This LSU professor was just named a Guggenheim Fellow. See his work at the Baton Rouge Gallery

Baton Rouge artist and LSU photography professor Jeremiah Ariaz was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship on April 14, one of 223 winners this year from across the country and just six in Louisiana.

Ariaz, who has spent his career exploring how American identity is impacted by social change, was honored for “The Fourth Estate,” an ongoing body of work that captures the fragile state of local journalism. The exhibit will be on view at the Baton Rouge Gallery May 1-24, along with works by painter Justin Tyler Bryant and photographer Kristine Thompson.

Ariaz, a Kansas native, has been a photography professor in the LSU College of Art and Design since 2006. His work interprets social challenges, ecological changes and rural culture across the country. While many of his projects are situated in the Great Plains and Southwest, his 2018 book Louisiana Trail Riders captures the culture of Black trail riders—Creole families whose history of trail riding on horseback dates back to the 18^th century.

After the pandemic, Ariaz began documenting social tension in political swing states and, in the process, observed the decline of local journalism. Fascinated with the state of newspapers in their traditional form, he shifted his focus to photographing local paper offices across his home state of Kansas.

The photos that comprise The Fourth Estate depict veteran printing press employees, dated equipment and aging newsrooms. Exterior shots show modest storefronts in sleepy downtowns. Many of the newspapers are family owned and were launched around the time Kansas became a state in 1861, Ariaz says.

The exhibit is comprised of more than just individual images. In some cases, Ariaz laid out his photographs with columns of text, creating visual riffs of newspapers themselves.

“As I began working on this project, I was trying to think, what’s the best vehicle to share this work?” Ariaz says. “And I started to conceptualize the idea of essentially creating a newspaper-like publication that had the aesthetic feel of the subject that I was covering.”

The text includes the perspectives of several newspaper editors Ariaz interviewed during the project about local journalism’s civic importance and its precarious financial model. It was important to get their voices in the exhibit, he says.

Ariaz has photographed 125 newspapers in Kansas thus far, including some that have closed since his project began. In one case, he was able to document a small town paper’s last day in business. He says he plans to use the Guggenheim Fellowship to continue the work and document all of the remaining newspapers in Kansas.

The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to mid-career individuals engaged in significant scholarship and artistic creativity. Award winners come from a wide variety of fields across the arts, sciences and humanities. The honor comes with a financial award intended to help winners take the time necessary to advance their projects.

Ariaz was one of two LSU professors awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year. Novelist Maurice Carlos Ruffin, an associate professor of creative writing in the English Department, was also honored. Louisiana’s other four 2026 Guggenheim Fellows are based in New Orleans.

The exhibit opens tomorrow. Baton Rouge Gallery will host its regular free First Wednesday Opening Reception on May 6 from 6 to 9 p.m. On Sunday, May 17, from 4 to 6 p.m., Ariaz, Bryant and Thompson will discuss their works during the gallery’s ARTiculate Artist Talk series. For more information, visit batonrougegallery.org.