Calvin Alexander Ramsey Photo Exhibition Announced at June Kelly Gallery

Seeing In Tempo, intriguing perspectives of landscape by playwright, book author, and photographer Calvin Ramsey will be exhibited in his first U. S. showing with the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street. Opening on Thursday, July 1, the work will remain on view through July 30, 2021.

Ramsey says photography forces him to see and endow ordinary things with a rhythm, tempo, and purpose. This body of landscape photos shot from the windows of trains moving across the country and Ramsey's sojourns walking in wanderlust on New York's Upper East Side coerce one to look at landscapes in a unique way...echoing passage of time. In 2004 while traveling from Atlanta to Valdez, Alaska, through the camera's eye, Ramsey conceived of landscape not unlike independent film stills intuitively captured while speedily passing.

The intermedia of non-representational language with visual elements fascinates as visual poetry. Here, each of Ramsey's photographs is as a time capsule with viewer mesmerized by image and tempo of the train wheels revolution or urban pattern repetition. Ramsey's images whether patterns of nature or man convey an impressive sense of fleetingness as in essence of time. Ramsey's images are not merely digital color photographs but triggers of psyche recognitions. Tempo abides the viewer in the visual sweep of each image as stimuli probing consciousness in which liaison form with remembrance or foretelling.
Calvin Ramsey

Ramsey is known more as a playwright and book author, having written and produced the musical Bricktop and Ruth and The Green Book, the picture book inspiration for the Academy Award-winning film, The Green Book. In 2004 along his creative path traveling from Atlanta to Valdez, Alaska for the Edward Albee Theater Conference (The Last Frontier Theater Conference) the concept for this body of landscape images was realized.

"To see with my own rhythm, tempo and purpose is the firm ground that holds me. My 'dream voice' becomes louder and more visible the more I create through my plays, books, and photography. We all have this living creative muscle within us."

Ramsey was born in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in Roxboro, North Carolina. Having lived in Atlanta, Georgia, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Santa Monica, California, Oaks Bluff, Massachusetts and Saint Croix, and Saint John U.S. Virgin Islands, he now divides his time between New York City and Sarasota, Florida. Ramsey studied at UCLA.

Ramsey's photographs have been exhibited in the U.S. Virgin Islands and are included in private collections in the United States. Throughout the varied sequences in his career, Ramsey received the Jane Adams award for Ruth, The Green Book, and Belle, The Last Mule at Gees Bend, the Bank Street College Best Book award, Texas Blue Bonnet Award, Forward Magazine Best Book award, ALA Notable Book award, and the Star Review School Library Journal Award. Ramsey was a recipient of the distinguished Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drum Major for Justice Award. Ramsey is a member of the National Arts Club, New York, Sons of The American Revolution, and a former Trustee at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York.