Archive for May 7, 2008

Sheila Pree Bright’s YOUNG AMERICANS On View at the High Museum, Atlanta

May 7, 2008 at 1:56 pm · Filed under MUST ATTEND, MVS PHOTO FAVORITES

Young Americans: Photographs by Sheila Pree Bright
May 3 – August 10, 2008

The High Museum, Atlanta
Lower Level, Wieland Pavilion

Young Americans is a portraiture project exploring the attitudes and opinions of young Americans (18–25 years old) toward their nation and their identity as Americans. Individual relationships to the nation as a whole are of increasing relevance as political engagement comes to the foreground in the 2008 election year. The themes explored in Young Americans also echo those of  the Civil Rights Era, as examined  in  Road to Freedom: 1956–1968 and After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, on view simultaneously beginning June 7.

Exhibition Details

Young Americans consists of 28 large-format chromogenic prints, several accompanied by statements from the subjects revealing their opinions and attitudes about American culture and society. Sheila Pree Bright began working on the series in the fall of 2006, and her swift development of the project led to her selection as the inaugural recipient of an artist-in-residency at the Amistad Center for Art and Culture. Her subjects are photographed with the American flag in poses reflecting elements of their identities and feelings about their country. Pree Bright collaborates with her subjects by inviting them to choose their own clothing, poses, and interactions with the flag. She has said of the work, “Young people born between 1982 and 2000 constitute the largest generation since the baby boomers, but they are often portrayed negatively in our society. I wanted to give them a platform to speak for themselves—to show and describe how they feel about this country. I also wanted to include young people from diverse backgrounds and socio-economic groups.”

Sheila Pree Bright

A 2002 National Graduate Seminar Fellow at the Photography Institute at Columbia University, N.Y., Pree Bright earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from Georgia State University in 2003. Her photographs are included in public and private collections across the United States. In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Santa Fe Prize. Presented annually by the Santa Fe Center for Photography, this prize recognizes young artists working in photography who show special promise. Currently a studio artist at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, she was awarded the En Foco New Works Photography Award (1999) and the National Bronica Award (2001). Pree Bright’s work prior to Young Americans highlights issues related to ethnic identity and gender and includes the series Suburbia, which focuses on home environments of African Americans residing in the suburbs.

Exhibition Organization and Support

The production costs for the Young Americans project and exhibition have been generously underwritten by the AETNA Foundation. The exhibition is organized by Julian Cox, Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art, in partnership with the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. The exhibition will travel to The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, an affiliate institution housed within the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn, this fall and will travel to additional venues to be announced.

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Exhibition “Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City” at the NY Public Library through August 29

May 7, 2008 at 1:37 pm · Filed under MVS PHOTO FAVORITES, READING MATTERS

EMINENT DOMAIN: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY and the CITY will be on view in the main floor exhibition space at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library (branch of the New York Public Libraries), 5th Avenue at 42nd Street in Manhattan, through the summer.

From the website:

“The exhibition Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City features the work of five contemporary New York–based photographers drawn primarily from new acquisitions in the Photography Collection. Thomas Holton’s The Lams of Ludlow Street is an empathetic account of one family’s daily life in Chinatown and a photographer’s personal quest to better understand his own heritage. Bettina Johae’s borough edges,nyc is a digital project exploring the edges of the city’s five boroughs, which the photographer physically traversed as a way of “remapping” the supposedly well-known city. In Window, Reiner Leist used a 19th-century camera to photograph the view from his 26th-floor apartment on Eighth Avenue overlooking downtown Manhattan. At different times on almost every day during the past decade, Leist captured a slice of Manhattan that includes One Penn Plaza, Madison Square Garden, and, until September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center towers. Over the same period of time, Zoe Leonard tracked changes and disappearances occurring on the Lower East Side as a result of the city’s economic transformation; her Analogue also serves as both elegy and homage to a long-standing tradition of documentary photography. In his series Untitled/This is just to say, Ethan Levitas photographs individual train cars and their passengers along the elevated lines of the New York City subway, capturing unexpected moments of connection and contradiction in the most obvious and overlooked of public spaces. Levitas’s project, like all of the works in Eminent Domain, deals with the life of the city in terms of passage (of seasons and time, people and place) and exchange (between individual and collective, interior and exterior). Turning on the nature of photography itself (which always complicates the relationship between private and public property), the works in the exhibition intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City.

