Nona Faustine: White Shoes

In his debut solo museum exhibition, Awol Erizku focuses on pioneering American Muslim human rights activist El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) as a subject of personal inspiration and complex cultural significance. Erizku views the historic figure as a metaphorical prism of faith, masculinity, transformation, and a vessel for truth. This ambitious exhibition is composed of new and recent works by Erizku, including iconic photographs, sculptures, works on paper, a powerful film, and an installation of a rare historic manuscript. Together, they collectively convey the artist’s multidisciplinary practice and dynamic approach to a diverse range of media. Presented in the SCAD Museum of Art’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies, the exhibition critiques the Eurocentric canon of art and history, with Malcolm X serving as a key figure connecting the U.S. and Africa. Erizku posits his singular aesthetic as a means to link ancient mythology, diasporic tradition, and contemporary culture as an antidote to closed-mindedness — striving toward Malcolm X’s late-life universalism and dedication to the “overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood.” Conceptual artist Awol Erizku (b. 1988, Ethiopia; lives and works in Los Angeles) attended New York City’s Cooper Union before receiving his M.F.A. from Yale University. He has presented solo exhibitions with the Public Art Fund, New York, and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York. His work has been exhibited at prominent venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark.; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, among others. His work is held in the permanent collection of many institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Fla.; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Calif.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He recently published Awol Erizku: Mystic Parallax, the first comprehensive monograph of his career to date. Image: Brick by Brick (Detroit Red), 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery. © Awol Erizku

Gagosian is pleased to announce Punctum, the first exhibition in the United States to center exclusively on Anselm Kiefer’s photography. Punctum will be on view at 976 Madison Avenue from April 25 through July 3, 2024. Photography has been an important but under-recognized aspect of Kiefer’s practice since 1968, when he began using his father’s 35mm camera. The medium underpins the evolution of the artist’s paintings and is a key component of his books. Punctum offers new perspectives on his exploration of materials and processes, and on the symbolic and expressive potentials of photography. The exhibition’s title refers to a concept formulated by Roland Barthes in his critical text Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). Punctum (Latin for “puncture” or “wound”) connotes a detail of a photograph that elicits a feeling or personal impact outside those formed principally by its culturally coded subjects. As if picturing a memory of something that never happened, Kiefer’s photographs convey a comprehensive, evocative, even melancholic aura beyond conventional representations of time and place. Returning to perennial motifs and images, the photographs reinforce the continuity of themes such as ruin and destruction, and growth and renewal, across Kiefer’s oeuvre, with subjects ranging from sunflowers and snow-covered fields to dense cityscapes. Works titled Merkaba (2010–13 and 2010–15) and Jericho (2010–15) picture the tower sculptures at La Ribaute, his former studio complex in Barjac, France—now part of his foundation, Eschaton. Kiefer often manipulates his photographs through techniques such as solarization and the application of metals and other materials that transform them physically and metaphorically. In Osiris (1985–91), the addition of heavy, opaque lead to the photograph’s top half creates a juxtaposition between its material properties and its ethereal image, functioning as an effective metaphor for alchemy. Likewise, by applying silver toner to the printed surfaces of works such as Feldblumen (Wildflowers) and Ukraine (both 1994–2012), he blurs distinctions between the photographic and painted image. Titled with a quotation from Immanuel Kant, Der gestirnte Himmel über uns und das moralische Gesetz in uns (The moral law within us, the starry heavens above us) (1969–2009) revisits an image from Kiefer’s Besetzungen (Occupations) series, a parodic travelogue in which the artist poses with a sieg heil salute at culturally charged European locations, appropriating and recontextualizing the taboo gesture to confront the historical weight of the Second World War. In the newer work, Kiefer overpaints the photograph’s top half in gouache, adding a star-filled sky that resonates with Kant’s line. Hero und Leander (2012) is a vitrine sculpture that expresses Kiefer’s relationship with photography. It incorporates a metal bathtub of the sort he used to develop his first photographs and included in early performances, with coiled strips of photographic prints mounted on lead that unfurl from within the vessel. Its title alludes to the Greek legend of Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite who tends a lighthouse on one side of the Hellespont between Europe and Asia, and her lover, Leander, who drowns while swimming across the strait when the guiding light of Hero’s flame is extinguished. Punctum follows La photographie au commencement (Photography at the Beginning), the first retrospective to focus on Kiefer’s relationship with photography, which was organized by the Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut (LaM) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France (2023–24). Angeli caduti (Fallen Angels) is on view at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy, through July 21, 2024. Image: nselm Kiefer, Jericho, 2010–15 © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Charles Duprat

