Artist Talk and Book Signing with Riley Goodman

Join us at Backwater Books in Ellicott City on August 29th at 11am as Patapsco Heritage Greenway welcomes home photographer Riley Goodman for an artist talk and book signing. Riley will discuss his artistic process along with his photobook, From Yonder Wooded Hill: a visual narrative that juxtaposes Riley’s own heritage and that of his ancestors to show the interwoven continuum of a long-passed yet ever-present culture embedded in hills near and far to his upbringing in the Patapsco River Valley. If you love history, our relationship to nature, and even the occasional ghost story, you don’t want to miss this. This event is free to attend, with copies of From Yonder Wooded Hill available to purchase. A bit about Riley: Riley’s multimedia art process inquires folklore, American history, and humankind’s relation to the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this manifests through the passage of time. Informed by the compositional styles of cinema and painting, Riley weaves a vast visual narrative inspired by everything from historical accounts and folk-based storytelling to dreams and familial legends. Riley’s work presents an ever-occurring understanding of history, establishing a crafted world that invites the viewer to question tenets of authenticity, leaving the idea of truth versus myth in an undisclosed middle ground. Riley is a BFA graduate of VCUarts and his first monograph, From Yonder Wooded Hill was published by Fall Line Press in 2022. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time, among other outlets, and most notably resides in the permanent collections of the MoMA Artist Book Collection and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is a 2026 Professional recipient of the VMFA Visual Arts Fellowship. RSVP HERE