Austin Peay’s CECA Announces 2024-25 Tennessee Artist Fellow: Stacy Kranitz
By: Dr. Andrea Spofford November 22, 2024
Stacy Kranitz of Smithville, Tennessee, the 2024-25 recipient of the Tennessee Artist Fellowship. | Contributed photo
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. - The Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA) at Austin Peay State University (APSU) has announced the 2024-25 recipient of the Tennessee Artist Fellowship, photographer Stacy Kranitz of Smithville, Tennessee.
Kranitz is a photographer based in East Tennessee known for documenting life in the Appalachian region. Through CECA’s Tennessee Artist Fellowship, she will receive $5,000 to aid in the creation of new artwork and additional funding for an artist lecture.
“Working within the documentary tradition, Stacy Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation,” reads Kranitz’s biography. “Her images do not tell the 'truth' but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents in order to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict.”
Kranitz’s work uses documentary photography to tell the stories of people’s daily lives in the Appalachian region. | Photo by Stacy Kranitz
The CECA Tennessee Artist Fellowship celebrates contemporary art to support the continued creative work of exceptional Tennessee artists like Kranitz. Unlike other fellowships, nominations and applications from artists are not solicited. A committee of APSU faculty compiles a list of outstanding artists from across the state and selects the fellowship recipient.
“Since APSU is the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts for the entire state of Tennessee, we wanted to find a way to support artists statewide,” said Barry Jones, who chaired the Department of Art and Design when the fellowship was established. “There is an incredible number of amazing artists here, but unfortunately, there isn’t much financial support for them. We hope that this fellowship helps a Tennessee artist maintain their practice and know that we support what they are doing.”
The Appalachian landscape is an important part of the region’s story, along with the people who live there. | Photo by Stacy Kranitz
The selection committee was particularly impressed by Kranitz because of her work’s distinctive style and relevance to Tennessee.
“Stacy Kranitz’s honest, stark, and hauntingly beautiful work immediately caught the committee's attention,” said CECA’s selection committee in a statement. “She is not just a Tennessee artist but an artist whose work speaks about Tennessee. She is an obvious choice for this fellowship.”
Kranitz will receive additional funding to present an artist lecture March 27, 2025 at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville.
Past recipients of the CECA Tennessee Artist Fellowship include Maysey Craddock of Memphis, Alicia Henry of Nashville, Andrew Scott Ross of Johnson City, Bryce McCloud of Nashville, Carl E. Moore of Memphis, Benjy Russell of Dowelltown, Karen Seapker of Nashville, Ashton Ludden of Knoxville, Yancy Villa of Memphis, and Jonathan Adams of Knoxville.
For more information on the CECA Tennessee Artist Fellowship, please contact Dr. Andrea Spofford, director of CECA, at spofforda@apsu.edu.
To stay informed of upcoming CECA events, including Kranitz’s upcoming artist talk, please visit www.apsu.edu/ceca or follow CECA on social media.
About the Artist:
Working within the documentary tradition, Stacy Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation. Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography (2017), a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant (2020), a Puffin Foundation grant (2022), and a Center for Documentation Fellowship (2023). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019). She has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015), the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move festival in Cortona, Italy (2022) and the Tennessee Triennial (2023) Her photographs are in several public collections including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke Universities, Archive of Documentary Arts She works as an assignment photographer for publications including Time, National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022. It was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award.
To learn more about Kranitz, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @stacykranitz.