Jeffrey Rothstein: Both Directions at Once

“For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia,” says artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Born in 1982 in the steel manufacturing town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity surveys the full range of the artist’s practice, highlighting her role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the 21st century. For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of fundamental labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments'' demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play in histories of labor and the working class. Image: LaToya Ruby Frazier. Women of Steel from On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford. 2017. © 2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present Face the Music: The Legacy of Music Photography. The exhibition celebrates the enduring legacy of music legends who transcended the boundaries of entertainment to become cultural icons. The curation brings together iconic photographers and musicians, from the forties to today, showcasing how their collaborative artistry captured and shaped the cultural zeitgeist of their respective eras. These artists not only created memorable music but also challenged societal norms, sparked significant movements, and mirrored the changes within society visible in the emblematic photographs on display. Visitors will journey through different eras each marked by the distinctive contributions of music legends including The Beatles, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Dizzy Gillespie, Diana Ross, Tupac Shakur, Elton John, Nirvana, Gloria Estefan, Harry Styles, and Cher among many more. Jim Marshall’s famous photo of Johnny Cash flipping the bird at Folsom Prison captures the rebellious spirit and raw authenticity of Cash’s persona, solidifying its place as an iconic image in music history. Randee St. Nicholas and Frank Ockenfels 3 were long time artistic collaborators and friends with Prince and David Bowie respectively, creating the unique opportunity for genuine representation of the musician rather than photographic interpretation. Ray Charles’ larger-than-life energy is palpable in Steve Schapiro’s portrait of Charles laughing in a board room filled with dour businessmen. Janette Beckman’s portrait of Run DMC in Queens represents a shift in hip-hop, where a group could come from a working-class neighborhood and rap about their lives, offering different stories from the groups coming out of the Bronx. Mark Seliger’s legacy of music photography continues with his portrait of Jon Batiste, a trailblazer in contemporary American music who continually pushes the boundaries of the medium. Face the Music is more than a celebration of musical talent; it is a tribute to the power of music to connect people across generations through the shared viewing of iconic photographs. The exhibition features work by David Bailey, Janette Beckman, Harry Benson, Brad Branson, William Claxton, Patrick Demarchelier, Timothy Duffy, Greg Gorman, Nadav Kander, Daniel Kramer, Herman Leonard, Christopher Makos, Jim Marshall, Fred W. McDarrah, Alasdair McLellan, Frank Ockenfels 3, Estevan Oriol, Lyle Owerko, Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, Steve Schapiro, Norman Seeff, Mark Seliger, Randee St. Nicholas, Phil Stern, Alex Stoddard, Art Streiber, Bruce Talamon, Albert Watson, Bruce Weber, Alfred Wertheimer, Dan Winters, Ernest C. Withers, and Magdalena Wosinska. Image: Amy Winehouse, Miami, Florida, 2007 © Bruce Weber

In his ongoing series Abstract, Kim Keever photographs dispersed paint seeping and emulsifying in large tanks of water. Bright, swirling pigments radiate with the effortless movement of a curtain in the wind, conveying abstract gestures that oftentimes conjure cloudscapes and mysterious flora in the same formation. In a new addition to the series, Keever experiments with lighting to incorporate darker backgrounds that more vividly highlight the central dance of fluid movement. The expressive contrast enriches these snapshots of constantly flowing motion, magnifying the sculptural depth of amorphous paint suspended around stark nothingness. Kim Keever's work is included in numerous collections, including the Louvre Museum, Paris, France; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, KS. His work has been featured in many publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine.