Parisian bureaucrat by day and tireless inventor after hours, Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) was one of the most important, if now lesser-known, pioneers of photography. During his thirty-year career, he invented the direct positive process and several other photographic techniques on paper. Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer, on view April 9 –July 7, 2024, at the Getty Center, presents a rare chance to view examples of Bayard’s pioneering work, all made between the 1830s and 1860s. Most of these photographs come from the Getty Museum’s Bayard album, one of the first photographic albums ever created. This exhibition will be the first to highlight one of the Getty Museum’s rarest and most treasured photographic holdings: a collection of prints by Hippolyte Bayard, and to explore his early processes, subjects, and strategies to achieve recognition. “This exhibition provides a new understanding of this pioneering artist and his very significant contribution to the early development of the photographic medium,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the Getty Museum. “The Getty Museum’s collection of over 200 prints is the second largest holding of Bayard’s work in the world, a highlight of which is our treasured Bayard album.” Bayard began experimenting in January 1839, the same month in which Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s daguerreotype was introduced in Paris and William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing was presented in London. Though Bayard developed an innovative direct-positive photographic process on paper, his work was overshadowed by the inventions of Daguerre and Talbot, two more prominent figures who had the benefit of more established connections. Because Bayard’s photographs are extremely light sensitive, they have been protected in storage since they came into Getty’s collection in 1984. Conservators conducted microfade tests on a selection to determine which works were stable enough to be put on view for this three-month exhibition period, making this a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Museum visitors. The exhibition also includes a digital reproduction of the Bayard album so that visitors can experience it in its entirety. Bayard’s self-portrait at his garden gate introduces the content of the album, which contains works from 1839 to the late 1840s, 145 of Bayard’s experiments with different processes on paper, primarily salted paper prints from paper negatives, and 23 works by his British photographic peers. This album offers insights into Bayard’s practice, aesthetic choices, and strategies for presenting himself through the order and arrangement of those photographs. It also offers visual evidence of his exchanges across the English Channel with his fellow British photographers who also promoted paper processes. Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer is co-curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator at the Getty Museum and Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty. A publication, Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography, co-edited by Hellman and Peter accompanies the exhibition. The first book in English devoted to Bayard, it includes over two hundred illustrations of Bayard’s photographs, along with a detailed chronology, four extended essays, twelve shorter examinations of single works by Bayard, and a conversation with contemporary photographer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya to compare his studio practice with Bayard’s. Image: Three Feathers, 1842–43, Hippolyte Bayard. Cyanotype. Getty Museum

This exhibition brings together three photographic series made in the 1970s: Barbara Crane’s People of the North Portal (1970–71), Melissa Shook’s Daily Self Portraits (1972–73), and Carol Taback’s Photo-Booth Strips (1978–80). The three photographers worked in different cities—Crane in Chicago, Shook in New York, and Taback in Philadelphia—and may not have ever crossed paths. They also used different cameras and equipment and made radically different choices about who to photograph. Nevertheless, there is a surprising alignment in their approaches to their work. Each photographer elected to operate under similar self-imposed constraints, creating strict guidelines that dictated where they would photograph. Crane confined her working environment to a single doorway, Shook to her small New York tenement apartment, and Taback to a cramped photo booth. Despite, or perhaps because of, these rigid parameters, each photographer was able to forge an innovative approach to portrait-making, producing pictures that deftly call attention to the complexity of lived experience. Image: George, 1979-1980, © Carol Taback

