In January 2017 the Morris kicked off its Art Now Artist Talk lecture series with a panel discussion featuring several artists represented in the exhibition The Female Lens: Photography from the Do Good Fund. The collection began as an effort by attorney and philanthropist Alan Rothschild to preserve and showcase photography that depicts and documents the American South. Since 2012 the Do Good Fund has collected more than three hundred works by dozens of both well-known and emerging artists.

The Female Lens focused on images by a selection of women photographers including Maude Schuyler Clay, famous for her haunting images of the people and places of the Mississippi Delta; Rineke Dijkstra, a Dutch photographer whose portraits are widely exhibited and highly collectible; Stacy Kranitz, Time magazine’s 2015 Instagram Photographer of the Year; and Rosalind Fox Solomon, a New York–based artist who began capturing timeless and personal instances of human existence at age thirty-eight and is still working at eighty-six. The exhibition was on view in the Education Gallery and the stairwell area of the museum.