In addition to showcasing current and upcoming fine art exhibitions from across the state of Florida, each issue of On View features artist profiles, behind-the-scenes interviews, gallery highlights, and fine art travel destinations. Chicago is the destination city for June/July 2010, and the MoCP is a recommended must-see!
Read the current issue of On View (MoCP is on page 84)
The Museum of Contemporary Photography is proud to partner with the Grange Prize in 2010 to help recognize the best in Canadian and international photography. The Grange Prize, now in its third year, is an annual award presented by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Aeroplan, a Canadian loyalty management company. These two institutions have formed a selection committee of four esteemed art professionals, including the MoCP’s own Karen Irvine, to narrow candidates to a shortlist of four artists, to be announced on May 26, 2010.
The Grange Prize winning photographer, to be chosen by the public via online vote, will receive $50,000. It is the only major Canadian art prize voted on by the public. As the press release explains, “each of the four shortlisted artists will participate in a ten-day residency: the Canadian nominees will travel to the U.S., and the American artists will visit Canada.” The three artists who are not selected to win the prize will receive $5,000 toward the creation of work developed during their residencies.
Of her participation in the selection committee and the MoCP partnership, Irvine cheerfully admits, “It is very exciting for us to serve as a partnering institution for the Grange Prize” because “the prize creates a unique dialogue between our two countries, and highlights some of the best photographers in both the U.S. and Canada.”
Both the AGO and the MoCP will host exhibitions of the four artists works this fall, prior to the voting period. Be sure to stop by to see the work in person before heading to the online polls!
Check back with our blog soon for updates and comments from Karen Irvine.
Read the full press release.
Subscribe to the mailing list for information on voting for the 2010 Grange Prize!
2009 Grange Prize winner Marco Antonio Cruz, Andrea Islas Garcia, farmer, blind from cataracts, Buenavista Cummunity, Municipality of Otumba, State of Mexico, 1998. Via grangeprize.com
Our programs–– whether exhibitions, lectures, screenings, or receptions--are always free, making the MoCP one of the values in town! Check out CBS 2's top-ten list, and plan your visit today!
Yale University Art Gallery and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library have acquired “The Lee Friedlander Archive” – a significant holding of Friedlander’s master prints, negatives, contact sheets, journals, work prints, and correspondence. According to Yale, the items in the archive “represent the finest examples of the photographer's work since adopting the Hasselblad Superwide as his primary camera in the early 1990s.” Read more at Artdaily and Photo District News (PDN).
The latest cover of TIME magazine features an image by MPP artist Julie Blackmon! Very cool, Julie! We are very proud. Read an interview about her experience with TIME here.
Catch collection photographers James Welling and Stephen Shore engage in an interview type conversation at Artinfo. The artists discuss photographic processes (film, digital, etc) and the restaging of New Topographics, originally exhibited at the George Eastman House in 1975, at the LACMA.
Jason Reblando, Daffodil House, Greendale, Wisconsin, via Chicago Artists Coalition
The Chicago Art Open opens Tuesday April 20. Congratulations to MPP artists Jason Reblando and Jane Fulton Alt who are both featured in the Photography category. Former MPP artists Ryan Zoghlin and Larry Chait are also featured. The opening reception on April 24 is free and open to the public.
MoCP associate director and curator Natasha Egan will be the sole juror of the 2010 Art of Photography Show contest and exhibition. Photographs are selected through a vigorous jury process and will be on view in San Diego from August to November.
Eirik Johnson, Freshly Felled Trees, via Aperture Exposures blog
Finally, Eirik Johnson’s recent series, Sawdust Mountain, is currently on view at the Aperture Gallery in New York. As Aperture describes, the series “focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support.”
Collection photographer Ashley Gilbertson is featured in a number of online media pieces and articles of the New York Times and NYT Magazine (see below for links). As a war conflict photographer since 2003, Gilbertson has captured countless poignant, intense, and challenging images of soldiers, civilians and moments of life and death. Gilbertson first started photographing conflict at the age of 23, after feeling that films of war correspondence or wartime did not give him any sufficient understanding of the world of war or the emotional toll taken on those that experience it.
Ashley Gilbertson, Untitled from 1/8 Bravo Marines during the November 2004 battle for Falluja, 2004, MoCP Collection
In the several NYT features, Gilbertson describes what he sees as his responsibility as a photographer to help his viewers understand what soldiers go through during wartime and to express that the difficulty of war is not over when soldiers return home. This feeling of responsibility was instigated by the 2004 death of the marine soldier, Billy Miller, who was assigned to protect the photographer as he worked to capture images of victims from the Falluja attack. Gilbertson is particularly concerned with expressing emotional and psychological turmoil, subjects like PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), and other internal or psychological topics that do not lend themselves to photography.
Gilbertson argues that his “soldiers’ bedrooms” photography, shown in this slideshow and highlighted in this article, is war photography. The images show what we, as a nation, have sacrificed in going to war. He explains that this project is the body of work that has reached closest to his goal of explaining what war is to people who have not seen what he has seen.
Some images in the slideshows and video interviews are intense and difficult. Please view them before sharing with others.
Watch the soldiers’ bedrooms slideshow.
Read the soldiers’ bedrooms article
Watch a video interview with Gilbertson concerning his goals and recent body of work.
Watch another slideshow of other images narrated by Gilbertson.
Bea Nettles, (paper by Marilyn Sward, printed by Audrey Niffenegger), Birch Bark, 1995
The Gainesville Sun featured a story on the life and work of collection photographer Bea Nettles. An exhibition of Nettles’ "untraditional" photographic work is currently on display at the Harn Museum of Art, through September 26. Throughout her career as an artist, Nettles mixed photography with painting, sculpture, and drawing techniques as well as with fabric, paper, and found materials. The works on view at the Harn are specific to Nettles' experience as a mother – a “visually poetic study of her daughter, Rachel, and son, Gavin, as they mature in their first decade of life” as the Harn describes. An interesting tidbit – Nettles once served as a lab assistant to Jerry Uelsmann (also a collection photographer).
