Photo Exhibitions

Ice Visions is an informal collaboration between myself, the ice fishing community, and elemental forces. When fishing holes refreeze overnight, they create fertile ground for nature's wild artistic side, and these perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile. The images on display depict ice designs I've documented during 20 years of exploring New England lakes and ponds. In the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed in place by several inches of new ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars, cells, and more when rendered in black and white. Due to milder than usual temperatures during the past winter, on many mornings I found barely a skin of new ice covering the prior day's fishing holes. Bubbles pooled up at the surface before freezing, creating striking new kinds of formations I'd never seen before, ones that perhaps reveal the fingerprint of a warming climate.

As a biologist, a photographer, and a filmmaker, I have always been focused on humans' relationship with nature. At the beginning of my career, my photographs mostly took a documentary and taxonomical approach to describing species and ecosystems, as well as capturing the processes and intricacies of making science. Later on, while I was pursuing an MFA, my ideas expanded into the realm of "contemporary photography," broadening the way I produce and understand photography. When thinking about the images from the Ice Shanties series, two main questions come to mind: what is nature without humans, and what are humans without nature? In asking questions, I don't seek to find correct answers but rather to open up conversations about human-nature interactions across different cultures and latitudes. As a Colombian who moved to Vermont a couple years ago, I instantly became curious about and fascinated by the peculiar structures that adorn the frozen waters of Brattleboro's West River. What are they for? Who uses them? Why do they have such unique looks? Friends quickly answered these questions, but my obsession with the tiny houses, the frozen ecosystem, the fishing culture, and the ephemeral aspect of the landscape pushed me to take a deeper look. When I came across the shanties, photographing them in broad daylight didn't seem fitting. The fully revealing light and bright atmosphere felt detached from the ideas of ethereality, solitude, and contemplation. At night, however, a whole new world is revealed: the absence or presence of moonlight, the color of the night, the city lights and traffic, the frozen tracks of life on the snow, and the connection between the shanties and the ecosystem. Night also allows us to delve into imaginary narratives about life on the ice, narratives that are complemented by the daylight portraits of "frozen" fish and "buried" fishing traps.

Revelations: Recent Photography Acquisitions features a selection of photographs made from the early 20th century to the present and added to the Ogden's Museum of Southern Art's permanent collection over the last decade. With over 70 photographs featured, Revelations represents a wide range of processes and techniques made by a diverse group of 39 photographers. Revelations celebrates regional identity in parallel with the South's ongoing contributions to a global conversation on photography in the visual arts. Photographers included in the exhibition: Keith Calhoun, William Christenberry, Lee Deigaard, Walker Evans, Debbie Fleming Caffrey, Aaron Hardin, Lewis W. Hine, Birney Imes, Dorthea Lange, Sally Mann, Andrew Moore, Chandra McCormick, RaMell Ross, Ernest Withers and more.

Jackson Fine Art is proud to continue our online viewing room series with works by newly represented photographer, Julie Blackmon. Contemporary American photographer Julie Blackmon draws inspiration from the raucous tavern scenes of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters, creating photographs based around the people and places in her small community. Blackmon has compared her surroundings to a giant Hollywood prop closet, where a Starbucks employee out on a smoke break may appear in her next photograph, or the beauty shop she passes every day becomes the setting for a new piece. "It's a fun perspective to have... to see the world around you as a potential story or idea. It changes how you see things. Nora Ephron said, 'everything is copy,' and that has really stayed with me. I live and work in a generic town, with a generic name, in the middle of America, in the middle of nowhere… but the stories unfolding around me are endless."

An exhibition about hope - takes its timely title from the lyrics of The Who's song "1921." The exhibition includes a selection of works by both classical and contemporary photographers where the underlying theme is positivity and optimism - an important feeling many of us desperately need to hang on to following the dismal year we have all just lived through! As The Who's song referred to a reunited couple looking ahead to better times following WWI, similarly, our exhibition seeks to present uplifting images to remind us there are better days ahead! Especially now that there are cures in play for the political, social and medical viruses we have been afflicted with. From the classic Blue Marble NASA image taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 to Murray Frederick's Vanity series where our gaze is redirected from ourselves and into our surrounding mesmerizing desert environment to Richard Misrach's mystical and spiritual images of Stonehenge to Ansel Adams Mount Williamson from Manzanar which was described by Edward Steichen as an image representing the birth of mankind on planet earth. All these landscape images inspire hope for our planet which has been seriously neglected as of late. Cig Harvey's Goldfinch depicting a hand releasing a bird signifies the letting go of anxieties and becoming free and unencumbered while John Mack's Mazatian, Sinaloa, Mexico image shows a diver high on a platform with arms wide open while below him a couple embraces, both ready to accept a new and better future. Works that address this timely theme by artists including Jeff Brouws, Elijah Gown, Michael Kenna, Ed Sievers and Aaron Siskind will also be on view. Art has always been used to communicate messages, to inspire people to act and to think. After the year we've all just had we hope the works in this exhibition provide an uplifting experience, filling the viewer with hope and positivity for the year ahead.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce End of the Road, an online exhibition of new work by New York based artist Brea Souders. The Viewing Room features thirty gelatin silver prints made during a year of turmoil and precarity in the United States. Shaped by these realities, the series reflects the moment of their creation. The body of work is comprised of black and white images documenting an uninhabited piece of land leading to a gravel cul-de-sac, and the various people who visit the end of the road.

Since the beginning of his career in the 1970s, Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) has used his camera to create poignant meditations on visibility, race, place, and American history. From early street portraits made in Harlem to a recent series imagining an escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad, Bey explores photography's potential to reveal communities and stories that have been underrepresented or even unseen. Both a form of personal expression and an act of political responsibility, Bey's art insists on the power of photography to transform stereotypes, convene communities, and create dialogue. Dawoud Bey: An American Project traces these through lines across the forty-five years of Bey's career and his profound engagement with the young Black subject and African American history. The title intentionally inserts his photographs into a long-running conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera. The questions of who is considered an American photographer, or simply an American, and whose story is an American story are particularly urgent today. Bey's work offers a potent corrective to the gaps in our picture of American society and history—and an emphatic reminder of the ongoing impact of those omissions.

COVID-19 and the response to stop the spread of the virus have reminded us all just how much our community relies on our essential workers. Nurses, bus drivers, farmers, teachers, firefighters, childcare workers, doctors, and government officials, to name just a few, have supported us and ensured that our needs are met and our families remain healthy and cared for. This photography project, created by Operation Technician Iz Balleto and Teaching Artist and Curator in Residence JaQuanne LeRoy, brings faces and voices to the many people who have kept our community going through this pandemic. This campaign explores what essential work entails and honors those individuals who continue to dedicate their lives to it every day.

This exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979 in Rochester, NY). Lawson is a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, she has been investigating and challenging the conventional representations of black identities. Drawing on a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images, Lawson's posed photographs channel broader ideas about personal and social histories, sexuality, and spiritual beliefs. Lawson's large-format color photographs are highly staged and depict individuals, couples, and families in both domestic and public settings, picturing narratives of family, love, and desire. Engaging members of her own community as well as strangers she meets on the street, she meticulously poses her subjects in a variety of interiors to create what the artist describes as “a mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen. It's about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent.” Lawson's works are made in collaboration with her subjects, who are often nude, embracing, and directly confronting the camera, destabilizing the notion of photography as a passively voyeuristic medium. This survey exhibition will include a selection of photographs from 2004 to the present, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated scholarly catalog, featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, historians, and writers.