This exhibition examines the ways in which photography has been read, used, and manipulated as data through objects from the Loeb’s permanent collection. How do these photographs, most of which predate digital technology by decades, relate to data? How are they read as data? How do they reflect upon practices of collecting data? And what do they tell us about how we are captured in and as data? While today we typically associate the relationship between photography and data with servers, digital pixels, and online data mining, this history stretches back to photography’s earliest inventions. We argue that photography has always served as a technology for the augmentation of reality, allowing the human eye to overcome the limitations of vision, and for the extraction of information about people, places, and cultures that are rendered objects of study and consumption. This project is co-organized by Jessica D. Brier, curator of photography, and Anna Mayer, visiting assistant professor of German Studies. It was developed with students enrolled in the fall of 2023 Vassar course “Of States and Their Terrorists,” offered by Professor Mayer and cross-listed in the departments of German Studies and Media Studies. Through close looking and object-based research, the students contributed ideas, text, and questions. The exhibition is presented in two complementary parts: Part 1 opens on April 9, 2024 in the Hoene Hoy Photography Gallery, a space dedicated to exhibiting photography from the Loeb’s permanent collection, ensuring that photographs are always on view. Part 2 opens on April 25, 2024 in the downstairs galleries. Both remain on view until September 15, 2024. This exhibition is generously supported by the Hoene Hoy Photography Fund.

Bruce Gilden: Why These? surveys Gilden’s oeuvre of gritty, true-to-life street photography through choice works hand-selected by the artist himself. A combination of large-scale color portraits as well as black-and-white photos taken all over the globe will give viewers an intimate glimpse into the unvarnished worlds of street life that Gilden has been documenting for decades. "Bruce Gilden’s often-disquieting photos dig deep into the psyches of everyday people. By revealing what’s just beneath the surface, he captures the fear that underlies so many of our thoughts about ourselves and those around us." – Jessica Jarl, Global Director of Exhibitions at Fotografiska Bruce Gilden is a self taught photographer, born in Brooklyn, NY in 1946. His photographic style is defined by the dynamic accent of his pictures, his special graphic qualities, and his original and direct manner of shooting the faces of passers-by with a flash. Gilden joined Magnum Photos in 1998, and has received a multitude of awards for his work, including the European Publishers Award for Photography, a Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship, a Villa Medicis Hors les Murs Artist’s Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Image: Coney Island, New York City, USA. 1982 © Bruce Gilden / Magnum Photos

Etherton Gallery’s new exhibition, Redux: Selections from The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, highlights examples of rare, vintage, and iconic photography from the 20th and 21st century that Etherton Gallery exhibited at The AIPAD Photography Show in New York this past spring. AIPAD is the largest art fair in the United States dedicated to fine art photography, and it brings together everyone in the photography community once a year. The best galleries in the world apply to participate in the fair, and the process is highly selective. Exhibiting at AIPAD places a gallery from Tucson on the same footing as a gallery from New York, London or Paris. Participating in AIPAD since 1985, Etherton Gallery has earned its reputation as one of the best galleries in the United States. For the 2024 edition of AIPAD, Terry Etherton, Gallery Director and owner of Etherton Gallery, selected a unique combination of photographs and photographic objects, which we are excited to share with the Tucson community. Image: Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1980 © Emmet Gowin

This exhibition is a dynamic retrospective of Frank Stewart’s photography that centers on his sensitive and spontaneous approach to portraying world cultures and Black life in many forms—including music, art, travel, food, and dance. His work over the years captured intimate and empathetic images of lives experienced and observed across subjects, cities, and countries. Tracing both Stewart’s explorations of life on the road and the trajectory of his stylistic journey, the exhibition brings together a comprehensive visual autobiography through over 100 black-and-white and color photographs as well as a selection of cameras from Stewart’s personal archives. Frank Stewart’s Nexus explores Stewart’s avid experimentation and numerous subjects over the course of half a century, including aspects and rituals of Black culture, trips to Africa and Cuba, and music. As the senior staff photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for 30 years, Stewart captured both public performances and candid, personal moments, including well-known photographs of jazz legends Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, and Wynton Marsalis. Frank Stewart’s Nexus also provides a window into less-explored aspects of Stewart’s practice, including his more abstract and painterly Drawings series, inspired by his travels. Color has dominated Stewart’s photography for the past two decades, and he has also increased the sizes for many images. In more recent images, he captures the ever-changing landscape and environmental catastrophes. At the center of his varied practice is a familiarity Stewart creates with the people and places that inhabit his works. Image: Frank Stewart, Stomping the Blues, 1997, gelatin silver print, 16 x 20 in. Collection of Rob Gibson, Savannah © Frank Stewart

