Andrea Morales: Roll Down Like Water

Roll Down Like Water features sixty-five photographs spanning a decade of work by the Memphis-based, Peruvian-American photographer Andrea Morales. These images reflect the collective change of Memphis and the surrounding region over time, a place that often just eludes definition by the many storytellers, poets, and songwriters that have lived in or passed through this area. Morales’s talent is looking directly, earnestly, while creating space for the essence of this place–the magic of it–to enter her lens.

Her approach is informed by Movement Journalism–an emerging, ethical, and community-oriented journalistic framework–and anchored in the historic legacies of activism in the American South. Titled after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech of his life in Memphis, in which he said “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” the images in this exhibition course through and around the structural issues and legacies in society, while documenting how those structures can be forever altered by an individual, a moment, or the strength of a community. The result is a complex and tender portrait of this region.

This exhibition represents Morales’s first major museum exhibition and catalogue, and the first museum exhibition dedicated to Movement Journalism. Through her captivating images of the South in moments of turbulence, stillness, darkness, and beauty, Morales charts new paths in sustainable journalism, while reflecting upon identity, community, and the power of storytelling.

Andrea Morales: Roll Down Like Water is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation, and Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities with additional support provided by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Bill and Lisa Courtney, Underground Art, Inc. and Isabel González Whitaker

All exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are underwritten by the MBMA Exhibition Fund.

Major annual support is provided by Kay Clark and Maggie and Milton Lovell, with generous annual funding from Anonymous, Gloria and Kenneth Boyland, Holly and Paul T. Combs, Deborah and Bob Craddock, Eleanor and William Halliday, Debi and Galen Havner, Sally Hergenrader, James R. Humphreys, Jay and Kristen Keegan, the Doris S. and Hubert Kiersky Charitable Remainder Trust, Carl and Valerie Person, and Bill Townsend.