Glenna Jennings

New work by Desert Kitchen Collective: Glenna Jennings, Jalisa Robinson & Friends

Now on view at Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center

Using the culture and class crossing egg as icon, our work critiques food apartheid and celebrates member and worker-owned grocery cooperative Gem City Market’s work towards food justice.

Full Artists’ Statement:

We two artists met as student and professor in a small classroom over ten years ago. As a focus for the University of Dayton’s first Art and Social Practice course, our inaugural group of two educators, four students, and one community partner chose food justice, a movement that strives for an equitable food system as a basic human right. In 2015, Dayton was ranked the 4th hungriest city in the nation and continues to be one of the most racially segregated metro areas. Across the country, people were gaining awareness of food deserts as areas where systemic displacement and disinvestment have blocked access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate foods, leading to negative—and preventable—health and education outcomes. In our local community, a small group of people decided it was time to stop waiting for change and initiated a grassroots effort to open Gem City Market (GCM), a worker and member-owned grocery store cooperative in Dayton’s historically Black west side. Since opening its doors in 2021, the market has striven to serve, engage, and empower the surrounding neighborhoods.

Nowadays, we two artists are neighbors living within walking distance of the market, where Jalisa is the deli manager and Glenna organizes socially-engaged educational opportunities. The Price of Eggs honors GCM’s mission while embedding critical views of our inequitable food system. From different positions, we have witnessed the market struggle with high prices and unfair food policies that intensify the looming specter of gentrification and federal funding cuts. In 2025, thanks to combined efforts across our county, Dayton has moved well beyond 40th on the food insecurity list. Since meeting in that small classroom over 10 years ago, our co-founded program Desert Kitchen Collective has grown to involve a cohort of professors, dozens of community partners and hundreds of students. However, time and money continue to serve as excuses or barriers to crossing the bridges over the Great Miami River, which still divides our city along racial and economic lines.

Our installation title both playfully and seriously evokes the troubling biological and human-wrought conditions surrounding eggs, a staple food that cuts across cultures and demographics. When the desire for short-term gain threatens environmental sustainability and human safety while greed rules the roost, the egg becomes a priceless commodity sacrificed to the highest bidder. The true costs and benefits of eradicating a human-wrought economic desert to end systemic food apartheid are impossible to measure, especially through visual art. But we found ourselves cracking shells, separating yolks, frying, scrambling and freezing these miraculous orbs that have come to stand in for the endless negotiation between the individual and the group, the body and the community, the One and the Many.

We two began by connecting with customers, friends and neighbors on the ground and under the roof of our beloved market. We end in Glenna’s kitchen, creating a menu of artworks that are a collaborative but ultimately personal perspective on place, people and shared sustenance. We two artists end by making visible our own stories embedded in the messy stuff of the everyday and the busy metaphors of our shared worlds.

Sit Down! New works by Glenna Jennings

The Blue House Gallery

Fotofocus Biennial 2024: Backstories

This installation examines the artist’s backstory for the longterm photographic project At Table with new works around frozen dinners, family memories and the Golden Age of television.

Full Artist Statement

Welcome to a room of memory in flux! Here, new creations cohabitate with older works to grapple with a question common to artists: When is a work over?  In seeking to end the decade-long series At Table, which captures friends, family and former strangers gathered around food and drink in locations scattered across the globe, this exhibition found a more pressing query: When do our creative projects actually begin?

The Fotofocus Biennial theme of Backstory offered rich soil for answers, and from that biome grew new works rooted in deeper places. The images and objects in this room trace back to a loved but often lonely child who dreamed of siblings and spaces beyond her home. My mom, essentially single and generally working, alternated between homecooked stews and frozen dinners consumed on a set of plastic, floral-patterned TV trays. From behind these individual eating places with their sturdy metal legs, I gazed into rooms where families sat at much larger tables with ways and worlds beyond my small town. From Weezy and George Jefferson’s dining room to the mess hall of MASH, I was raised on visions of a world more diverse and lively than my own, one that was tackling some heavy social issues through humor. However, drained through a colander of muted white supremacy, Blaxsploitation and American exceptionalism, the worlds of shows like these, Good Times and Sanford and Son created false hopes that our racialized worlds were not so far apart, while Different Strokes and Facts of Life offered tales of white saviorism to ensure that the status quo – a default to whiteness – remained intact.

