Counter Narrative/ CENTER Panel Discussion

About the Artists

Peter Mertz- Incarcerated Artists

Peter Merts, winner of CENTER’s 2021 Social Award, was born and raised in the swamp country of southern Georgia. He graduated from Duke University, then spent time in the English Lakes District and Steamboat Springs, Colorado – and eventually settled in the San Francisco area. Merts worked with black and white film for many years, primarily medium format, and spent many, many hours in a darkroom. Currently his process is entirely digital.  He specializes in documentary, portrait, and fine art forms. 

His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, Newsweek Online, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Conde Nast Traveler Magazine, and others. Some of his prison arts photography was funded by the California Arts Council, which administers the state’s Arts in Corrections program. In 2015, Peter Merts and Dr. Larry Brewster published Paths of Discovery—Art Practice and Its Impact in California State Prisons (second edition). In 2022, Merts published a monograph of his photographs as Ex Crucible: The Passion of Incarcerated Artists, with Daylight Books.

Incarcerated Artists shows incarcerated men and women creating and performing artworks in California prisons; beyond that, it portrays the passion, creativity, and humanity of those artists.

https://petermerts.com/

Maximilian Thuemler: Born from the Limb

Maximilian Thuemler, winner of CENTER’s 2022 Project Development Grant, was born in Berlin, Germany and received a BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design in New York. His work has appeared in Fraction Magazine, Tabula Rasa Magazine, Office Magazine, Ain’t Bad Magazine, and Accessible Objects among others. It is also part of the Yuko Nii Foundation Collection in Brooklyn, NY. Thuemler is a recipient of the 2021 Creator Labs Photo Fund and the 2020 Lucie Foundation Emerging Artist Scholarship. He is also among the 2021 Critical Mass Top 50. Recent group exhibitions include Corona Culture at Alte Muenze in Berlin, Salon #1 at New Collectors in New York, Tabula Rasa Magazine Volume IV: Performance at Usagi NY, and Thank You, Have a Nice Day at Galerienhaus Berlin. He is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

Maximilian Thuemler utilizes photography and its boundless archive to engage the medium’s uniquely complex and fraught relationship to historical narratives of power, race, and recognition. The collecting and recontextualizing of archival materials forms project specific conglomerates of evidence, which interrogate historical modes of representation, while simultaneously anchoring Thuemler’s photographic image production and performative practice.

www.maximilianthuemler.com

Jane Whitmore: The Bikini Project 

Jane Whitmore, winner of CENTER’s 2021 Project Launch Grant, is a licensed clinical psychologist. In addition to her doctorate in psychology, she has a master’s degree in anthropology and formerly worked as an archeologist in New Mexico and Arizona. She has traveled extensively around the world. Originally from New York, Whitmore has lived in New Mexico for 47 years. Whitmore’s father was a photographer; she jokingly says that she grew up in a darkroom.  She received her first camera from her father when she was seven, and he enthusiastically supported her photographic efforts. 

In 2018, Whitmore closed her clinical psychology practice. Now she is able to devote her time and energy to her photography and writing projects which are an outgrowth of her professional work and her father’s influence. Through these projects, she strives to promote human rights, and respect for cultural diversity; to evoke compassion for the human condition; and to enhance cultural pride. Whitmore uses photography and writing to advocate for these issues by documenting the experiences of prehistoric, historic, and contemporary cultures.