The 1970s witnessed an unprecedented explosion of interest and activity around photography, and was a hub for wildly varying conceptions of what photography could look like, how it could be used, and what it could stand for. On one hand, the 1970s were an apex of traditional black and white darkroom photography, as artists who had worked in relative obscurity were suddenly thrust into the spotlight. But it was also the end of an era, as younger photographers began experimenting with mediums, formats, and conceptual approaches that defied established modes of photographic art. Some artists made deeply personal works that included crafts like embroidery and collage, historical processes like cyanotype, or new technologies such as the Teleprinter, an early version of the fax machine. Other photographers, including William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, created images that recalled the spontaneity, humor, and saturated color of vernacular snapshots. Mikki Ferrill and Susan Meiselas spent years producing series of intimate portraits that forged connections between photography and the growing Black Arts and Feminist movements. And conceptual artists such as Martha Rosler interrogated photography’s association with advertising and systems of visual representation, even branching out to explore the new medium of video. This exhibition offers an exciting overview of this diverse and energetic era. Image: New York City, 1974, © Joel Meyerowitz

When we have our picture taken, we often try to present our best selves. Even during difficult moments, we might force a smile, sit straighter, move closer together, cover the stain on our shirt. We might take pictures of things as we would like to remember them, present ourselves as we would like to be seen, even if—and especially when—there is significantly more to the story. Drawing from The Block’s collection, this intimate exhibition weaves together personal snapshots and work by artists who have integrated family photography into their visual language. By incorporating family photographs into their artwork in various ways, these artists make visible some of the memories, realities, and complexities that might lie beneath the facades of family photography. This exhibition asks us to deepen our own looking practices to better understand the role of photographs in familial memory: What is the relationship between what we see in a photograph and what we know or don’t know? How are memories shaped by what cannot be represented visually? And what is the relationship between private family photographs and broader cultural histories? In our digital age, where photo filters and editing are so prevalent, this exhibition provides a space to reflect on the power of what we cannot, and in some cases, do not want to see.

For over five decades Sidney B. Felsen (b. 1924) has chronicled the life of the Gemini workshop, conveying with great empathy the joy and demands of the creative process. He has documented the expertise, labor, materials, time, and care that sustain every project, capturing how Gemini’s modes of making transform with each artist. First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L., on view February 20 –July 7, 2024, shares the remarkable history of Gemini G.E.L (Graphic Editions Limited), the Los Angeles artist’s workshop and publisher of limited-edition prints and sculpture eloquently. The photographs record the many close friendships fostered with artists who collaborated at Gemini, and bear witness to the evolving Los Angeles art scene. In 1966, Felsen co-founded Gemini G.E.L., the Los Angeles publisher of limited-edition prints and sculpture, with Stanley Grinstein and master printer Kenneth Tyler, together with Rosamund Felsen and Elyse Grinstein. An accountant by profession, Felsen had been studying drawing, painting, and ceramics at local schools since the 1950s. His creative practice came into focus when he started photographing artists at Gemini. “What is so stunning about Sidney Felsen’s work is how he uses both the understanding of artist practice and his patience behind the lens to yield photographs of such great insight,” says Mary Miller, director of the Getty Research Institute. “His eye opens fresh vistas on 50 years of art-making in Los Angeles.” Gemini has championed a boundless sense of possibility, encouraging artists to expand their creative reach and push the limits of printmaking. Within its first five years, Gemini produced groundbreaking editions by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, becoming a major force in the post-war American printmaking revival and earning a reputation for dynamic, generative collaboration. Today, this spirit of innovation endures. Gemini continues to collaborate with world-renowned artists who embrace broad-ranging visual languages and technical approaches. Recent artists include Julie Mehretu, Analia Saban, and Tacita Dean. At the heart of this exhibition is the Felsen archive of photographs, which was donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear. The exhibition also features Gemini prints and editioned sculpture as well as related drawings from the GRI’s special collections with loans from LACMA, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Gemini G.E.L., Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and three private collections. This exhibition will illustrate the rich ties between Gemini and the GRI’s collection and highlight the far-reaching research potential of the Felsen archive of photography. “Felsen’s photographs are born of an intimacy with his subjects,” says Naoko Takahatake, curator of the exhibition. “They offer rare insights into five decades of collaborations between artists, printers, and fabricators. They also celebrate the bonds of friendship that shaped Gemini to become more than a workshop and publisher, but a creative community where art is embraced as a way of life. Image: Self-portrait with two Ellsworth Kellys, 1984. Sidney B. Belsen (American, b.1924). Getty Research Institute, 2019.R.41. Gift of Jack Shear. © J. Paul Getty Trust.

