Address:  15th & Detroit, Box 41041, Lubbock, Texas 79409-1041         Phone: (806) 742-3749

Millennial Collection  

The Millennial Collection is a joint documentary project between Texas Tech University’s School of Art and the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. The collection is permanently held at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library and consists of work from students enrolled in the School of Art’s documentary photography class and several professional portfolios including work by Bill Wright, Peter Brown, Rick Dingus, Rob Amberg, Robin Germany, Sharon Stewart, Steve Fitch, Tom Kiefer, and Wayne Lambert. This project is ongoing and its sponsors hope to include artifacts from varied disciplines that will work together to create a perpetual record of responses to Lubbock and the High Plains region.

The documentary class, and the resulting images that make up the Millennial Collection, is in part a response to the history collected at the Southwest Collection. In studying the Southwest Collection’s holdings students begin to understand how photographs function as historical documents. It is from this collection that students are prompted to begin to question and experiment with the variables of time, place, representation, contextual information (included or excluded), personal experience, changing frames of reference, and the challenges inherent in assigning meaning to photographic images.

Since its implementation in 2000, the Millennial Collection has grown to include almost 1000 documentary works, including photographs, artist books, and digital video documentaries. The most recent addition of work was a project entitled El Llano Estacado: An Island in the Sky. Six nationally recognized photographers—Peter Brown, Rick Dingus, Steve Fitch, Miguel Gandert, Tony Gleaton, and Andrew John Liccardo—traveled the breadth of the Llano Estacado of northwest Texas and eastern New Mexico, capturing images of what they saw as important in defining the Llano as place. Full of contradiction often hidden in plain sight, a rich history lives on in this wide expanse of hardscrabble canyon and grass called the Llano Estacado. The Llano stands out as a place often under-appreciated for its contradictions and for the stories etched across the land and the faces of the people who have called this place home. The history of this island in the sky straddling two states is a vast untapped resource for historians, geographers, photographers, and other visual artists.