Drawing together photographs and installations from both his celebrated and lesser-known series, Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love charts new connections across the artistic practice of Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965, Bronx, NY). The exhibition explores Harris’s critical examination of identity and self-portraiture while tracing central themes and formal approaches in his work of the last 35 years. The artist’s recently-completed Shadow Works anchor the exhibition. In these meticulous constructions, photographic prints are set within geometric frames of stretched Ghanaian funerary textiles, along with shells, shards of pottery, and cuttings of the artist’s own hair. Our first and last love follows the cues of the Shadow Works’ collaged and pictured elements—which include earlier artworks and reference materials, personal snapshots, and handwritten notes—to shed light on Harris’s layered approach to his practice. Harris’s work engages with broad social and political dialogues while also speaking with revelatory tenderness to his own communities, and to personal struggles, sorrows, and self-illuminations. Groupings centered around singular Shadow Works will expand upon these multiple throughlines, including Harris’s continued examination of otherness and belonging; the framing and self-presentation of Black and queer individuals; violence as a dark undercurrent of intimacy and desire; tenderness and vulnerability; and notions of legacy—both inherited and self-defined. Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love is co-organized by the Queens Museum and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, and is co-curated by Lauren Haynes, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs, Queens Museum and Caitlin Julia Rubin, Associate Curator, Rose Art Museum. Image: Lyle Ashton Harris, "Succession", 2020. Ghanaian cloth, dye sublimation prints, and artist’s ephemera. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Mortimer and Sara Hays Acquisition Fund, 2023.4. Courtesy the artist. © Lyle Ashton Harris

This landmark exhibition presents the work of Christina Fernandez, whose photographs and installations explore migration, labor, gender, and her Mexican American identity. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures surveys over three decades of Fernadez’s most important photographic series and installations. Informed by her family’s involvement in the Chicano movement, Fernandez’s conceptual practice has paired aesthetic inquiry with political commitment since the 1990s. Working between portraiture and landscape photography, Fernandez addresses the intersections between the personal and the political as grounded in her immediate community in East Los Angeles and her family’s history of migration. Fernandez’s first monographic museum exhibition invites us to reconsider history, borders, and the lives that cross and inhabit both. Image: Christina Fernandez, Untitled Multiple Exposure #4 (Bravo), 1999 © Christina Fernandez

Almost from the moment that photography was invented—an artistic medium that recorded the physical world in extraordinary, mirror-accurate detail—artists wanted to find a way to capture color in those images. This exhibition explores the history of how artists added life-like tints to the silvery or sooty tones of black and white photographs, eventually leading to the development of color photography. Throughout most of the 1800s, color was added through hand-painting directly onto metal plates, such as Daguerreotypes or tintypes, or onto paper images, such as salt or albumen prints. However, photographers also developed revolutionary techniques to produce even richer, more accurate color. Among these were Opalotypes, a photographic technique printed onto milk glass which, when hand-tinted, produced incredibly realistic effects. By 1900, the quest for photography which could accurately capture all the hues of the prism lead to the invention of Autochromes—the first commercially successful photographic color process. Drawn from both private collections and the Museum of Fine Art’s extensive holdings, True to The Tint offers a chance to look at the remarkably innovative and evocative history of early tinted and color photography. This exhibition is curated by Chief Curator Dr. Stanton Thomas and Director of Collections Management Jason Wyatt. The exhibition’s title, True to the Tint, is taken from the 1851 article “Photographing in Natural Colors.” That work is one of hundreds that were published during the 19th century which explored not only the development of new black and white photography techniques, but also chronicled the search for how to capture the world in all its hues. The desire to create color photographs reflects one of the greatest artistic goals of that period: realism. While black and white photography captures the world in all its detail, it sometimes lacks the vitality and sense of vivacity associated with color. Indeed, tinted or color images, because of their heightened realism, often evoke a stronger emotional response. Thus for decades photographers sought a way to produce works in color—thus enhancing the evocative, personal, emotive aspects of their works, whether portraits, landscapes, or still lifes.

