Between you and I (working title)
- Glenn (Sonnie) Wooden, Jr.
- Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
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Student Arts Innovation Grant
Glenn Wooden who goes by the moniker “Sonnie,” is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and entrepreneur from Chicago, Illinois. Outside of the realm of family and relationships, he also studies race and class while exploring aspects of social and cultural capital, assortative and disassortative mating, and the symbols and insignias that proves one's social economic position. Photo Credit: Glenn (Sonnie) Wooden, Jr.
Glenn (Sonnie) Wooden, Jr. will work towards developing a project that is about photographing families and considering how a family is either biological or self-selected. Being from Chicago, the artist looks at how families move from the streets of Chicago, live in inherited poverty, and what it means to be an outcast. He has worked on this project over 3 years now, attracting attention from The Daily Iowan newspaper, V103 radio station in Chicago, and recently had a solo exhibition in May 2018 in Iowa City, Iowa. With support from The Sachs Program, he will be able to take this project beyond documenting his own family experiences to develop a larger ethnographic project about life in Chicago, and what it means to be black in the 21st century. The artist intends to curate these images into a book, which would include commissioned essays about life in Chicago, blackness in America, as well as about the photographs themselves. He will also be collaborating with friend and artist Brooklynn Kascel, who makes visual stories about family, relationship, and conflicts of expression and repression in Midwestern culture in relation to her queer identity.