Barbara Crane

(b.1928; resides Chicago, IL)

Schism, 1997/2001

Sand Findings, 1994/2002

Urban Anomalies, Chicago, 2001

For more than fifty years, Barbara Crane has worked as a photographer creating highly formal, often abstracted images of a wide array of subjects including people, natural objects, and the urban landscape. That diversity is represented in this portfolio by six sets of work. The black-and-white pictures include two groups: close, solarized photographs detailing bark and leaf, and a pair of contact printed diptychs of once-living things viewed recto and verso. The four color groups are even more ranging: long, adjacent-panel diptychs of trees; urban roofs and brick walls jumbled together in a collision of colors and textures; sand pictures with dark objects obscured by shallow focus and a nearly monochromatic palette; hubcaps, mushrooms, and glowing green leaves cropped into circular vignettes and collected into grids.

Crane, who studied at Mills College in California, completed her BA in art history at New York University and later received her MS from the Institute of Design (now the Illinois Institute of Technology). For twenty-eight years she taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipient of an NEA grant, Crane has participated in 170 group exhibitions and mounted 75 solo exhibitions; her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Photography.

http://www.barbaracrane.net

PAST PORTFOLIO

Untitled, 1995

Untitled, 1996

Still Lifes: Natures Mortes, 2002

My intention with this body of work is to convey unadorned simplicity. Divorced from their natural environment, floating in blackness, these sticks are studies in severity striving for Zen-like balance. The photographs attempt to capture the essence of each stick: to examine its form, skin, and the space it occupies. They beg the viewer to scrutinize the details. - Barbara Crane

For the past fifty years, Barbara Crane has been working as a photographer, creating works based on architecture, chaos theory, and people. With an extremely broad range of subject matter behind her, Crane now focuses mostly on nature in her photographs. In these images, taken from her series Coloma to Covert Sticks; she strives for a fusion of form and content, or, in her words, “a super reality and concurrently an abstraction of reality.”

Crane, who studied at Mills College in California, completed her BA in art history at New York University and later received her MS from the Institute of Design (now the Illinois Institute of Technology). She taught for 28 years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipient of a NEA grant, Crane has participated in 170 group exhibitions and mounted 75 solo exhibitions; her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She has two books, Barbara Crane, Photographs 1948-50, published in December 1981 by the Creative Center Press, and Barbara Crane: Chicago Loop, published in February 2002 by LaSalle Bank, Chicago.