Nosotras: Portraits of Latina, an exhibit of 50 photographs — black and white as well as color — from eight emerging photographers documenting the lives and culture of Latinas in the United States, runs Oct. 21 through Nov. 30 in Gallery I of UALR’s Fine Arts Building.

Virginia Dodier, a Mexican-American born on the border and raised in Middle America, who organized the exhibition, will discuss the works at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 9, in Fine Arts Room 161. The exhibition is part of the Arkansas Mexico 2010 celebration.

Dodier — photography historian, curator, and director of the Carlsbad Museum and Art Center in New Mexico — has, like many other Hispanic women and girls, experienced the feeling of living in two worlds. She organized Nosotras — Spanish for the feminine “us” or “we” — to present positive images of women’s lives lived “between here and the homeland.”

The exhibit is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, and 2 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed on university holidays.

The images convey dignity and strength in the faces, families, and traditions of multiple generations. In the series From Inside the Home: A Portrait of Mexican Immigrant Women, Lupita Murillo Tinnen documents “women and the way in which their homes reflect their blending of two cultures.” Karen Bucher’s Growing Up in the Southwest examines life in the booming city of Las Cruces, N.M., and Patricia Gomez explores her Family Connections on both sides of the border in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico.

The exhibition also features selections from five additional photographers: Angela Cappetta’s Glendalis series follows the activities of one young woman and her friends and family during a seven-year period; Nereida Garcia Ferraz’s Habana Vieja/Old Havana merges old snapshot negatives with new digital techniques; Mary Teresa Giancoli’s Mexican Lives, Mexican Rituals, Stories from New York City depicts the experience of immigration and the preservation of cultural traditions uprooted from a distant homeland; Scott Nava’s Following the Harvest reaffirms the pride and resilience of the Latin American community in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood; and Tone Stockenstrom’s Just Because I Live in America follows one Mexican-American immigrant family in visual comment on the impact of immigration on the social structures of family and home.

The traveling exhibition by Exhibits USA and Mid America Arts Alliance was made possible by support from the UALR Department of Art, the Friends of the Arts, and Office of Campus Life.