Etched into the wallpaper and mingled with 1970s news photographs related to food and war, dinner scenes from these popular 20th century sit-coms provide the background for more recent works from At Table, which are shown alongside souvenir photographs from high school trips to bars in Tijuana, Mexico in the 1980s. These $3 black and white photographs, hastily snapped, developed and delivered to drunk teenagers by Mexican photographers with darkrooms along the Avenida Revolución, function as ‘self-portraits’ that give me siblings and a sense of belonging. But they also serve as artifacts of an ongoing settler colonialism that takes insidious form along our southern border, where cultural appropriation masquerades as fun and both culinary and cultural habits co-mingle to blur socio-political borders.

The TV trays, made with wood harvested from the destruction of Dayton’s 2019 tornado, add additional layers of complicated meaning to the work on the walls.  Each is made for an individual, but through the magic of magnetism, the tables are also designed to come together, moving from One to Many to form a theoretically never-ending gathering place. Atop these objects, vernacular ‘table pics’ from my youth emerge from frozen meals, offering indexically-inspired metaphors around food, memory, consumption, care, and love. Finding my At Table backstory led me to freeze, melt and even microwave photographs, opening up a new body of work that will likely also tease me with the matter of its own end, while picking up new backstories rooted right here in the Blue House, where this only child has generously been offered a place to be, create and belong.

So, if you can find a table, floor, step, or cushion, Sit Down! As both invitation and command, this phrase offers pause and thought about seats and surfaces. Do these furnishings simply bear the weight of our bodies, sustenance and labor?  Or are chairs and tables more about togetherness, conversation, celebration, human connection?  Perhaps a table’s greatest strength is its role as a social equalizer. After all, we are all just about the same size when we sit down.

Purchase the book recently published through Blue Sky Books HERE

The tables of my youth were compact, plastic, and single-serve. Meant to be folded and put away, then quickly reassembled in time for dinner and prime time television. Our dining room table came complete with a leaf to fit guests into holiday feasts. But these occasions were rare in our smalltown American home, where a single working mom and her only child alternated between TV dinners and homecooked stews or spaghetti. The ongoing photographic series At Table arose from a desire to add people to these tables, to cultivate relationships across cultures and borders, to document the in-between when ordinary moments come alive through gestures and expressions, food and drink. In homes, restaurants and bars scattered throughout locations in North America, Asia and Europe, I have used the messy contingency of plates, silverware, bottles and placemats to frame candid moments from a consistent, single-person perspective, revealing a multicultural narrative that converges and collides in a shared, familiar place – the table.

Though At Table largely focuses on places of access and abundance, the imagery often helps guide conversations around equity within my work as a socially-engaged artist and food justice activist. In Dayton, Ohio, this work has involved collaborations across diverse disciplines and backgrounds to open a member-owned, full-service grocery store in a former food desert. Gem City Market and its programming around social equity, community and connection, both before and after its opening, has served as an active backdrop for my At Table work.

To learn more about our collective work around food justice, please visit desertkitchen.org

See more from the collection at Float Magazine.

The edges of the Anthropocene are lawn-covered and drunk with pesticides. Let’s change that!

In Our Own is an ongoing body of work that documents, interrogates, celebrates, disrupts, reimagines and purposefully plays within the North American backyard.

As part of Dayton Regional Green’s Bring Your Green challenge, I am available to photograph Montgomery County backyards - and you - if you commit to our Promise Garden challenge!

Please contact me for further details: gjennings1@udayton.edu / (626) 676-0627 / @glenna_goes_places

The work is also featured in the online group exhibition The Red Wood curated by Julia Westerbeke. This multi-media collection of works “looks at our current landscape through the lens of the wildfires, and more broadly, the Anthropocene”.

Below is an introduction in progress…

In Our Own: backyard (sur)realisms from a global pandemic

Just over three years ago, I found myself in my own backyard.

This was not long after the global pandemic had arrived and shortly before George Floyd was murdered on a street not far from my Midwest doorstep. The day I set foot anew on our scratchy grass was just months before historic fires would engulf the west coast, sending ashes across imaginary borders and destroying very real walls. On this ordinary day made extraordinary by the shared circumstances of forced isolation, I saw this yard for the first time. I recognized its values, both economic and spiritual, natural and constructed.