The third iteration of the Hillman Photography Initiative (HPI), a CMOA project committed to exploring new ideas about photography, launches this year. The initiative will present an exhibition of work by artist Trevor Paglen, a publication, and an interdisciplinary podcast. With the development and advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been a radical change in the way that surveillance systems capture, categorize, and synthesize photographs. Mirror with a Memory explores the many ways artists probe the intersections of photography, surveillance, and AI-their past, present, and future-to underscore concerns about implicit bias, right to privacy, and police monitoring embedded in corporate, military, and law enforcement applications. The exhibition will include a new site-specific commission as well as a sculpture that doubles as a WiFi hotspot and photographs that reveal how AI analyzes and labels photographs of people and places. These works will be placed in three areas within the museum, inviting visitors to encounter Paglen's insightful perspective in different contexts.

Infamous is a visual exploration of the long history of deeply rooted racism in the United States. Throughout his illustrious career, Andres Serrano has directly confronted the zeitgeist with provocative works. In this exhibition of over 30 photographs of racist artifacts, he continues to hold a mirror to the nation's recent, dark past. In 2019, Andres Serrano began buying and photographing objects with a sense of infamy attached. Serrano acquired KKK hoods, consumer products depicting caricatures of Black people, violent documentary photographs, and more, most of which were previously owned and purchased directly from the homes of Americans. By creating a visual catalog of evidence that includes reductive and virulent portrayals of Black Americans, the artist challenges viewers to confront the country’s racist history and consider its influence on and relevance in culture and society today. On the exhibition, Serrano shares 'Infamous is an excavation into Man's inglorious past. Seen through objects and images that paint a disturbing picture, it’s an exhibition imbued with the patina of tainted history. They tell the story of infamy with varying degrees of bigotry and insensitivity. Although we want to believe that ‘what happened in the past stays in the past’ history proves us wrong.'

Las Carpetas looks at the bureaucratic residue of a 40-year-long secret surveillance program that aimed to destroy the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Through still-lives, archival appropriation, and investigation, Christopher Gregory-Rivera provides a counter-history to the way many understand this period of time and its aftermath. By rescuing, displaying, and photographing the contents of surveillance files, Las Carpetas questions what forces have control over what and how we remember. La Residencia is a co-located residency program in partnership with Pública. A cultural space in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Pública aims to provide a platform for local and international artists to strengthen relationships between Puerto Rico and a global audience. Over the course of eighteen months, Pública Co-Director Natalia Viera Salgado will serve as Abrons' 2020-21 Curatorial Resident and will support the development of projects at Abrons and Pública. Curated by Natalia Viera Salgado

Russell and Stockdale each explore their personal history through photographs of botanical subjects. Russell's images of plants found on her family's property in San Diego's back country are paired with actual botanical specimens and these are often also affixed to her photographic prints. These artworks speak to the ways she experiences the land - spiritually, emotionally, artistically, and scientifically. The stunning beauty of Stockdale's images of a seed pod flowering then withering, belie the very personal meaning and intent behind his photographs. Their bold colors fade to earth tones and reference the slow destruction of Alzheimer's disease. Through these photographs he investigates mortality, memory, and loss.

For centuries, people have immigrated to the United States and recorded their perspectives on the unfamiliar country. This rotation is a brief chronological presentation of selected photographs created by immigrants to this country, many of whom became naturalized citizens. Photographers such as Napoleon Sarony (American, b. Canada, 1821–1896) and José Maria Mora (American, b. Cuba, 1849–1926) dedicated their careers to creating portraits of notable Americans, including Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland. Others documented the American landscape at key moments. Arnold Genthe (American, b. Germany, 1869-1942) recorded the chaotic aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and Andreas Feininger (American, b. France, 1906-1999) photographed the bright lights and hectic environment of Times Square in the 1940s. In the 21st century, photographers such as Vietnam-born Binh Danh (b. 1977) turned their lenses on the regions of the world from which they emigrated, while others, like Marco Breuer (German, b. 1966), have maintained their native citizenship while living and working in the United States. Curated by Meghan L. Jordan, curatorial assistant, with Jamie M. Allen, Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Associate Curator, this installation highlights the fresh vision and pictorial insight brought to America by newcomers.

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present new work by Christian Marclay, incorporating collage, video animation, and photography. The exhibition continues Marclay's investigation into the relationship between sound and image through sampling elements from art and popular culture, and reflects the anxiety and frustration of the current global pandemic and political crises. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery from January 21 to March 26, 2021, and will be accompanied by a musical performance in which Marclay's collage No! serves as a score, on a date to be scheduled soon. The voice is at the center of the exhibition. In a series of photographs showing screaming faces, cut and torn fragments from comic books, movie stills, and images found on the internet are arranged into haunting, mask-like composites, and then recorded by the camera. Capturing the paper's inherent creases and tears, the photographs mix analog and digital elements, and investigate the computer screen as a contemporary physical surface. This exhibition marks the premiere of Fire, 2020, a hypnotic new animation. Using small pieces cut from comic books, the single-channel video work is an impressionistic representation of fire. Hundreds of photographs shown in rapid succession suggest a flip book, creating the illusion of a flickering, fiery mosaic in motion. Flames are also the subject of Raging Fire, 2020, a large collage made of paper cutouts from comic book illustrations of fire. The piece transforms representations of all manner of war, catastrophe, explosion, and arson into abstracted yellows, oranges, and reds in a variety of styles. Also on view will be No!, 2019, a set of 15 original collages made from comic book fragments, and No!, 2020, a graphic score for a solo voice that comprises a facsimile of the 2019 collages. While earlier works such as Manga Scroll, 2010, incorporated onomatopoeias disconnected from their generative action, No! uses vocal utterances, facial expressions, and body movements to prompt a performance. Writes Marclay, "Like my earlier graphic scores dating back to the 1990s, the use of words that illustrate their sonic counterparts engages non-traditional visualizations of sound as a possibility for generating music." As in his music and video works, which splice together found recordings and film footage, the comic book segments are culled and re-contextualized in vibrant, dynamic ways. Christian Marclay (born 1955) works in a sampling aesthetic, using fragments from the ephemera of popular culture to create new forms and meanings. Marclay's work has been shown in museums and galleries internationally, including recent major one-person exhibitions at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as Kunsthaus, Zurich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Marclay received the Golden Lion award for best artist at the 54th Venice Biennale for his 24-hour virtuosic video piece, The Clock, which has been shown widely to great acclaim. His work is in the collection of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others

The Manifest portfolio consists of photographic representations of objects, documents, photographs, and books held in various public collections throughout the U.S. These repositories include various elements of material culture such as diaries, slave collars, human hair, a drum, souvenirs, and other objects, some with great significance and others simply quotidian representations of daily life in the history of the African American community. I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit these material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia, suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration. Manifest is an effort to seek out the artifacts and material evidence of the American construct and representation of race. The histories of slavery, abolition, segregation, the U.S. Civil War, and the Civil Rights Era are a few of the narratives that emerge in these photographs. The content is remarkable, visual evidence of lives and events; however, I also intend the viewer to consider this informal reliquary as a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history, memory and to imbue the remnants of material culture with power. Wendel A. White was awarded a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. White taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, NY; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY; the International Center for Photography, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; and is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University. His work has received various awards and fellowships including a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography, three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, a photography grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is also represented in museum and corporate collections. White has served on the boards of various non-profit and public organizations including the Society for Photographic Education, Kodak Educational Advisory Council, NJ Save Outdoor Sculpture, New Jersey Black Culture and Heritage Foundation, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the New Jersey Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Commission.

Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation by police violence. Even with smart phones and dash cams recording the actions, more lives get cut short due to unnecessary and excessive violence. Who is next? Me? My brother? My friends? How do we protect these men? Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits and protests is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child. I set out to photograph mothers with their sons in their environment, reenacting what it must feel like to endure this pain. The mothers in the photographs have not lost their sons, but understand the reality, that this could happen to their family. The mother is also photographed in isolation, reflecting on the absence. When the trials are over, the protesters have gone home and the news cameras gone, it is the mother left. Left to mourn, to survive. The title of the project is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit.” Instead of black bodies hanging from the Poplar Tree, these fruits of our families, our communities, are being killed in the street. Jon Henry is a visual artist working with photography and text, from Queens NY, now residing in Brooklyn. His work reflects on family, socio-political issues, grief, trauma and healing within the African American community. His work has been published both nationally and internationally and exhibited in numerous galleries including Aperture Foundation, Smack Mellon, and BRIC among others. Known foremost for cultural activism in his work, his projects include studies of athletes from different sports and their representations. He was recently awarded the Arnold Newman Grant for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture and a 2020 En Foco Fellowship. Henry was named one of LensCulture's Emerging Artists for 2019 and won the Film Photo Prize for Continuing Film Project sponsored by Kodak.

Strange Instrument brings together 45 photographs documenting South Africa-where David Goldblatt was born in 1930 and lived until his death in 2018-at the height of apartheid, between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s. Curated by artist and activist Zanele Muholi, who was Goldblatt's friend and mentee, the exhibition offers a deeply personal meditation on the brutality and humanity that Goldblatt captured in his strikingly beautiful images of everyday lives under conditions of profound injustice. Taking an expansive and affective approach to their mentor's body of work, the exhibition presents a portrait of Goldblatt himself through Muholi's eyes.

Discover how the 20th-century's foremost American photographer often created multiple interpretations of a single image to express his creative vision. Twentieth-century American photographer Ansel Adams famously said that the photographic negative is like a composer's score, and the print a performance. Drawn from the Ansel Adams Archive, at the Center for Creative Photography, housed in Tucson at the University of Arizona, this exhibition illustrates Adams' meaning. Throughout the exhibition of sixty photographs, sets of prints-grouped in twos and threes-show how on different occasions Adams created varying interpretations from his own negatives. These groups demonstrate how, using the same score, Adams was constantly revising the way it was performed.

Working Together is an unprecedented exhibition that chronicles the formative years of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers established in New York City in 1963. "Kamoinge" comes from the language of the Kikuyu people of Kenya, meaning "a group of people acting together," and reflects the ideal that animated the collective. In the early years, at a time of dramatic social upheaval, members met regularly to show and discuss each other's work and to share their critical perspectives, technical and professional experience, and friendship. Although each artist had his or her own sensibility and developed an independent career, the members of Kamoinge were deeply committed to photography's power and status as an independent art form. They boldly and inventively depicted their communities as they saw and participated in them, rather than as they were often portrayed. This presentation focuses on the influential work of founding Kamoinge members during the first two decades of the collective. It includes approximately 140 photographs by fourteen of the early members: Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Daniel Dawson, Louis Draper, Al Fennar, Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Jimmie Mannas, Herb Randall, Herb Robinson, Beuford Smith, Ming Smith, Shawn Walker, and Calvin Wilson. Nine of these artists still live in or near New York City. The photographs provide a powerful and poetic perspective of the 1960s and 1970s during the heart of the Black Arts Movement. Working Together also presents an overview of many of the group's collective achievements, such as exhibitions, portfolios, and publications. Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, VMFA. The installation at the Whitney is overseen by Carrie Springer, assistant curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Mia Matthias, curatorial assistant.

In partnership with Iris PhotoCollective, HistoryMiami Museum will present Urban Tranquility: Photographs by C.W. Griffin. The exhibition, featuring the work of C.W. Griffin and curated by Carl Juste, is the exploration of a one-block area of downtown Miami surrounding Government Center, an area that provides both graphic and visual movement and a sense of serenity in the busy urban core. "Miami is unique as a metropolitan city. Even more unique is its tranquil essence felt at its busy urban core. When you go to cities like New York you feel the hustle and bustle. But you don't feel that in Miami," Iris PhotoCollective photographer C.W. Griffin said. "There is a sense of calm in our streets. In our downtown you can be relaxed." Griffin started capturing the serenity of downtown two years ago and now a curated selection of images from his photo essay will be displayed on the HistoryMiami plaza, which is also a subject of some of his photographs. "The HistoryMiami plaza is one of the very few spaces of the people. It is quiet and vast and has a calm to it. You feel safe," curator Carl Juste said. "For me, that place is the town square. Everyone can claim that space." HistoryMiami Museum will host a press preview and virtual opening with special guests, C.W. Griffin and Carl Juste on Wednesday, December 2 at 6 p.m. The public can view the exhibition starting on December 3. "We are looking forward to sharing this work with the community. We are honored to work with both C.W. Griffin and Carl Juste," HistoryMiami Museum Executive Director Jorge Zamanillo said. "Griffin captures the tranquility of downtown through his lens, while Juste curates the exhibition so that everyone sees themselves in it. You will leave the exhibition inspired to capture your own photos of the area." C.W. Griffin is a photographer working in Miami. He has taught at the University of Miami for many years and was a staff photographer at the Miami Herald for 31 years. Griffin is the recipient of numerous awards, and while serving in the military was the first African American photographer to be named Military Photographer of the Year for all branches worldwide. His work has appeared in numerous books and magazines such as National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Time. Griffin was represented in the book and exhibit Contemporary Black Photographers, and his work has appeared in numerous volumes of the coveted ‘Day in The Life' series. His work has also been a part of many major photography exhibits in galleries such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, and HistoryMiami Museum. Under the threat of persecution, Haitian-born Carl-Philippe Juste and his politically active family were forced to flee their homeland in 1965, eventually settling in Miami's Haitian community. Since 1991, he has worked as a photojournalist for The Miami Herald. Juste has covered national and international stories for the Herald, including assignments in Haiti, Cuba, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. As part of his ongoing independent work, in 1998, Juste co-founded Iris PhotoCollective. In 2016, Juste won a prestigious Knight Arts Challenge grant to complete Havana, Haiti: Two Cultures, One Community, a book and exhibit of photographs and essays about Cubans' and Haitians' lives and shared humanity. Havana, Haiti opened IPC Art Space in 2019 to further engage the public with the arts, and won the Oolite Arts' "The Ellies" in 2019. Urban Tranquility is sponsored by OPG Media | PhatAutoWraps and presented with the Museum's Center for Photography, which is supported in part by the Funding Arts Network, the Knight Foundation and Susannah and John Shubin.

Libby Black, Cameron Clayborn, Jim Goldberg, Raymond Saunders, Sunŭ Woods As interest in creating alternative narratives of varying measure grows, 'truth', as it relates to reality, has become an inconvenient impediment for a progression of agendas. The truth, becoming all the more elusive, has since become the most powerful course correction to date. In this exhibition an expression of truth is appealed to: it is witnessed, it is allowed for, it is resolved through the object. Each artist in this exhibition has unceasingly examined truth, (that being the reality of historical events and the social conditions as demanded by these actions, and how those points intersect to inform our present moment), for themselves and others, as central to their practice.

