OC photography faculty asked to showcase 66 of their photographic artwork pieces in new MCCU flagship building

ODESSA (Jan. 18, 2017) – Photographic artwork of Odessa College photography faculty members Steve Goff and Beckwith Thompson will be showcased throughout the new My Community Credit Unions’ new flagship building when it opens this month.

After the MCCU Ribbon Cutting ceremony on Thursday, Jan. 19 at 4:30 p.m., tours of the building will feature Goff’s and Thompson’s work in addition to photographic works by OC photography students.

“We were honored to be asked to showcase 66 pieces of our photographic artwork in the My Community Credit Union’s flagship building,” Goff and Thompson said. 

“Included are images from five different bodies of work,” Thompson added. “Banking Elements is a series of images that MCCU commissioned specifically for their new building. Flora is a series that we created in our cottage-style garden using new technology alongside a photographic process from the 1880s. Someone's in the Garden is Steve’s series of garden images from across the nation. Two other series are still life groupings. True Blue, is a color-based series created for a specific room in the building and Eat Real Food focuses mostly on produce grown in Farmer Troy's urban garden in Ector County.” 

“My Community Credit Union strives to represent Odessa as best as possible, and we were thrilled to have local artists display their artwork in our branch…,” Autumn Blankenship, MCCU marketing manager, said.

Steve Goff, professor and program head of photography, has taught at Odessa College since 1984. He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Ohio University and taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops, Lakeland and Cuyahoga Community Colleges and Cleveland State University before moving to Texas. He has been awarded the Aid to Individual Artist Fellowship

from the Ohio Arts Council and the Fellowship Award in Photography from the Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts. He also represented the Fellowship winners at Mois de la Photo in Paris, France. Goff has an extensive exhibition record and teaches workshops around the state and region. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Texas Photographic Society and also is currently serving on the Board of the Odessa Council for the Arts and Humanities.

Beckwith Thompson, an adjunct photography faculty member at Odessa College and a native of West Texas, has a love of traveling that has taken her to 15 countries and 48 states. As the owner of Beckwith Thompson Studio, she has developed a way of seeing the world through an artist’s eyes, which she shares with her portrait clients throughout the country and internationally in such places as Paris and Shanghai. In between her travels, she focuses her energy on creating and showing her artwork, teaching photography, and maintaining her drought-tolerant garden.