For over six decades, Ellen Graham has photographed actors, musicians, models, athletes, and royals at their most vulnerable: unplanned, unposed, and unscripted. Imbuing a sense of immediacy, showing moments of intimacy and humor, and celebrating her remarkable ability to disarm her subjects, Graham’s photographs provide unique insight into a person’s inner dimensions. This exhibition highlights several of Graham’s gifts to the Norton along with a generous array of special loans — both photographs and photographic ephemera — from the Ellen Graham Archive. Image: Joey Heatherton, Nantucket, MA, 1980 © Ellen Graham

At first glance, photographs made in the nineteenth century may seem like faded relics of an increasingly distant and forgotten age, yet they persist in inspiring, challenging, and resonating with artists today. Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, on view April 9 through July 7, 2024 at the Getty Center, offers new perspectives on early photography by looking through the lens of contemporary artists who respond directly to their historical themes and subject matter. “This exhibition provides an opportunity to connect visitors with some of the earliest photographs in the Museum’s collection, now almost two centuries old, via the responses of contemporary makers,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The revelatory ability of early photography to capture images of the world around us still resonates with practitioners today, and bridges between past and present photography are as active and relevant as they have ever been.” Organized around five themes, dating back to the medium’s beginnings, Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape, and Circulation, this exhibition explores nineteenth century photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth century photography while exploring its complexities. In their work, artists Daido Moriyama, Hanako Murakami, and Carrie Mae Weems look back to the invention of photography to convey a sense of how this revolutionary discovery changed people’s perceptions. As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the nineteenth century were people. In the galleries focused on Identity, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture while Laura Larson, Stephanie Solinas, and Fiona Tan investigate the pseudosciences of the nineteenth century and how they reinforced stereotypes and identification systems that impact us today. Photography and Time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. This section includes work by Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes exploring nineteenth century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time. The genre of Spirit photography emerged from the Victorian obsession with death in Europe and North America. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. In this section, Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen. Nineteenth century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote Landscapes. Government-sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present. By the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of photographs were in Circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. In this section, early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the nineteenth-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories. “Through the works of these visionary contemporary artists, nineteenth-century photography is not faded and dead but very much alive, an active material that enables us to rethink the medium and our relationship to it,” says Karen Hellman, curator of the exhibition. Nineteenth-Century Photography Now is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, served as organizing curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant. Related programming includes Who or What is Missing in Nineteenth-Century Photography?, a discussion featuring artists Laura Larson, Wendy Red Star, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in a conversation about their artistic practices and how they are engaging with, and critiquing photography from the nineteenth century, and Art Break: The Precarious Nature of Photography, Society, and Life, June 6, 12:00pm. Artist Phil Chang talks with curator Carolyn Peter about his series “Unfixed” on view in Nineteenth-Century Photography Now and how an economic crisis and a pandemic inspired him to create photographs that will intentionally fade away to express the fragility of societal systems and life. Image: Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbellifer, probably 1843–46, William Henry Fox Talbot. Photogenic drawing negative. Getty Museum; Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbellifer, circa 1843–1846, 2009, Hiroshi Sugimoto. Gelatin silver print. Getty Museum, Gift of the artist. © Hiroshi Sugimoto