As we began to open our yards to others, I ventured through multiple properties, my camera and lights as guides and companions. I captured lawn games and campfire smoke. I sat in sand and spoke with stink bugs. I ran with dogs and chickens and friends who donned animal masks to help me forge a new visual language with tones both reverent and ironic, personal and political.

In a nation that prides itself on private ownership, backyards are often spaces of privileged escape and status. Yet our yards also engender connection, allowing pets to mingle with the native flora and kids to revel alongside fauna both wild and domestic. While In Our Own takes inspiration (and titles) from works of environmental literature, anthrozoology, and sustainability studies, it relies on whimsy as a tool to fend off the constraints of hard sciences and harsh realities. Taking cues from horror and fantasy genres, I envision the backyard as a portal to another universe, a place where nature and wilderness compete for primacy, a biome in which the groomed and orderly meet the macabre and supernatural. Meshing landscape photography with constructed portraiture and still life, the work addresses our need for escape in troubled times of collective grief, trauma, and fear.

At its core, In Our Own grapples with life writ-large in the shared Anthropocene and moments etched-small in our own private patches of earth.

From 2013-2016, I spent several summers as an artist in residency working with photography students at Nanjing University of the Arts in China. For this project, my students and I set up a temporary learning space (table, chairs, sign) in a public park and invited passersby to teach me words and phrases in Mandarin. The lessons derived from methods learned in my 20 years as a English Language instructor in the USA and abroad. Photos from the National Cash Register archive (see Looking at Looking) are used as prompts to initiate conversation on a broad range of topics. Participants are then gifted small editions of these historic images.

This project reflects my ongoing relationship to language teaching and learning, processes that are difficult to capture in my other “foreign language” of photography. The work may be seen as a performance, a public intervention, an interactive installation or a participatory artwork. It aims to disrupt the everyday while establishing unusual relationships and intentionally awkward dialogs that can, at times, become meaningful and productive.

In the end, these images are just documentation events that have dissipated into memory, along with many of the words I learned in the park. In the end, my Mandarin is still not very good. But I keep trying. And I will return to this park and others and continue to seek out the kindness of strangers.

If you are a speaker of Mandarin, contact me! Please teach me Chinese!

This disjointed but interconnected body of ongoing imagery celebrates Daytonians striving for a more just, sustainable and equitable future. It also meditates on in-between moments discovered within sites for social change and gatherings for embodied togetherness .

Space rubs up against place, objects juxtapose with bodies, time veers backward then slithers forward. Memories and images collect, morph, grow, pull apart, escape and entangle in this fast moving stream that captures the city that called me Home.

Most of the photographs share moments in and around Gem City Market, a full-service member-owned grocery cooperative in a former food desert. If you have photos of GCM’s history in particular or local social movements in general, please send them along to gjennings1@udayton.edu.

The Moral Courage Project’s (MCP) ‘Unhousing: claiming the human right to home’ is a multimedia, community-engaged, creative project sharing stories of everyday upstanders who act to build more just, sustainable and equitable futures. Since 2015, MCP, a partnership between the University of Dayton Human Rights Center and PROOF: Media for Social Justice, has traveled with a cross-disciplinary cohort of professors and students to chronicle individuals and communities responding to critical human rights crises, including the Ferguson uprising, the struggle for immigrant rights at the US-Mexico border, and the lack of access to clean water in Michigan and Kentucky. As in the past, we sought to understand a pressing issue by immersing ourselves in a place infamously associated with it, and finding people whose actions show us, and others, a way forward. In Oakland, California, nearly 10,000 people have no address in the city they call home, a figure that has doubled in the last five years. But housing insecurity is not confined to the makeshift spaces occupied by people without permanent shelter. It is the feeling of not knowing when your next rent check is coming, and it’s your paycheck stagnating while the cost of living soars. It is a hedge fund buying your building with plans for a future that doesn’t include you; it’s being uprooted from one location to another, chasing a sustainable livelihood. City planners may be able to stop people from sleeping on benches, but there is no clever solution to the cascade of interconnected problems we regularly refer to as “the housing crisis.” Our team of students, professors and community partners will share lessons learned from individuals including housing activists, arts collectives, tenants’ rights organizers, filmmakers, and city officials. These narratives are embedded in our student-produced podcast, traveling exhibition, print publication, and website, which are the result of over a year of research and creative production. As we share our original photography of tiny house encampments, Black liberation walking tours, community murals and inspiring individuals, we will reflect on the human connection to earth, hearth and home. Since gentrification is an act of erasure, the practice of memory can be revolutionary. We aim to share our creative, collaborative act of remembering through storytelling.

