Myra Greene

Myra Greene is an American artist who has worked on a number of projects, mostly photographic. Among them are Hairy Projects, The Beautiful Ones, Character Recognition, Self Portraits, My White Friends, and Sketches for Something.

Early life Born in 1975 in New York City and growing up in Harlem, Myra Green received her B.F.A. from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (1997) and her M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico (2002). Throughout her career, Greene has confronted matters of race and personal identity through her work. Growing up in the predominantly black neighborhood of Harlem, New York, yet attending mostly white schools on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Greene has always been conscious of race and how it has influenced her personal narrative.

Since 2016 Greene has been a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and is currently the chair of Art & Visual Culture and Photography Program Director.

In a New York Times interview, Greene states, "I'm always thinking about race. I recognize it when I'm the only black person in a room. My white friends will notice I'm the only black person, too. But they don't notice a room full of white people."

My White Friends The premise for her most well-known collection of photographs "My White Friends" originated after a discussion she had with one of her white friends about her images in "Character Recognition". Greene commented in an Art Beat interview that her friend said "they're really beautiful, but I just don't feel comfortable thinking about blackness." In the conversation that followed, this friend admitted that he didn't think about his own whiteness when he looked at photos, which started Greene on a path to examine what it would look like to photograph her friends for their whiteness.

This collection gained national recognition and had a successful Kickstarter campaign that resulted in a book of the photographs in the collection "My White Friends".

Recognition 1999: Curatorial Fellowship, Museum of Modern Art, New York City 2001: Academic Scholarship, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, Colorado 2002: Journal of Contemporary Photography Award, The Print Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academic Fellowship, The Photography Institute, New York City 2003: Artist Residency, The Center of Photography, Woodstock, New York 2004: Artist Residency, Light Work, Syracuse, New York 2007: Honorable Mention, New Work #11, En Foco 2009: Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowship 2012: Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) Grant, City of Chicago. 2013: Prairie Center of Arts Residency, Peoria, Illinois 2014: Artist Residency Bolt, Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago, Illinois

Group exhibitions Myra Greene's artwork has been shown in group exhibitions in the following museums and galleries: Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art; Synapse Gallery and Center for Photography; Rochester Contemporary; Center for Photography at Woodstock; SRO Gallery, Texas Tech University; Northlight Gallery; Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester; Warren Robbins Gallery; Anderson Gallery; Grossman Gallery; School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Boston, Massachusetts; East and West Galleries, Texas Woman's University; The Print Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; The University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico; AC2 Gallery; The Red Eye Gallery; Joseph Gross Gallery; Community College Visual Arts Gallery, Harwood Art Center; and John Sommers Gallery.