KMR Arts is proud to announce the opening of our exhibit, The Spell of Time, by Andrew Moore. This is Moore’s first exhibit at KMR Arts. Please join us for the opening reception and book signing with the artist, Saturday, June 1, 2024, from 2-5pm. Andrew Moore’s photographs create a narrative of a sense of place and time as it affects the natural landscape. Andrew Moore’s exploration of the Hudson River, Catskill Mountains, and New England’s landscapes has yielded photographs of sublime mystery. These images combine seemingly disparate qualities: beauty and decay, fragility and strength, beginnings and endings. The themes of the Hudson River School painting, discovery, exploration, settlement, are as evident in Moore’s photographs as they are in the paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church. Andrew Moore speaks about this body of work: “Here is a forest wading into a river. Here, a tangle of saplings penning a private script. Here is an artist in the act of making a landscape, a picture that feels familiar--didn't Cole paint that? Didn't Church? --just as the place itself often feels familiar. When the first American painters made pictures of the Hudson River Valley, they saw the landscape as uniquely wild, its mountains, forests and rivers a sublime symbol for the vast wilderness of the so-called New World. But of course, this world was not new, not wild, not, in the end, even that vast. And images of it went from mysterious to familiar with astonishing speed--from painting to lithograph to dinner plate to beaded belt, until the actual landscapes came to feel like folding picture postcards of themselves. And today, any Instagrammer can put herself in the picture. The Hudson River Art Trail offers images at trailheads with the tagline "Step into a landscape painting." Snap, tag, post--I was here--and then we too become one more piece of digitized data, one more ghost in the machine.” "Nature is a haunted house," wrote Emily Dickinson, "but Art -- a house that tries to be haunted." If the photographs have a sense of unease, it's a fruitful unease, a productive haunting. What is this place? The elements themselves shift their shapes. The Hudson River is not really a river but a tidal fjord; the Catskill Mountains are not really mountains but an eroding plateau. The wilderness is not really a wilderness but a factory that fell asleep and woke up twenty years later to find itself crumbling. This place is not really a place but an event, a location unfolding in time, drunk on its own story, as we are always drunk on ours. And like the train speeding ahead in the darkness, the sheep unsure of how to proceed, we are elements in this place's story. We have no idea how it ends.” Moore’s work is represented in numerous public collections in the United States and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., the Israel Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Four monographs of his work have been published: Inside Havana (2002, Chronicle); Russia (2005, Chronicle); Detroit Disassembled (2010, Damiani); and Andrew Moore: Cuba (2012, Damiani). Image: © Andrew Moore

In the Now unites nearly fifty women artists who are resisting traditional ideas of gender and nationality, as well as of photography itself. The first museum survey of photography-based works by women artists born or based in Europe, this exhibition interrogates the continent’s legacies of nationalism and patriarchal power structures—which continue to shape everyday life, particularly for women. In the Now highlights the expansive nature of the Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Photography Collection at the Brooklyn Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Made entirely after 2000, the exhibition’s more than seventy artworks offer a window into the first decades of the twenty-first century. In the section titled “Gender,” photographers such as Bettina von Zwehl and Elina Brotherus contend with (mis)representations of women’s bodies and experiences, bucking against oppressive beauty standards and the male gaze. “Nation” unpacks the promises—and realities—of contemporary Europe and the ongoing fallout of European nationalism and colonialism. The controlled explosion in Sarah Pickering’s Landmine (2005), for example, underscores the relative peace in England as British troops supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And in “Photography,” women artists upend this male-dominated medium with experimental approaches—as in Shirana Shahbazi’s Farsh-13-2006 (2006), a Vermeer-inspired photographic portrait translated onto a carpet hand-knotted in her native Iran. Together the works defy outdated definitions of a woman, an artist, a nation, and a photograph. Image: Le déguisement (the disguise), 2009 © Carolle Benitah

For six decades, János Megyik (Hungarian, born 1938) has been making poetic investigations of fractal geometry and perspectival systems, motivated by questions of point, line, plane, volume, and all that lies between and beyond their innumerable intersections. In 1983, following a decade or so spent building constructions from larch wood, the artist started experimenting with the cameraless technique known as the photogram. To create a photogram, objects are placed directly upon photographic paper that is then exposed to light, darkening the exposed areas and revealing a shadow-like image of the object in white (or, if the object is transparent, shades of gray). Using his Vienna studio as a makeshift darkroom, Megyik spread six-foot-long sections of photosensitized paper directly on the floor and made photograms of his larch wood constructions—essentially creating reversals of his earlier work. Over the next five years Megyik made about 50 of these photograms. Working photographically offered the artist a ready means to give negative and positive space equal weight and to emphasize that “drawing” space always involves an interpretation. For Megyik, however, rigorous spatial analysis goes hand in hand with a sense of wonder at the infinite and absolute. The first US museum exhibition of the artist’s work, János Megyik Photograms includes 12 large-scale photograms and one wall construction, his sculpture Corpus. A projection in three dimensions generated from one of his photograms, Corpus effectively functions as the reversal of a reversal, a prime example of the sort of “new dimension” the artist continuously seeks.