My photography is shown here alongside writing and book design by undergraduate students Amariá Jones and Reagan Miller. My project collaborators include Dr. Natalie Hudson, Leora Kahn, and Dr. Joel Pruce.

NCR founder John H. Patterson created the world’s first corporate photography department at the turn of the past century with the goal of “teaching through the eye.” He is credited with pioneering an american-styled welfare capitalism that was rooted in altruistic intentions that were, themselves, embedded in deeply inequitable soil.

Since 2011, I have been working with material from the National Cash Register’s photographic archive to generate art works and conversations related to corporate identity, social welfare and private ownership. In general, I aim to restore these private, forgotten histories to the public, expanding and combining them with a diverse range of narratives from the present.

In addition to creating collages and custom-designed wallpapers that cull from images of Industrial Betterment initiatives, such as calisthenics and hygiene projects, I have brought the photographs into public spaces in Dayton, OH, Nanjing, China and, Ensenada, Mexico. I photograph participants viewing and signing the images to playfully engage with notions of intellectual property (IP). I also interview the subjects about issues related to civic life, labor and shared memory. These historic images serve as catalysts for conversation and pick up alternate histories and meanings in their multiple travels.

Issa Randall and Glenna Jennings ponder geographies of imitation, flattery, memory and milk in portraits inspired by their radically whimsically serious social politics. The photographs draw from other photographs which likely cull from other photographs, and so forth and so on in an endless whirl of giddy cultural appropriation and stubborn self-expression. Our divided states congeal and converge on a backdrop of broken nations. Our identities rupture and rejoin within a pattern of mixed-up memories forged from forgotten or short-lived flags. Nothing is permanent. Except for a photograph. A photograph is almost a perfectly forever kind of place.

NOTE: some images from this series and its accompanying installation have mysteriously disappeared from this site. We are working on it. And maybe photographs are not so perfectly permanent after all!

Raskolikov (2008-2009) portrays 13 bodies wearing my high school cheerleading uniform and loosely reenacting scenes from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When I was 17 years old, I fell in love with the antagonistic protagonist of this Russian novel, who represented the stock character of an emotionally unavailable Bad Boy nihilist. The series creatively conflates canonic literature, personal memory, teenage angst and adult uncertainty in non-site-specific locations throughout Southern and Baja California. Having grown up on both sides of the US-Mexico border, the chosen locales represent a medley of metaphors and references around suburbia, dystopia, landscape (the exterior) and home (the interior). The participants are all friends, family or colleagues who approached me with their own reasons for wishing to don this culturally-charged artifact. Their performances were often cathartic, and almost always represented a confrontation or negotiation with gender norms and roles.  

The images are purposefully non-linear, and titled with phrases and sentences from the David McDuff translation. My choices were motivated by both intuition and personal memories of charged scenes and ideas from the novel.  The photographic subjects are pictured both together and alone, in non-hierarchical references to both Raskolnikov (Rodya) and Sonya, who together portray the notion of intrinsic duality inherent to Dostoevsky’s work. Their love connection is retold in my novella “Granite,” a retelling of the Crime and Punishment portraying Rodya as a meth-addict artist and Sonya as a high school cheerleader . But that is yet another story.

From 2008 to 2010, I spent time living and working in Jacumba, a small border town in the Southern California desert. The town thrived then, as it does now, thanks to thermal waters discovered and made practical by indigenous people before colonial times. The town languished then, as it does now, thanks to the political border between Mexico and the United States that runs beside this unincorporated community of roughly 500 humans. The images in this collection were made in and around the Jacumba Hotel and Spa, a site serving as the sole social, economic and cultural nexus of this small town. The stories gathered from this land and its people will be offered in a forthcoming ficto-critical novella. In the meantime, my photographs of a diverse array of people and moments have been shared in exhibitions and presentations that focus on themes ranging from place and space to identity, history and memory. I share with you some of these moments here in a small, disjointed and poetic visual narrative. This story and its other sides offer glimpses into a world that relies on both compassion and skepticism to exist. They invite you to a place that uses both whimsy and sheer grit to get by.  

Site Under Construction. Please check back or contact Glenna Jennings for more info:

gjennings1@udayton.edu