Obscura Gallery launches our 2021 season with a solo exhibition of Kurt Markus's dune forms photographed in Namibia, Africa, home to the largest sand dunes in the world. These images celebrate the meditative beauty found in these sensual shapes and forms created by the winds and natural forces ever-changing this unique landscape set within the coastal desert of Namibia. This is Kurt's second solo show at Obscura Gallery focusing on his personal work in the landscape, the first being an exhibition of Monument Valley landscapes in 2018. Markus approaches this landscape with the same respect and admiration, demonstrating his attunement with the natural world as one would be when impacted on a spiritual level. Many of the images included in the exhibition were taken at Sossusvlei, in the southern part of the Namib Desert, which is a salt and clay ‘pan' surrounded by sand dunes uniquely red in color and which are 5 million years old. Kurt Markus, a Montana native now based in Santa Fe, New Mexicois an internationally acclaimed photographer,film maker, and writer. He is widely published, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone, Travel + Leisure, New York Times Magazine, Outside, Esquire, Conde Nast Traveler, Texas Monthly, People, Entertainment Weekly, Men's and Women's Health, Vogue, Flair, German Elle, House and Garden, and Best Life,among many others. He has done advertising campaigns for such clients as: Armani, BMW, Sony, Levi's, Timberland, Calvin Klein and Nike. His monographs include three volumes on cowboys: After Barbed Wire, Buckaroo, and Cowpuncher; a book on boxers for which he traveled to New York, Dublin, Havana and Mexico City. In addition, under his own imprint, he published a book featuring the sand dune photographs of Brett and Edward Weston; as well as publishing a small volume in Japan, showcasing a fashion shoot in New Mexico in the spirit of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Featuring new work by Martha Casanave, Susan Hyde Greene, Jane Olin, Anna Rheim, Robin V. Robinson, and Robin Ward. Imagine creating art for an exhibit and an existential crisis occurs in the middle of your effort. A crisis that extends for an unknown amount of time, with your exhibit landing in the middle of it. How would your creative life be affected? Would you change your focus? Would you create more feverishly or remain frozen on the couch? What kind of emotions would influence your output? Would the situation change your perspective and seeing? The answers to these questions might be found in the work of the Salon Jane artists exhibited in Present Tense. This exhibition is the result of each artist's intention to create their deepest work during an unsettling time, when time itself has felt uncertain. Some of the work is a response to the pandemic. Some of it is a response to ecological crises. And some of it isn't consciously related to crisis but reflects the artist's emotional state during an unfamiliar state of being. Themes of isolation, decline and uncertainty are balanced by connection, transcendence, emergence, and beauty. We look into ourselves and our world and this is how we of Salon Jane have each made sense of it all. About Salon Jane The six members of Salon Jane came together in 2014 for feedback and inspiration about their work and over time they formed a bond that facilitated a safe atmosphere for risk taking and creative evolution. Instead of their pre-pandemic quarterly meetings in artist homes, they now Zoom once a month to share work and conduct business. Monterey Peninsula has a deep tradition of straight photography as set forth by Ansel Adams and others. But these local artists inhabit an island of innovation, pushing against the strict boundaries set forth by straight photography. In content and process, each artist's work transcends the ordinary while tapping into mystery. Salon Jane quickly evolved into a group of exhibiting artists. Their first exhibition was at Green Chalk Gallery in Monterey in 2015 and was followed by three unique exhibitions through 2017. In 2018 Salon Jane became a vital part of the Monterey Museum of Art's Year of the Woman with their exhibition, The Ethereal Zone. As Stuart Chase, MMA's former Executive Director, states, "Salon Jane's work is a beautiful demonstration of California's vibrant spirit. These women have created a dynamic grouping of diverse imagery and a strong intellectual and critical support system. It propels photographic art into the future and sparks creativity in all of us."

ClampArt is pleased to announce "Behind-the-Scenes" - Kenneth Gruenholtz's first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition coincides with the release of the artist's monograph titled Uncensored: My Year Behind the Scenes with Michael Lucas and his Models (Salzgeber: Berlin, 2020). In the style of a classic photo documentarian, Gruenholtz captures the fascinating world of gay adult entertainment with unexpected virtuosity and sensitivity. His beautiful "behind-the-scenes" photographs, shot between takes and after hours, constitute a compelling long-form portrait of Michael Lucas and his models over the course of a year of unprecedented access. The photographs in the book and the exhibition were shot on location in New York, Fire Island, Puerto Vallarta, and Barcelona. Kenneth Gruenholtz is an artist living and working in New York City. His work has been exhibited in New York, London, Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. Gruenholtz serves as a senior curator for DontDeleteArt.com, a website devoted to sharing artwork that has been improperly censored on social media. He holds a master's degree in digital photography from the School of Visual Arts.

ClampArt is pleased to announce "Transformations" - Mariette Pathy Allen's first solo show with the gallery. Mariette Pathy Allen has been photographing the transgender community for over forty years. Through her artistic practice, she has been a pioneering force in gender consciousness, contributing to numerous cultural and academic publications about gender variance and lecturing across the globe. Her first book, published in 1990, was titled Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them. The publication was groundbreaking in its investigation of a misunderstood community. The series "Transformations" started with black-and-white images in New Orleans on the last day of Mardi Gras 1978: "[W]hen by fluke, I stayed at the same hotel as a group of crossdressers, one of whom became a friend," writes Allen. "This chance meeting took me into a mostly closeted world of men who need to express their 'feminine sides. . .' Realizing early on that I had stumbled upon something potentially liberating and almost completely misunderstood, I set out to 'de-freakify,' and to offer a different view." Allen produced a portfolio of 11 dye transfer prints to coincide with the release of the book, Transformations. The exhibition at ClampArt includes the complete portfolio of color vintage prints, which consists of portraits of crossdressers shot in the late 1970s and 1980s. The same series was exhibited 30 years ago in January 1990 at the Simon Lowinsky Gallery in New York City. ClampArt's show also includes a selection of black-and-white prints by Allen shot in the same era. Mariette Pathy Allen's second book, The Gender Frontier, is a collection of photographs, interviews, and essays covering political activism, youth, and the range of people that identify as transgender in the United States. It won the 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender/Genderqueer category. Other books by the artist include TransCuba and Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand. In 2020, Queer|Art, a New York nonprofit dedicated to promoting the work of LGBTQ+ artists, launched a new $10,000 grant for Black trans women artists. The award, called the Illuminations Grant, was developed in collaboration with photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, writer and consultant Aaryn Lang, and multidisciplinary artist Serena Jara. Allen single-handedly endowed the award. Mariette Pathy Allen's photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City; New York Public Library, New York City; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; McEvoy Family Collection, San Francisco, California; Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania; and Museum of Photography, Lishui, China. Her work will be archived at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959-in the midst of the Cold War-Robert Frank's The Americans is among the most influential photography books of the 20th century. The Addison is one of only four museums in the world to own a complete set of the images from the book. In 1955-56, a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed the Swiss-born photographer to travel throughout the United States with the goal of creating a book that he described as a "visual study of a civilization." Frank's dark and grainy images are the work of an outsider looking in and reveal his ambivalence toward his adopted country. The eighty-three carefully sequenced photographs, edited down from more than twenty-seven thousand, are raw documentation of a country in transition. They celebrate its strengths as an emerging superpower while exposing the cracks in the veneer of optimism and opportunity that defined its postwar culture. As Jack Kerouac wrote in the introduction to the book, "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film." Frank's unsentimental vision of a modern America that looked surprisingly lonely and dislocated was initially censured by the critics. However, the honest and poignant beauty captured in these images and his distinctively expressive and visceral style were soon embraced by younger photographers. More than a revelation of a specific moment in American history or a manifesto for a new photographic style, The Americans is a work of resonance that probes the defining and enduring dualities of American life and culture-hope and despair, affluence and want, freedom and limitation, community and isolation. Exploring the gulf between appearance and actuality, national ideals and regional specificity, American myth and street-level reality, these provocative and nuanced images ask what America is. Generous support for this exhibition has been ​provided by the Winton Family Exhibition Fund.