A publication accompanying the exhibition will include written meditations on these themes by the Bronx-born artist Glenn Ligon, who is known for his multi-media explorations of critical issues in contemporary culture. “

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Hotbed: Video Cultivation beside the Getty Gardens in LA

May 7, 2008 at 1:36 pm · Filed under APPROACHING EVENT, Market Musings, MVS MUSTS

From the e-blast:

Hotbed: Video Cultivation beside the Getty Gardens

Dates: Friday, May 9, and Saturday, May 10, 2008
Time: 7:00–9:00 p.m. on Friday, 7:00–10:00 p.m. on Saturday
Location: Getty Center
Admission: Free; no reservations required.
Projected onto the exterior walls of the Getty Center, 18 artists’ videos from 1984 to 2007 explore the theme of the body as nature or culture. This free, special two-evening installation complements the exhibition California Video and is curated by Anne Bray, Director of Freewaves, a Los Angeles-based arts organization connecting new media from around the world. The videos are arranged thematically and play in a loop starting and ending at the tram arrival plaza, with a fulcrum at the Museum Courtyard..

Click here for information about all of the videos that will be projected and to download a map of the screening locations. http://www.getty.edu/visit/events/hotbed_video.html

Admission is FREE and no reservations are required.
Beer and wine available.

This event complement’s the Getty’s current exhibition, California Video, which features more than 50-single channel videos and 15 installations by 58 artists including Eleanor Antin, John Baldassari, Brian Bress, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Jim Campbell, Meg Cranston, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Martha Rosler, Jennifer Steinkamp, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Diana Thater, Bill Viola and William Wegman. Co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, approximately half of the works in the exhibition are drawn from the GRI’s extraordinary collection of video art, which, since its acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive in 2006, has become one of the largest institutional collections in the world. California Video is curated by Glenn Phillips, senior pojects specialist and consulting curator, Department of Contemporary Programs and Research at the GRI.

California Video runs through June 8, 2008. Click here for more information and to watch excerpts from some of the videos: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/california_video/index.html

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JoAnn Verberg Lectures in San Francisco on Friday, May 9th

May 7, 2008 at 6:49 am · Filed under APPROACHING EVENT, MVS MUSTS, MVS PHOTO FAVORITES, READING MATTERS, Uncategorized

JoAnn Verberg will be speaking at the San Francisco Art Institute this Friday evening, sponsored by PhotoAlliance.

EVENT DETAILS:
Date: May 9, 2008
Time: 7:30 pm
Location: San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall 800 Chestnut Street San Francisco, Ca (at Jones Street)
Ticket Information:
$10.00 general admission $5.00 students with ID tickets available at the door.

About JoAnn Verburg:
 JoAnn Verburg received a BA in sociology from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA in Photography from the
Rochester Institute of Technology.

From 1977 to 1979, Verburg served as project manager for the Rephotographic Survey Project, traveling throughout the American West to replicate the same wilderness views made by 19th-century frontier photographers William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. While heading Polaroid’s
Visiting Artist Program in the early 1980s—a program she created—Verburg promoted technical innovation in the field by inviting such artists as Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Michael Bishop and Linda Connor to experiment with new 20 x 24 and 40 x 80 cameras.

Distinguished by its extraordinary sensitivity to the energy and sensuality of the natural world, Verburg’s work combines soft lighting, varied focus, and thoughtful composition to convey the beauty of its subject and setting. Often exhibited as large-format diptychs and triptychs, her evocative images of olive groves near her home in Spoleto, Italy, envelop the viewer in a serene and dreamlike atmosphere. For over 20 years Verburg has returned to the area with her husband, poet Jim Moore, capturing the fields and trees of the Italian countryside.

Her photographs of Moore relaxing in this idyllic environment have been compared to Alfred Stieglitz’s
portraits of Georgia O’Keefe and Harry Callahan’s pictures of his wife Eleanor. In addition to landscape, still
life, and portrait photography, Verburg has also worked on various installations and public art projects in
Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Verburg has exhibited her work extensively. The solo show “Present on the Road to Bazzano” was held at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 2001. She is currently the subject of a mid-career exhibition and catalog, “Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg” organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007 which traveled to The Walker Art Center in 2008. (NOTE: you can hear an audio tour of the exhibition at that link as well.) Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle; the International Center of Photography, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Teharan, Iran; and other museums and galleries.

Click here to listen to an interview JoAnn, MoMA Curator Susan Kismaric and photographer William Allard produced by Minnesota Public Radio.

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