CLARKSVILLE, TN – Austin Peay State University’s Department of Art + Design, with support from the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, is hosting Professor Emeritus Susan Bryant for an exhibition on the Mann Wall of Legacy, located on the second floor of the Art + Design Building. The exhibition is free and open to the public during normal university business hours.

Selections from Bryant’s photography collection, Southward, will be on display during the Fall 2026 semester.

“Large Oak, Clarksville, Tennessee,” one of the works from Susan Bryant’s Southward collection. The photo was taken in 2017, and this archival pigment print was made from a scan of a collodion tintype. (APSU, Contributed)

“I am interested in how nature can act as a metaphor for human emotion,” Bryant said. “I am amazed by how quickly nature can change from comforting to threatening, and that each of these conditions is imbued with beauty, power, mystery, serenity, grace, and allegory. My aim is to capture the timeless essence of a place through close observation of light and dark, space and atmosphere, stillness and silence.”

The Mann Wall of Legacy is made possible by a generous gift from Jim & Dottie Mann. Notable past exhibitions include work by Olen Bryant, Jim Diehr, and Kell Black.

About the Artist

Susan Bryant received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Indiana University and her Master of Fine Arts in photography from Indiana State University. She retired from Austin Peay State University in 2019 after teaching photography for 37 years. Bryant’s process includes gelatin silver prints, hand-colored silver prints, digital photographs, and most recently the 19th-century processes of daguerreotypes, tintypes, and wet-plate collodion negatives and positives (ambrotypes).

Her work has been widely exhibited across the United States in solo and juried exhibitions. In addition to other honors and awards, Bryant is the recipient of a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship.

You can learn more about Bryant’s photography by visiting her website at https://susanbryantphoto.com/.

For more information, contact The New Gallery Director Jaroslava Prihodova at prihodovaj@apsu.edu. To learn about future CECA events, visit https://www.apsu.edu/art-design/visiting-artist/.