Art Exhibition Features Student’s Iraq Photographs

Leesha Quigg looks at the world through a number of filters. She’s a single mom, part Native American. She’s a Montgomery County Community College student. And she’s a U.S. Army Reserves Civil Affairs specialist, recently returned from a year in the province of Diwaniyah in Iraq.

“Photographs from Iraq,” a special exhibition at Montgomery County Community College’s West Campus, will focus what Quigg, 24, sees through the filter on the lenses of her Nikon camera. During her tour in Iraq, Quigg has captured the simple and poignant moments of the lives of the Iraqi people—children playing in the streets, students learning in refurbished schools and widows attempting to rebuild their lives.

It’s a far cry from the images of uniformed military personnel, destruction from improvised explosive devices and the explosive encounters with suicide bombers the public has come to expect from war-torn Iraq.

“Leesha Quigg's body of work shows an intimate interaction with the Iraqi people during wartime," exhibition organizer and curator Walter Plotnick, senior lecturer and co-coordinator of fine arts at the college, said in a press release. “It goes beyond the front-line images we are used to and takes us into the lives of the civilians doing their best to preserve some kind of normalcy for themselves and their children, helped by Americans like Ms. Quigg.”

Quigg’s profound photographs will be on display during the special exhibition from April 6 through April 29.   

Plotnick recommends watching a video about Quigg. “Seeing and hearing Leesha talk about her images and her experience will allow viewers to have a better understanding of who she is and our upcoming exhibition,” Plotnick said in an e-mail interview.

“It pulls at me very strongly,” Quigg said in the video of her experience in Iraq, “In a way that makes me want to almost go back and finish things and reach out to more people.”

At the same time, MCCC will host its sixth annual West Campus Art Students’ Exhibition and Competition on the first floor of the North Hall Gallery. The Students’ Exhibition will include artwork featuring a variety of subjects and styles in an array of media.

A reception for both exhibitions will be held at 5 p.m. April 13. The awards ceremony for the Students’ Exhibition will be held at 6 p.m., followed by a gallery talk by Quigg. The exhibitions and reception are free and open to the public.

Proceeds from the sale of prints and catalogs of the “Photographs from Iraq” exhibition will be used to help fund MCCC’s Jess Hodges Memorial Veterans Scholarship, awarded annually to a student/veteran. For Quigg, the exhibit is a way to help her fellow veterans and spotlight the often overlooked civilian face of the Iraqi war.

For more information about the Iraq Photography Exhibition, contact Walter Plotnick at wplotnic@mc3.edu or Galleries Director Holly Cairns at hcairns@mc3.edu.

If you go ...

Leesha Quig's "Photographs from Iraq," will be on display from April 6 through April 29 on the second floor above the North Hall Gallery at the West Campus, 16 High St., Pottstown. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday; and 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday. The gallery is closed weekends.