Opening Friday, December 18, New York Responds: The First Six Months looks at the still-unfolding events of 2020 through the eyes of over 100 New Yorkers. This crowd-sourced exhibition presents objects, photographs, videos, and other artworks that document and interpret the COVID pandemic, the racial justice uprisings, and the responses of New Yorkers as they fought to cope, survive, and forge a better future. A jury of a dozen New Yorkers representing many walks of life helped to make the selection from among tens of thousands of submissions received from individual artists and from partner institutions. On July 23, the Museum unveiled the first phase of this exhibition, an outdoor installation featuring 14 images that had been submitted as part of our ongoing collecting efforts. Together, these powerful artifacts and artworks speak to the dramatic effects of these unprecedented months on the city, its residents, and the dynamics of urban life itself.

PCNW is pleased to present To Survive on This Shore, a new photographic exhibition on view January 14–April 15, 2021. This interdisciplinary project is a collaboration between Jess T. Dugan, photographer, and Vanessa Fabbre, social worker and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, whose research focuses on the intersection of LGBTQ issues and aging. For more than five years, Dugan and Fabbre traveled throughout the United States seeking subjects whose experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class and geographic location. They traveled from coast to coast, to big cities and small towns, documenting the life stories of this important but largely underrepresented group of older adults. The featured individuals have a wide variety of life narratives spanning the last 90 years, offering an important historical record of transgender experience and activism in the United States. The exhibition will include 22 photographs, each paired with texts illuminating the life narratives of those photographed.

Marian Goodman Gallery New York is very pleased to announce an exhibition by Giuseppe Penone opening on Tuesday 9 March through Saturday 17 April 2021.The exhibition will feature a series of canvas works titled Leaves of Grass(2013) which are being shown for the first time, alongside individual sculptures made concurrently (2014-2015), and a series of drawings (2014). The canvas works in the North Gallery take as a point of departure Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass(1855), currently on loan from The Morgan Library.Penone's Leaves of Grassis comprised of twelve canvases in total which correspond to the twelve original poems of Whitman's first edition. Six of the works are presented here and a selection will be included in a forthcoming exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Paris in the Fall of 2021. Initially inspired by images from the natural world, Penone found himself drawn to the verdant cover of Whitman's first edition, which was printed, bound and set in type by the young poet in 1855 and has been in contact with Whitman's hands. Penone finds meaning in the correlation of a leaf to a fingerprint; a fingerprint to the surface of a book; and the hue of the book to nature, perceiving green as an equilibrium between light and shadow. Scaling each canvas to a ratioechoing the first edition, he enlarges the work seven times in relation to its original object. Whitman's verses, analogous to a single breath or gesture, create a natural correspondence for Penone: "Words that are breaths, breaths that evoke thoughts, thoughts that are impressed on the mind like the marks left by hand on the surface of things, infinite traces bearing witness to our identity." Each of the canvases in Leaves of Grassis initiated by touch, the principle of cognition and creation, which the artist conceives as a 'sign, order, thaumaturgic gesture, or projection of a thought.'Beginning with an imprint of the finger, he adds another, with every ensuing impression becoming a unique and distinctive mark unlike the previous, akin to Whitman's blade of grass as a uniform hieroglyphic. Multiplying into an infinitude of 70,000 accumulated imprints, the canvas' active surfaces metamorphose into vast landscapes resembling the foliage of trees. Punctuating each vista is a small terracotta sculpture formed from the gesture of clasping a handful of earth, from clay sourced from lands across the United States. Drawingnot only on Whitman's 'hopeful green stuff woven'but earth itself as memory, these fired clay elements reinforce the Penone's sculptural intent and his principle that one needs to touch the earth to activate it. In the North Gallery Viewing Room, Leaves of Grass in the Hands, a 2014 drawing made from graphite rubbing on paper mounted on silk and made from a first edition of Whitman's book, returns Penone to frottage, a process utilized in early and recent canvas works with vegetal pigments. A series of drawings titled Foglie (Leaves)from 2014 reiterate the notion of landscape as an expanse of imprints. Each work on paper traces indexical gestures, imprints in ink and pigment which carry the memory of an action, in dialogue with collaged leaves and vegetal forms. To Penone, the Foglie drawings depict "a drapery of the forest's leaves, each unique, absolute, unrepeatable, which redress the forest's body like skin." In the South Gallery, the 2015 bronze sculpture Artemide (Artemis)bears a twofold identity, being the cast of a real tree and evoking at the same time the female body as the title suggests,implying nature and fertility, interior and exterior, positive and negative forms.Nearby are the Indistinti Confini -Contatto (Indistinct Boundaries -Contact) works from 2015:trees of carved marble which 'hide' a bronze core, theyexplore boundaries between positive and negative as well as the sculptural process itself, the bronze invoking the memory of a wax mold

Beyond Measure features works produced by Fieldworks project collaborators Todd Stewart and Robert Bailey. Professors Stewart and Bailey initiated this program at the University of Oklahoma in 2015. The interdisciplinary residency invites artists, scholars and students to artistically respond to the presence of humans in the American Southwest. Each summer, they visit sites where people have left traces on the land. Participants study each place as deposits of knowledge and creativity. Beyond Measure presents a selection from the Fieldworks project's diverse archive of objects, photographs, texts, videos and more. Clusters of photographs by Stewart immerse the viewer within the landscapes they depict. Text by Bailey excavates layers of meaning throughout the display, suggesting more complex relationships between artworks. Together, they deepen our understanding on the various ways people locate themselves within their environments. Themes explored include the human role in ecology, the origins of different measurement/recording practices and the limits of movement across the land. The mixed-scale objects and texts invite each visitor to construct their own experience and make their own unique set of connections between the works presented. Beyond Measure's visual array of artefacts and art showcases how people relate to the expanse between Oklahoma City and Los Angeles. Coinciding with Ed Ruscha: OKLA in the main gallery, Beyond Measure encourages audiences to consider ways that overlooked surroundings can be reframed through the lens of contemporary art practice.

The Print Center announces a full spring season - and offers this preview of our upcoming exhibitions and public programs. With our galleries closed since March 2020, programming has been moved online and into our street-facing window. After successful presentation of our first virtual exhibition, (Un)Making Monuments in fall 2020, we are pleased to offer three online solo exhibitions awarded from the 95th ANNUAL International Competition - Kevin Claiborne: Before I Died I Was Invisible, Dawn Kim: Half Rest and David Rothenberg: Landing Lights Park beginning February 1, 2021. Following these shows, we will present Fit to Print, a thematic group exhibition exploring the use of newsprint in contemporary art, opening online May 1, 2021. Kevin Claiborne: Before I Died I Was Invisible Dawn Kim: Half Rest David Rothenberg: Landing Lights Park

Chemistry and Light brings together the work of Chuck Kelton and Joseph Minek-two artists who practice versions of camera-free photography. They each elect instead to work directly with the raw materials of darkroom practice-paper, chemicals, lightbulbs-generating unique monoprints. Their energetic works carry resonance with abstract painting and natural phenomena. Taken together, each to the other, Kelton and Minek represent in their common philosophies and divergent differences some contours for a genre. In one sense traditionalists-aka being actual darkroom photographers -nevertheless they eschew the fundamental conventions of both camera and film in pursuit of a deconstruction of the medium that is both more pure and more complex. There is a rich legacy in the historical avant-garde, of artists with a soul of scientific inquiry who take this kind of almost anatomical approach to centering the building blocks of their practice. But as each Kelton and Minek take it up, this center vectors off according to the aesthetics and axioms of each one's vision.

