Kerry Stuart Coppin has held faculty appointment as Associate Professor of Visual Arts, and Associate Professor of Africana Studies, at Brown University; the University of Miami, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Kansas State University . . . Kerry earned his MFA at Rhode Island School of Design, in 1977, where he studied with Harry Callahan, Ray Metzker, and Aaron Siskind.
“Kerry Stuart Coppin has used his photography as a means to explore the African American cultural identity and communal experience. In recent years he has extended his photographic research to include people of African heritage both in the New World and on the African Continent, traveling and photographing in Barbados, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, Cuba, Egypt, and Senegal . . .” His works are provocative photographic interpretations that elaborate and celebrate positive aspects of the Black community experience. Kerry is convinced that "the lives of black people are complex, and are therefore worthy of sophisticated critical analysis and reflection . . ." He uses photography to document and examine the image of Blacks in the Diaspora.
Since 2000, Kerry has participated in more than one hundred sixty exhibitions, including sixty solo exhibitions. He has exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions in Bridgetown, Barbados, WI, three times in Havana, Cuba, and a solo exhibition in Dakar, Senegal. Kerry’s work has been singled-out numerous times for recognition in group and juried shows, and examples of his work are included in thirty-five museum collections: including the National Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Bibliotéque Nationale de France, and the Art Institute of Chicago . . . He was nominated for the 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award . . .