.

EXHIBITIONS IN ST. LOUIS and HARVARD CAMPUS

With curation by designer and Harvard Loeb Fellow, De Nichols, The Griot Museum of Black History in St. Louis will be home to the first exhibit of the artists’ photographs and public workshops. A landmark of North St. Louis with a 23-year history of presenting stories about the region's Black heritage, The Griot is the first black-owned museum in the city.

The second exhibition of artist fellows’ work will be at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies, on view in early May, held in conjunction with the campus-wide 2020 ARTSFIRST festival. A program of talks and events will be released for both.