We Hold These Truths, installation view, Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville, TN. By Jeremiah Ariaz.

Jeremiah Ariaz, professor of photography, debuted his exhibition We Hold These Truths, a selection of photographs he made across the U.S. during the Trump presidency, on display October – November, 2020, at Zeitgeist, in Nashville, Tennessee.

Jeremiah Ariaz

“We Hold These Truths is a selection of photographs made across the U.S. during the Trump presidency,” Ariaz said.

“The photographs reveal the anxiety felt across the nation and speak to this historic moment, as tensions run increasingly high in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.”

“Drawn from the Declaration of Independence, the title implicates ‘We’ the viewer as an active participant, acknowledging the collective responsibility shared in our democracy,” he said.

Along with the images he made extended captions for select photographs that relate the people and places to this political moment.

“Over the past month I have expanded the images with photographs in some of the most contentious battle ground states,” he said. He traveled around the country via motorcycle, documenting Americans in small towns across the United States.

View a selection of the images online.

Additionally, Ariaz exhibited his work Louisiana Trail Riders, January – March 2020 at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. For Louisiana Trail Riders Ariaz was the recipient of a 2018 ATLAS grant, the Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the Southern Arts Finalist Prize from South Arts, and was named the 2018 Louisiana State Fellow. The photographs have been exhibited nationally.  A monograph of the work is available from UL Press (2018).

His artworks “explore the West as both a physical space and a terrain for the imagination.”