Location:
Clayton Staples Gallery
McKnight Art Center West, Room 205
School of Art, Design and Creative Industries

Holding Together | Allison Grant
On view March 22–April 30, 2027

Gallery hours:
Monday–Friday | 8 a.m.–5 p.m.

Exhibition-related events
Artist Talk | Thursday, March 25 | 4–5 p.m.
McKnight Art Center West, Room 210
WSU School of Art, Design and Creative Industries

Meet-the-Artist Reception | Thursday, March 25 | 5–6 p.m.
McKnight Art Center West, Clayton Staples Gallery, second floor

From the artist:
Holding Together is an ongoing, collaborative photographic project made in my home state of Alabama and other parts of the U.S. with abortion bans. I photograph women and people with uteruses holding botanicals historically used in reproductive care, including pennyroyal, Queen Anne’s lace, cohosh, cotton, and juniper.

Working in collaboration with my subjects, we craft a counter-narrative to the regressive control enforced by political systems in the Deep South and beyond. We recall forms of folk medicine, including some that have toxic side effects, to honor a long and imperfect struggle for bodily autonomy amid persistent threats. The project seeks to highlight the essential role of community support in reproductive justice and consider ways art might offer the potential for collective action that restores and safeguards accessible, safe medical care for all. The plants we hold cannot adequately provide that care, and we refuse to accept a world where they become our only resource.

About the artist
Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and associate professor of photography at the University of Alabama. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in the collections of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. She is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow and was named to the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s 2022 Silver List. Editorial photographs by Grant have been published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She lives and works in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.