Through photographs, the prism of time is illuminated and breaks to clarity. We see the components and how they fit together. They take us on unexpected paths, they bring us to other lives we could know if life were to turn another way; they foster empathy. They allow us to recognize that life is not a story that flows to a neat finale; it warps and branches, spirals and twists, appearing and disappearing from our awareness. This exhibition presents photography attuned to this consciousness, photography from the world, from life as it is-in all its complicated wonder-in the twenty-first-century United States: from Vanessa Winship's peripatetic vision in she dances on Jackson through Curran Hatleberg's gatherings of humankind in Lost Coast; Richard Choi's meditation on the differences between the flow of life and our memory of it in What Remains; RaMell Ross's images of quotidian life from South County; Gregory Halpern's luminous Californian journey in ZZYZX; Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti's Index G work on the delicate balance between economic theory and lived fact; Kristine Potter's re-examination of the Western myth of manifest destiny in Manifest; or Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa's braiding the power of images with the forces of history in All My Gone Life. This photography is postdocumentary. No editorializing or reductive narrative is imposed. That there is no story is the story. For these artists, all is in play and everything matters-here is a freedom, hard won, sometimes confusing, but nonetheless genuine: a consciousness of life and its song. The world's infinite consanguinity lies here: each of us and all of this exist in the fulsome now.

Jason Francisco, Guest Curator A Life with Others is the first comprehensive survey of the work of Laurence Salzmann (American, born 1944), one of Philadelphia's most renowned living photographers. The exhibition explores the major themes of the artist's remarkable and ongoing fifty-year career, the geographic scope of his practice in photography and film, and the intensity of his concerns. Salzmann is a lifelong resident of Philadelphia; he remains today a member of the same synagogue in which he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1957. But his work has taken him to communities in more than a dozen countries around the globe, his subjects ranging from rural Mexico to urban Turkey, the mountains of Transylvania to the highlands of Peru, New York City to Jerusalem, Cairo to Havana. Trained in visual anthropology, Salzmann is distinct in his conception of art as research, and research as a point of artistic departure. His photographs and films push us to measure our ethical consciousness and to meet his subjects on their own terms, with critical awareness and compassion. They push us to defend those who are vulnerable to ignorance and stereotype, and to transcend cultural and psychological barriers in the protection of human dignity. The exhibition will include over seventy-five works of art, including vintage photographs from all eras of Salzmann's career, as well as films and books. Materials will be lent by the artist himself, and by the University of Pennsylvania, which in 2018 acquired Salzmann's vast archive.

Inspired by the last three decades of China's dynamic development, Out of the Shadows: Contemporary Chinese Photography features Chinese artists who question traditional aesthetics, local and global histories, and the photographic medium. Each featured artist has found his/her artistic voice by not only questioning traditional Chinese aesthetics but also challenging conventional expressions of the photographic medium. The show's selected contemporary Chinese artists, many of whom have never been exhibited in an American museum before, all continue to push the boundaries of photographic art with new technologies and innovative perspectives. The exhibition is curated by Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres, an art historian and Asian art specialist previously based in Beijing for nearly a decade, and who has curated over thirty exhibitions around the world. Artists included in the exhibition are Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), Chu Chu, Hong Lei, Ni Youyu, Shao Wenhuan, Shi Guorui, Wang Ningde, Yang Fudong, and Yang Yongliang. A catalog published by the Museum of Photographic Arts will accompany the exhibition.

Did you know that the idea for the camera existed 2,000 years before photography was invented? That the Chinese invented eyeglasses 300 years before they appeared in Europe? Or that photographs of a galloping horse captured the stages of motion for the first time? Illusion: The Magic of Motion explores how photography was not suddenly discovered but came about as a result of several centuries of scientific and artistic explorations into light, optics, and perception. Artworks in the exhibition show the invention of cinema, works created through perspective and anamorphosis, the magic of shadow puppets, and how the human eye perceives motion. Artists in the show include historic photographers Eadweard J. Muybridge, Berenice Abbot, Phillip Leonian, and Harold “Doc” Edgerton, and contemporary photographers Ori Gersht, Eric Dyer, and Luis González Palma.

Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency explores the psychological, physical, and emotional realities people encounter in the years leading up to, during, and after fertility. The exhibition features eight artists who consider a range of topics including birth, miscarriage, pleasure, the lack of access to abortion, trauma, and the loss of fertility. The term 'reproductive' is twofold. It implies the characteristics of a photograph, bringing attention to a notable lack of visual representation of the experiences of the female body. Additionally, the term is a reference to a common patriarchal, capitalist view of women's bodies as vehicles for reproduction. This exhibition aims to add visual presence and a deeper understanding of the precarious nature of female rights and freedoms in a time where the future of these rights is uncertain.

Initially an identity project, Balancing Cultures gives voice to a story suffered in silence by my immigrant grandparents and American-born parents. My mother's passing left my brother and me with boxes of photographs. Among them were photos of family members taken in camp that we had never seen. In my family, when anyone spoke of camp, they weren't referring to a pine-scented summer retreat-they were referring to the WWII American concentration camps sanctioned in 1942 by President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. Piecing together a historical puzzle of photographs, memories, and artifacts, I began an exploration into my family's undisclosed past. For the first time, the hardships my family endured in the camps were illuminated to me. EO 9066 caused 110,000 Japanese Americans economic loss, the pain of prejudice and imprisonment, and the repercussions of re-integration into post-war America. Although racism is deeply woven into our institutional and social fabric, there is no scientific basis for race. Race and racism are social constructs. This project is a testimony to the shame and indignation my family kept hidden due to their cultural stoicism and fear of retribution. Left untold, their experience would remain buried, a casualty of the country they loved and fought for. Balancing Cultures is especially relevant as long as America continues to incarcerate people-not for crimes they've committed, but simply because of whom they are. Bio Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. He studied photography with Don Worth and is the recipient of many honors and awards including: the Imogen Cunningham Award (1982), the Clarence J. Laughlin Award, New Orleans, LA (2017), Photolucida's Critical Mass Top 50 (2017, 2020), CENTER Awards, Curator's Choice First Place, Santa Fe, NM (2018), and the Rhonda Wilson Award, Brooklyn, NY (2020). His work is in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.

The 2020 jurors for the Chervinsky Scholarship awardee have chosen Tavon Taylor to receive the Chervinsky scholarship. The jurors would like to acknowledge their shortlist as well. "We propose the opportunity to have a longer short-list so that we have a larger group of emerging artists who receive the encouragement of being short-listed for the award. As we discovered a larger pool of individuals who deserve to be finalists and have equally impressive work. We thought this would be a wonderful opportunity for more emerging artists to add this accolade to their CV's and receive the acknowledgement that their work deserves." Logan Bellew, Becky Behar, Maria Contreras-Coll, Dylan Everett, Alayna N. Pernell, Kendall Pestana, Daniel Seiffert

Photographs can support the journey through our diverse experiences of processing, loss, and healing; we all react and respond to images differently, based on our own life perspectives. In this exhibition the Center shares a range of photographs to encourage investigation, reflection, and restoration as we explore ideas central to this historical moment. The exhibition (both online and in the Center’s Main and Heritage galleries) will share images within five conceptual pairs that seem particularly resonant at this time: connection/isolation; wellness/illness; solace/discomfort; presence/absence; and communal/domestic. We will create opportunities to share thoughts and responses to the photographs, building a collective and multivocal conversation about how we are experiencing and coping during this time.

In 1840, Jeremiah Gurney abandoned his career as a jeweler to establish one of New York City's first daguerreotype studios. Despite vigorous competition from rivals such as Mathew Brady, Gurney soon developed his reputation as a leading camera artist whose works were "nearer to absolute perfection" than those of other daguerreotypists. Widely admired for the beautiful, hand-tinted images produced in his studio, Gurney continued to make daguerreotypes until the latter half of the 1850s, when he began transitioning to paper print photography. This exhibition will feature a selection of daguerreotype portraits by Gurney from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, alongside works from several private collections. This exhibition is curated by Senior Curator of Photographs Ann Shumard.

