Associate Professor Jeremiah Ariaz has garnered critical acclaim for his photographs, Louisiana Trail Riders, a five-year project documenting Creole trail riding clubs in Southwest Louisiana. For the work, Ariaz was named the 2018 Louisiana State Fellow ($5000) and awarded the Southern Arts Finalist Prize ($10,000) from South Arts. On May 10th at a ceremony in New Orleans, Ariaz received the 2018 Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Ariaz also received an ATLAS grant to support a series of national exhibitions of the work. The photographs will be installed this summer at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies then will travel to the Kansas State University Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art before returning to Louisiana for an exhibition in January 2020 at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.

A monograph of the work, also titled Louisiana Trail Riders, will be released this fall from UL Press. The book of 89 photographs and accompanying essay by Alexandra Giancarlo will be the most substantive document of Creole equestrian culture to date. The work reflects the celebratory spirit of the rides while sharing one of the many histories in the American story that has largely remained untold.

Zeitgeist showed work from this series in 2016. See the show page here for more info.