Eli Durst

In images from his series, The Children’s Melody, 2025, Guggenheim Fellow Eli Durst explores the very serious absurdities of collective identity formation, through photographs made in environments including cotillion groups, dance practices, ROTC training, and school performances. When read together, these images defamiliarize everyday life, questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, between the margins and the center. In sequence, they lay bare how invisible cultural forces shape us into who we become. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, which is itself a reformulation of Sartre: “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?"

Eli Durst is an American artist whose work explores the social forces and group dynamics that shape the suburban American experience. Durst’s photographs have been exhibited internationally and have been featured in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, and The Atlantic among others. He has published three monographs: The Community (Mörel, 2020), The Four Pillars (Loose Joints, 2022), and The Children’s Melody (Gnomic 2025). Durst lives and works in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas College of Fine Arts. Durst has received numerous prizes, including the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2017 Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.  

www.elidurst.com

Instagram: @durzt

Geoff Winningham

For almost four years, starting in November of 1975 and continuing through December of 1978, I traveled to high school football games all across the state of Texas. I photographed just over 120 games, the towns and their stadiums, the bands, the mascots, the cheerleaders, the coaches, the sidelines and the locker rooms, and the players themselves. As I photographed high school football in Texas, I learned that it is much more than a game. It is nothing short of a civil religion. Especially in the small towns of the state, the ritual of Friday night football involves the vast majority of the citizens of the community, and when the hour of truth comes—the game itself—the final result will be neither subtle or ambiguous, but direct and simple. There will be winners and losers, joy and grief, pride and disappointment. I was never interested in who the winner or the loser of a high school football game might be. As a photographer, I was looking for pictures, visual discoveries that would point to the beauty and the human complexities of the game.

When the book of my high school football photographs, Rites of Fall, was published in 1979, the curator John Szarkowski wrote: “Those who think that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton and those who think that the twentieth century was lost there will find equal collaboration in Geoff Winningham’s book about high school football in Texas. For the rest of us, the book shows that the truth is more complicated, more touching, and much funnier.”

Geoff Winningham earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Rice University and a master's degree in photography from the Institute of Design at IIT. He joined the art department at Rice University in 1969, where he continues to teach today, holding the Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities. Winningham has received two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous commissions. He has published books and directed documentary films on a wide variety of subjects, primarily related to Texas and Mexican culture. His book Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea: The Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico (2010) won both the Ron Tyler Prize from the Texas State Historical Association and the J. B. Jackson Award from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Winningham’s photographs are included in major collections across the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Wittliff Collections, San Marcos. His work has been published in numerous anthologies, including 20th Century Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art, Courthouse, Faces: A History of the Portrait in Photography, and Masters of the Camera.

geoffwinningham.com

Jorge Pineda 

Lucha libre is intensity, tradition, athleticism, and storytelling unfolding all at once. Through these photographs, I wanted to honor the beauty of lucha libre. Each image reflects a different side of the sport: the nonstop action, the technical precision, and the emotional energy that connects luchadores and the audience. To me, lucha libre is poetry in motion. My goal was not simply to document matches, but to preserve the authenticity, emotion, and cultural tradition that make lucha libre so powerful and meaningful.

Jorge Pineda is a Mexican American photographer based in Houston whose work is rooted in culture, identity, and personal connection. Guided by a desire to photograph the things that have shaped him, Pineda focuses on subjects he deeply loves and understands, such as boxing, lucha libre, and fútbol, which he grew up watching with his family. Inspired by both Monterrey and Houston, his photography also reflects the culture and energy of the places he calls home. Through his work, Pineda aims to provide an honest and heartfelt perspective on the people, traditions, and communities that have played a significant role in shaping his identity.

