Artist talk and Opening Reception: Thursday, October 23, 5:00 p.m.
Exhibition open: October 23 – December 11, 2025
The Carlos Gallery in the Visual Art Building at the University of the South is pleased to present It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel, an exhibition by artist Raymond Thompson.
Raymond Thompson’s It’s hard to stop regels that time travel is a photography project that utilizes archival fragments, historic ephemera, and Thompson’s images to focus on individual stories of slaves, maroons, and runaways whose existence is only now revealed through traces in the collective archive. This project works to expand narratives about the Black experience and our connection to the “American” landscape. This work has been guided by local historic archives of runaway slave ads, lynching news articles, Black folklore, and other location-specific historical events. Maroons were enslaved people who had escaped their captors, but did not flee to the North. Instead, they choose to create a life in hard-to-access swamps or the wild spaces between plantations. The plantations can be considered “freedom practices.” Through these recently reclaimed threads of stories, viewers can radically re-envision Black people’s connection to the American landscape.
Raymond Thompson, an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and visual journalist, is based in Austin, Texas. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic journey includes an MFA in Photography from West Virginia University, an MA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and a degree in American Studies from the University of Mary Washington.
Thompson explores how race, memory, representation, and place combine to shape the Black environmental imagination of the North American landscape. He won the 1619 Aftermath Grant (2023) and the 2021 Lenscatch Student Prize (2021). His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions, including the Fotofest Biennial - Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2022-23 (2024). His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Raymond is the author of Appalachian Ghost, published in 2024 by the University Press of Kentucky.
Thompson’s professional experience extends to freelance photography, where he has collaborated with renowned organizations such as The New York Times, The Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, ProPublica, The Nature Conservancy, ACLU, WBEZ, Google, Merrell, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine, and the Associated Press.
More of Thompson’s work can be viewed online at https://www.raymondthompsonjr.com