Lillian Bassman, Carmen, New York, Harper’s Bazaar, 1963, printed 1994
Eryn-Ashlei Bailey of the Conducive Chronicle wrote a lovely feature on fashion photographer Lillian Bassman last week. Avidly experimental, Bassman made black and white photographs with unusual compositions, blurred outlines, and dark silhouettes. She abandoned her studio in the 1970’s, after decades of trying to reconcile her artistic interests with commercial demands, and left behind many of her film negatives. In 1991 hundreds of Bassman's lost negatives were discovered and returned to the artist, who set about reprinting them. In the process, Bassman decided to reinterpret her images from the 1940s and 1950s, often giving the images a dramatically different form. Read more about Bassman, her abandoned negatives, and fashion photography struggles in this New York Times article from 2009.
Judy Natal, Ladder, 1999
Photographer and Columbia College professor Judy Natal has been working on her Future Perfect series, which focuses on “sites that fabricate nature, not through duplication but simulation as the modeling of natural and human systems, in order to gain insight into their functioning.” Natal’s photograph of Biosphere 2, a built environment meant to represent Earth’s many ecosystems (including rain forest, desert, marsh, and mini-ocean), was featured on the Nevada Museum of Art blog this week. Of her artist-in-residency work at Biosphere 2, Natal says her images “depict, with transparency, the fabrication of environments that ultimately appear natural. It is my intent to seek out sites where this process of chaos has been repeatedly transformed.” Read more about her residency with the University of Arizona B2 Institute here.
Ben Gest, Jess & Alan, 2004, 2004
Images by Ben Gest and Glenn Rudolph have been selected for the Silverstein Photography Annual (SPA) at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York City. The SPA is part of the gallery's ongoing effort to provide exposure to emerging artists whose work incorporates the medium of photography. The gallery will host a opening reception for the exhibition on March 27 from 6-8pm.
“We’re tourists. Wonderful exhibition”
Our current exhibitions 50% Grey: Czech Photography Reconsidered and Recent Acquisitions of Czech Photography from The Baruch Foundation have generated some much appreciated honest criticism and comments from our daily visitors. Museum-goers of all ages and from varying cities and countries have responded in our comment book over the past few weeks. Thank you to everyone who has come to see the show and has left their thoughts with us! We have included a few of our favorite excerpts below.
If you have not yet visited us this year, be sure to check out these two exhibitions before they are gone on March 28. And share your thoughts with fellow visitors and the museum via the comment book. Who knows? Maybe your comment will be featured next!
“OK Favorites: No Pants haircut; vagabond; the shadow people against the canyon; alleyway with looming cathedral. Thank you for a very free experience. We will be back.”
“oh man I love photography”
“Outstanding. This was spectacularly displayed. Thanks.”
“A wonderful and exotic experience"
“Czech wit and sophistication on exhibit. Good to find on a grey day!”
“Bravo!”
“Original artwork contributed by Ryan, 2 years old”
Alec Soth, Patrick, Palm Sunday, Baton Rouge, LA, 2002
Alec Soth speaks with the Art:21 blog regarding his relationships with his portrait subjects. In the “Sleeping by the Mississippi” series, to which the author refers, Soth captures the disparate scenes and people he discovers during meandering journeys along the Mississippi River. Beginning his voyages in the frozen winters of Minneapolis and ending in the sultry heat of New Orleans, Soth's pictures trace a cultural gradation along the largest and most storied river in the United States. View Soth in the MoCP Collection.
Jennifer Greenburg has been busy this week! Over the weekend, Greenburg was quoted and appeared in a New York Times article for her involvement in the exhibition Aldermen Project: 50 Aldermen/50 Artists at Johalla Projects in Chicago. (This exhibition also features collection artists Jon Gitelson and Melissa Ann Pinney.) Greenburg and her recent photo publication, The Rockabillies, were also the focus of today’s Eight Forty-Eight broadcast on Chicago Public Radio.
Lorna Simpson, 9 Props, 1995
Lorna Simpson was announced as the winner of an Infinity Award in the “Art” category from the International Center of Photography. The award winners will be honored at a gala event held Monday, May 10, in New York.
Finally, Duncan MacKenzie of Chicago’s Bad at Sports interviews Curtis Mann for this week’s podcast. An image of Mann’s piece from the Whitney Biennial also appears in an audio slideshow on the New Yorker’s website. Peter Schjeldahl analyzes Mann’s and a few other artists’ pieces from the exhibition in this slideshow.
Jaroslav Rössler, Akt (nude abstract), 1926, gelatin silver print, 73/4 x 7 1/2 inches, Gift of The Baruch Foundation
Check out Michael Weinstein's review of the Baruch Collection exhibition in this week's NewCity. The exhibition is on view through March 28.
Jiří Thýn, Untitled, Composition No. 17, 2007
Check out Jason Foumberg's review of 50% Grey on NewCity's site.
WP Themes commented on 50% Grey: Contemporary Czech Photography Reconsidered reviewed in NewCity!
July 25, 2010 12:30 PMLouboutin shoes commented on Cindy Sherman and "Transformation"
June 18, 2010 1:01 PMregistry cleaner commented on Remembering Dennis Stock – Photographer of Jazz and James Dean
June 14, 2010 5:03 PMkikus commented on Curtis Mann announced as Whitney Biennial 2010 artist!
June 12, 2010 11:45 PM