The Asheville Art Museum proudly presents Shifting Perceptions: Photographs from the Collection, an exhibition on view from May 17 to September 23, 2024. Shifting Perceptions continues the Museum's 75th-anniversary celebration and magnifies its expanding Collection of photographs. This exhibition is guest-curated by Katherine Ware, curator of photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art, and features over 125 artworks organized into three sections: Inside/Out, Together/Apart, and Natural/Unnatural. Each section explores seemingly opposing forces, prompting viewers to reconsider the nuances and complexities of life. "Our brains gravitate toward hard distinctions, but life is filled with gradations, complexities, and ambiguities. The categories offer a context for considering the pictures," said Ware. "They sound like opposites, but it is up to visitors to decide if these dualities are different or part of a continuum." Shifting Perceptions showcases photographs by 20th-century masters such as Ruth Bernhard, Bruce Davidson, Donna Ferrato, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jerry Uelsmann, alongside contemporary images by Jess T. Dugan, Matthew Pillsbury, and Cara Romero, among others. While some photographs offer a distinct point of view, many invite contemplation of the intersections and contradictions within each category. Recent acquisitions and longtime favorites are presented in new juxtapositions, providing fresh insights into the evolving landscape of photography. The exhibition includes prints from the 19th century but predominantly represents developments in the field in the 20th and 21st centuries. It emphasizes images made by regional artists and those exploring varied aspects of the Southern experience. In-depth holdings include suites of images by Shelby Lee Adams, Rob Amberg, photojournalists for the Asheville Citizen-Times, Bruce Davidson, Sally Gall, Walter Iooss Jr., Robert Glenn Ketchum, Joel Meyerowitz, Bea Nettles, Jo Sandman, Joyce Tenneson, Kent Washburn, and Jonathan Williams. Pamela L. Myers, Executive Director of the Asheville Art Museum, shares, "Our photographic holdings are extraordinary, and Katherine has taken a new look at the national and regional dialogues reflected in the Collection. Shifting Perceptions: Photographs from the Collection is a captivating exploration of photography's multifaceted nature. It invites viewers to challenge their preconceptions and embrace the rich tapestry of visual storytelling. Image: Cara Romero, T.V. Indians, 2017 (printed 2023), archival pigment print on Epson Legacy Platine paper, 38 ⅞ × 59 ⅝ inches, edition 1/3. Museum purchase with funds provided by 2023 Collectors’ Circle members Butch & Kathy Patrick, 2023.47.01. © Cara Romero

Vision(ary) is the Griffin Museum of Photography’s 5th Annual summer public art exhibition dedicated to the art of visual storytelling. Presented as a part of Winchester Waterfield Summer Arts Festival, the instillation will feature 18 individual installations with distinct photographic styles. The Town of Winchester plays host to this summer exhibition, with installations throughout Winchester Town Center. Photographers from around New England and across the country are highlighted in a unique format. The exhibition concept and Photo Cube structures are designed by our long time partner, Photoville. Creating a photographic walking trail around the town of Winchester, where the Griffin Museum is located, Vision(ary) is a public art installation showcasing national, international and New England photo based artists. Downtown Winchester is filled with sidewalk art, featuring the students of local Winchester schools and local Winchester based photographic artists. The Griffin Museum is happy to partner with Photoville and the Winchester Cultural District again this year to bring this installation to life. It is also a pleasure to collaborate with the students of Network for Social Justice and MassArt. Photosynthesis, our student portfolio development program, now in its 20th year, hangs on a banner in the Town Common. The students of Winchester and Burlington High Schools have worked this spring to develop visually engaging personal portfolios about their family, community and world around them. This program is sponsored by the John & Mary Murphy Foundation. We are grateful for their support of this project each year. In a community initiative, Our Town is also featured on the wall at the Town Common, and on the walls of the Griffin Museum. We asked the local community for a vision of their family and community, and we recieved many images highlighting what we love about our surroundings, including the people and place of Winchester. We want to thank the Winchester Cultural Council and En Ka Society for their generous support in producing this exhibition. Additional banners hung on light standards and sidewalk art installations can be found throughout Winchester’s downtown.. Image: © Natalya Getman, Sisters