Instagram: @hechoporjorge

Patty Carroll

In my ongoing series titled Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise, I am exploring the connection between a woman's identity and her home, specifically examining the term “housewife.” I create staged, full-size interior domestic rooms for the camera filled with decor and objects that surround (or hide) a solitary female figure. The fictional scene uses a mannequin, the substitute ideal woman, who does not move, complain, or age. In the set, the woman is enveloped by her environment while creating it, with fulfilling and problematic consequences, pathetic and humorous. In each image, I use color, design, and humor to entice the viewer to relate to the woman’s plight and circumstances. The figure stands in for many women who silently make the home a place of comfort, safety, and warmth, yet are unseen heroines of their lives. Rooted in Western consumer culture and the meaning of material possessions (how belongings provide identity, continuity, and tradition), my female figures represent women from all backgrounds and cultures. My photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of all women. Here, the invisible suburban woman is depicted, often considered privileged but limited by outdated expectations and overlooked in today's identity politics.

Patty Carroll has delighted audiences with her bold, saturated color photographs since the 1970s. After years of teaching photography, she returned full-time to her studio to create Anonymous Women, a vibrant and witty four-part series of staged installations made for the camera. These large-scale images explore women’s complex ties to domestic life, transforming everyday settings into playful, surreal dramas where the figure vanishes into drapery and décor. A humorous game of visual hide-and-seek, the series invites viewers to both laugh and reflect. Carroll’s work has earned wide acclaim, with monographs published by Daylight Books (2016), Ain’t Bad Books (2020), and most recently, Domestic Demise and Debacle (2025) by Paper Street. The series has won numerous awards, including 1st Prize at the 2023 BBA Photo Awards, and was recognized in Photolucida’s “Top 50” (2014 & 2017). Her photographs have been featured in international press such as the Huffington Post, British Journal of Photography, and NYT LensBlog. Carroll’s work appears in major collections and over 100 group exhibitions, and worldwide solo shows including  the White Box Museum in Beijing, Royal Photographic Society in Bath, Art Institute of Chicago as well as gallery and University spaces. She recently completed a residency at Studios Inc in Kansas City and continues to live and work in Chicago.

pattycarroll.com

Instagram: @pattyphotosnaps

Tay Butler 

Bull and Sun are both part of a larger mixed-media series of collages, paintings, video and literature titled HyperInvisibility, which speaks to the limitations of "Black Excellence." Similar to W.E.B. DuBois' philosophy of the "talented tenth", the phenomena of Black Excellence pretends that the inequity and inequality of Black life can be remedied by following the lead of those "exceptions" to the rule: the wealthy Black leaders given access to dominant societal circles. Whereas educated and charismatic intellectuals like DuBois and Booker T. Washington once represented these exceptions, today those exceptions are athletes and entertainers. These collages imagine a bleak future, where our greatest Black leaders worthy of being immortalized were shooting guards and NBA MVPs.

Tay Butler is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Houston, TX. He received his BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston and completed his Photography MFA at the University of Arkansas. After retiring from the US Army and abandoning a middle-class engineering career to search for purpose, Tay reignited a rich appreciation for Black history, visual art and the Black archive. Through collage, photography, drawing, video, sound, literature, performance and large-scale installation, Tay utilizes past histories and imagery to create new understandings of the present while planning a brighter future.

Tay's solo exhibitions include A Friendly Game of Basketball, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, The Triangle, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, RE.Migrant I & II at Project Row Houses, Houston, TX and We Are Still Searching at the Louise J. Moran Fine Arts Courtyard, Houston TX. His collage murals have been installed in the historical Black community of Edgehill, TN, Rice University and McGovern Park in his hometown of Milwaukee, WI. His group exhibitions include the groundbreaking Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, Slowed & Throwed for CAMH, Houston, TX and Terms & Conditions, for the Buffalo Soldier museum and the University Museum of TSU.

His awards include the Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council, the Idea Fund grant from Diverse Works, and First Prize in the 2019 Citywide African-American Artists Exhibition at TSU. He currently teaches Art & Design at San Jacinto College, and has also led over 80 public and private workshops for many institutions from Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas to The Center for Fine Art Photography, Colorado.

stayclosetay.com

Instagram: @stayclosetay