The BIG Picture: Giant Photographs and Powerful Portfolios is a two-part exhibition that highlights recent photography acquisitions at the Fitchburg Art Museum. The Giant Photographs section features large-scale prints (some measuring over 6 x 8 feet) by twenty individual artists, while the Powerful Portfolios section features groups of multiple, related photographs by André Kertész, Steve Locke, Kenji Nakahashi, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, and Barbara Norfleet. Giant Photographs examines a tendency among contemporary photographers to exploit new digital technologies to create extremely large, high quality prints. Because of their size, these images engage not just with the history of photography, but also with the history of painting, advertising, and cinema. This exhibition also explores how giant photographs change our physical relationship to images, as they tower over and envelop us, instead of being trapped in our phone screens or flying by on the highway. On the Giant Photographs section of The BIG Picture, Terrana Assistant Curator Marjorie Rawle notes: "It's an immersive experience that centers the viewer as an active participant in the culture of images, making us more aware of their role in our daily lives." The show includes the work of photographers from across the globe: Gil Blank, Angela Strassheim, Laura McPhee, Amie Dicke, Eve Sussman, Miao Xiaochun, Ambra Polidori, James Casebere, Sarah Pickering, Pierre Gonnord, Noriko Furunishi, Karin Bubaš, Greg Girard, Héctor Mediavilla, Matt Siber, Paolo Ventura, Tang Yi, Alejandro Chaskielberg, Brian Ulrich, and Hong Lei. Powerful Portfolios considers the potential of sets of multiple images to create narrative, deliver meaning, and stir emotion. There are haunting and nostalgic black-and-white images by 20th-century giant André Kertész and by photographer, professor, and social scientist Barbara Norfleet, as well as quirky and colorful works by street photographer Ruben Natal-San Miguel and conceptual photographer Kenji Nakahashi. A 2016 series entitled Family Pictures by Steve Locke, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, inserts images of historical trauma and violence against Black bodies into quiet, home interiors in order to "reconcile a violent history with the contemporary spectacle of state violence within a domestic sphere," according to the artist. The BIG Picture offers the opportunity to celebrate the Fitchburg Art Museum's continuously growing collection of photography, which has more than doubled over the last five years. FAM now holds over 2,000 photographs from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. This has been made possible by strategic purchases, and also by gifts to FAM from important collectors of photography, most notably Harley Fastman, Linda Fisher, Martin Goldman and Dorothy Klepper, Arlette and Gus Kayafas, James Pallotta, Richard and Jeanne Press, and Anthony Terrana. Dr. Terrana's ongoing gift of 500+ photographs has not only significantly increased the size of the FAM collection, but also adds recent, color, large-scale digital photography to our art historical holdings.

American photographer Gillian Laub (b. 1975) has spent the last two decades investigating political conflicts, exploring family relationships, and challenging assumptions about cultural identity. Her work frequently addresses the experiences of adolescents and young adults in transition who struggle to understand their present moment and collective past. In 2002, Laub was sent on a magazine assignment to Mount Vernon, Georgia, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. The Montgomery County residents Laub encountered were warm and polite, both proud of their history and protective of their neighbors. To the photographer, Mount Vernon, a town nestled among fields of Vidalia onions, symbolized the archetype of pastoral, small town American life. Yet this idyllic town was also held hostage by a dark past, manifesting in the racial tensions that scar much of American history. Laub learned that the joyful adolescent rites of passage celebrated in this rural countryside-high school homecomings and proms-were still racially segregated. Laub photographed Montgomery County over the following decade, returning even in the face of growing-and eventually violent-resistance on the part of some community members. In 2009, a few months after Barack Obama's first inauguration, Laub's photographs of segregated proms were published in the New York Times Magazine. The story brought national attention to the town and the following year the proms were finally integrated. The power of the photographic image served as the catalyst and, for a moment, progress seemed inevitable. Then, in early 2011, tragedy struck the town. Justin Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old unarmed African American man-whose segregated high school homecoming Laub had photographed-was shot and killed by a sixty-two-year-old white man. At first, the murder seemed to confirm every assumption about the legacy of inequality and prejudice that the community was struggling to shake. But the truth was more nuanced than a quick headline could telegraph. Disturbed by the entrenched racism and discrimination that she encountered, Laub recognized that a larger story needed to be told. Her project, which began as an exploration of segregated high school rituals, evolved into an urgent mandate to confront painful realities. Relying on her incisive and empathic eye as a photographer, she explored the history of Montgomery County and recorded the stories and lives of its youth. What emerged over the next decade-during which the country witnessed the rise of citizen journalism and a conflagration of racially motivated violence, re-elected its first African American president, and experienced the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement-was a complex story about adolescence, race, the legacy of slavery, and the deeply rooted practice of segregation in the American South. In Southern Rites, Laub engages her skills as a photographer, filmmaker, storyteller, and visual activist to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are simultaneously painful and essential to understanding the American consciousness. Through her lens and the voices of her subjects we encounter that which some of us do not want to witness, but what is vital for us to see. Southern Rites is a specific story about young people in the twenty-first century from the American South, but it poses a universal question about human experience: can a new generation liberate itself from a harrowing and traumatic past to create a different future? Southern Rites is organized by the International Center of Photography and ICP curator Maya Benton.

The process of creating photographs is a contemplative one. It is an exploration of my feelings as much as it is an exploration of what I am seeing. The best images always happen when what I am feeling becomes one with what I am seeing. Chip Hooper

The scope of the work reflects the intricate nature of indigenous identity. Ten artists have created images that reveal expressions of pain, resiliency, resistance, healing, tradition, history and celebration. The exhibition includes NatGeo photographer, Kiliii Yuyan's sweeping landscapes, internationally acclaimed artist Meryl McMaster's dream-like self-portraits, Projects 2020 award recipient Donna Garcia's historical recreations, and Sundance Film Festival invitee Shelley Niro's work focused on women and indigenous sovereignty. Canadian documentarian Pat Kane, Fine Art photographer Will Wilson and newcomers, Jeremy Dennis, the collaboration of Kali Spitzer & Bubzee and photojournalist Toni Cervantes round out the show. Spirit: Focus on Indigenous Art, Artists and Issues is an initiative designed to educate the public, through lens-based art, regarding the true history of indigenous people and recruit advocates for indigenous issues everywhere, but with a specific focus on the US and Canada, where native lands and people аre still coming under attack everyday.

An exhibition of works by Bruce Davidson from the permanent collection that explores historic context and viewer response as key factors in the evolution of meaning in photographs. Photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933 Oak Park, Illinois) is known for his intimate and humanist approach to documentary photography. Through remembering the historical context in which he worked and the opposing views his work provoked, this exhibition explores how understanding and "reading" documentary photography has evolved over the past half century. Davidson never claimed to be driven by ideology or agenda; his art was born from his roving curiosity, a deep desire for human connection, and the willingness to be patient. But despite the artist's best intentions to simply immerse and observe, ideologies and agendas can manifest far beyond the frame when it comes to documenting the world, and it is within this resulting conversation that we can find meaning in images. The exhibition features photographs from some of Davidson's best-known projects, including Brooklyn Gang, Time of Change, East 100th Street, and Subway.

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance is presented as part of the inaugural UOVO Prize for an emerging Brooklyn artist. John Edmonds is best known for his use of photography and video to create sensitive portraits and still lifes that center Black queer experiences and reimagine art historical precedents. This is the artist's first solo museum exhibition and features new and recent photographic portraits and still lifes of Central and West African sculptures alongside friends and acquaintances from Edmonds's creative community in New York. These works explore the intersections of representation, modernity, and identity in the African diaspora. For this exhibition, Edmonds was invited to engage directly with our Arts of Africa collection, photographing select objects donated to the Museum in 2015 by the estate of the late African American novelist Ralph Ellison. The presentation of the collection objects, along with Edmonds's excerpts from scholarly texts on Baule art, considers the distinct role that individuals and institutions-from collectors to art historians to art museums-play in the bestowal of meaning, authenticity, and value. While Edmonds's work recognizes the persistence of power imbalances, it offers new aesthetic and conceptual possibilities. John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance draws its title from an essay by scholar Krista Thompson that looks at perspectives on Black diaspora art history, and how they have shifted from examining relationships with Africa to questioning forms of representation in Western cultures. Edmonds is the inaugural recipient of the UOVO Prize for an emerging Brooklyn artist. As the awardee, he receives a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, a commission for a 50x50-foot art installation on the façade of the new UOVO: BROOKLYN art storage and services facility, and a $25,000 unrestricted cash grant. The mural is on view through spring 2021. John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance is curated by Drew Sawyer, Philip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum, and Ashley James, former Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum (currently Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).

Birds will be the first North American exhibition of legendary fashion photographer Paolo Roversi. Presented at Dallas Contemporary, the exhibition will feature over 40 of Roversi's photographic works and will focus on his longstanding collaboration with the fashion brand Comme des Garçons and its founder Rei Kawakubo. Titled Birds to highlight Roversi's use of movement in photography, the exhibition will examine how the Italian photographer has created a unique visual style in which models pose in abstract, mobile ways, often evoking birds landing or taking off. At Dallas Contemporary, visitors will encounter colored walls with groupings of photographs in varying sizes when entering the Museum's galleries and will be able to explore Roversi's work through one unifying theme in the exhibition- mobility- to foster new connections and interpretations around his oeuvre. "My collaboration with Rei Kawakubo goes back a long time and each time working with her is a new inspiring adventure," says Roversi in regard to the upcoming exhibition. "As Dallas Contemporary is bringing all arts- including fashion- closer, it seemed a good opportunity to show my work together with hers." Birds will showcase known photographs by Roversi, as well as works that have never been seen before. On display will be photographs spanning the four-decade creative relationship Roversi and Kawakubo have developed and exploring how these two fashion trailblazers have exchanged ideas and creative philosophies throughout their impressive careers.

In the last five years, the San José Museum of Art has experienced tremendous growth and its permanent collection has evolved into one of increasingly greater inclusivity and relevancy. Propelled by the generosity of artists, gallerists, collectors, Museum patrons, and members of the Museum's Acquisitions Committee and Council of 100, SJMA now boasts many artworks by the most innovative artists working today. As the only collecting art institution and the only museum in the City dedicated exclusively to acquiring the art of our times, its permanent collection of more than 2,600 artworks serve as a valuable resource and public legacy for the community. South East North West celebrates SJMA's 50th anniversary with a dynamic presentation of paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, and new media recently acquired by the Museum. Reflecting the rich cultural diversity and innovative spirit that define San José and Silicon Valley, the exhibition showcases the work of internationally acclaimed artists, including those working in California and the Bay Area, and emerging artists garnering critical recognition. A number of artists in the exhibition-including Diana Al-Hadid, Rina Banerjee, Victor Cartagena, Dinh Q. Lê, Louise Nevelson, and The Propeller Group (Matt Lucero, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Phunam)-will be familiar to SJMA's audiences, as they have recently been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum. Many artists in the exhibition offer provocative and poetic responses to often-polarizing cultural, political, and social issues. Mona Hatoum evokes the agony of exile in her work Drowning Sorrows (2001-02), which is composed of severed clear glass bottles arranged in a circular formation on the floor. Andrea Bowers, Chitra Ganesh, and Lara Schnitger address ongoing struggles for gender equality and women's rights to imagine a more just world. In his painting Trauma Eve with Virus Bombs (2001), David Huffman reimagines African American stereotypes in order to reclaim them from prevailing narratives of the black experience. In our twenty-first century digital age, artists such as Petra Cortright, Hayal Pozanti, and Margo Wolowiec push the boundaries of representation and contemporary image making using new media technologies. In contrast, artists such as Tacita Dean and Tony Feher show us that the simplest elements-whether images of clouds for Dean or blue painter's tape for Feher-can prove to be profoundly pleasurable to the senses. Other artists featured in the exhibition include Firelei Báez, Tony Berlant, Alexander Calder, Tiffany Chung, Russell Crotty, Jay DeFeo, Genevieve Gaignard, Kojo Griffin, Robert Hudson, Yojiro Imasaka, Jitish Kallat, Hung Liu, Frank Lobdell, Vanessa Marsh, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, Robert Minervini, Richard Misrach, Ruben Ochoa, Nathan Oliveira, Josephine Taylor, William T. Wiley, and Imin Yeh. Adopting the title of a monumental, two-panel mixed-media work by Diana Al-Hadid to symbolize the breadth and depth of the collection, South East North West testifies to SJMA's adventurousness and ambition of becoming a borderless museum for the future.

En Foco's fellowship recipients continue the work of the twelve Puerto Rican photographers of the 1973 Dos Mundos exhibition by offering fresh visions of existing discriminatory mainstream cultural perspectives and policies. Evolving to contemporary circumstances and inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, they maintain their commitments to their communities and individual photographic processes. Many of them are also leaders, nurturing other artists of color across the diaspora, in the South, the Bronx, classrooms, and beyond. Dos Mundos: (Re)Constructing Narratives features artists that center stories at the fringe of public attention: hidden sanctuaries, subcultures, painful identities, far-away homes, spirituality, transcendence, broken promises, and all too easily ignored social ecologies.Cinthya Santos Briones, Danny Peralta, Damarys Alvarez, Aaron Turner, Antonio Pulgarin, Tau Battice, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Erika Morillo, Daesha Harris, Roger Richardson, Yu-Chen Chiu, Anthony Hamboussi

The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Featuring more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the work of the diverse "new" women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and artistic expression from the 1920s through the 1950s. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera, and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era. The exhibition is the first to take an international approach to the subject, highlighting female photographers' innovative work in studio portraiture, fashion and advertising, artistic experimentation, street photography, ethnography, and photojournalism. Among the photographers featured are Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Florestine Perrault Collins, Imogen Cunningham, Madame d'Ora, Florence Henri, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Consuelo Kanaga, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla. Inspired by the global phenomenon of the New Woman, the exhibition seeks to reevaluate the history of photography and advance new and more inclusive conversations on the contributions of female photographers.

This retrospective exhibition will survey the career of Marion Palfi (1907-1978), who produced an important visual document of 20th-century American injustice. Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi's America, 1940-1978 features more than 100 photographic prints and numerous archival materials, including photobooks, magazine spreads, research journals, and grant applications, drawn exclusively from the Center for Creative Photography's vast Marion Palfi Archive. Many of these prints and materials have never before been exhibited or published and will offer an unprecedented opportunity to draw new insights into the work. Palfi's philosophy of using photography to influence social change shaped her vision and distinguished her career. A German immigrant to the United States during World War II, Palfi arrived in Los Angeles to find a reality far from the myth of the American Dream. Outraged at the economic, racial, and social inequalities she encountered, she spent more than three decades traveling throughout the United States documenting various communities to expose the links between racism and poverty. As a self-described "social research photographer," Palfi aspired for her photographs to live in the world and effect social change. Her work was featured in numerous American periodicals, including Ebony and The New York Times. Sponsors for her work included the Council Against Intolerance in America, the NAACP, and the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing.

During the Civil War era, numerous women rose to national prominence - from First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln to the actress and Union spy Pauline Cushman. This intimate exhibition includes portraits of these and other intriguing women who captivated the public while becoming sought-after subjects for Mathew Brady's camera. Ann Shumard, the National Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of photographs, is the curator of this exhibition.