ARTIST SERIES | BOOK TALKS | FALL 2024

All lectures in the Artist Series are In-Person only, and are free to attend. We ask that you kindly RSVP. Please see individual talks for more information.

Thursday, September 12, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

CAti bestard

Cati Bestard was born in Mallorca (Spain). She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at Ulterior Gallery, Times Square Space, Jewish Museum, Crush Curatorial, ChaShaMa, La Capella Barcelona and Untitled Miami. She has been a resident at the Institute of Investigative Living (Joshua Tree, 2018), Hercules Art Studio Program (New York, 2019-2020), Art Workspace Easthampton (Easthampton, 2021) and Penumbra Foundation (New York, 2022). She currently teaches at Smith College.

About the book:
Ca s’abuela begins with a grandmother’s house that has been empty for years. Dust acts as an archive of the passing of time, an entryway to a family history that also conveys a socioeconomic history of the island of Mallorca, Spain. The photobook combines the artist’s images taken inside the house, projections of these images rephotographed, and photographs from her father’s archive taken in the 1960s in the same house and surroundings. Time is presented in a nonlinear way, with memories and layers of visual information overlaying and repeating to speak about photography as a fragmented reality.

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Wednesday, September 18, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM RSVP

VICTOR SIRA

Victor Sira, born in Venezuela in 1969 and currently based in New York City, works across various mediums including photography, video, and artist books. He has been honored with fellowships from prestigious institutions such as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the W. Eugene Smith Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

In addition to his artistic work, Sira has taught at the ICP–Bard MFA Program in Photographic Studies, SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design, and the Hartford Art School’s MFA Photography Program. Sira is also the co-founder of bookdummypress, a platform dedicated to visual publications.

About the book (from the publisher):

Caracas: Homecoming is a meticulously crafted book that unfolds in three distinct layers, each adding depth and shifting the overall meaning. The journey begins with Osamu Kanemura's evocative text, "Cracked Concrete." This section uses Sira's poignant photography to paint a vivid picture of a city where the traces of the deceased are integral to its essence.  Following this, readers are immersed in a series of 121 color photographs, presented in diptychs, that capture the essence of Caracas as if seen through a camera left on during a city walk. These images offer a raw, unfiltered look at the city, highlighting its beauty and complexity.  The final layer, titled "The Dream of Order," features eight fragmented narratives by Victor Sira. This section blends text with black-and-white images, delving into the intimate and poignant memories of Caracas through the lens of Sira's family experiences and the city's push toward modernization. These narratives vividly depict a city in constant ideological flux, accompanied by small black-and-white photographs that serve as visual punctuation to the text. 

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Wednesday, Septmeber 25, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

JOÃO Pina

João Pina is a photographer born in Portugal in 1980. Focused on the human condition and human rights, he began working as a professional photographer at age eighteen, and spent the past 25 years focused mostly on Latin America but also covering key socio-political issues in places such as Angola, Afghanistan, Cape Verde, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Libya, Myanmar, Mozambique and South Africa. Pina’s photographs have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, GEO, Stern Magazine, El Pais, Le Monde, among others.

He has published four books, “Por teu livre pensamento” (Assírio&Alvim, 2007) portraying 25 former political prisoners from Portugal; “CONDOR” (Tinta-da-china/ Blume/Ed. Sous-sol, 2014) about the military dictatorships in South America in the 1970’s; and “46750” (Tinta-da-china/ Loco/FotoEvidence, 2018) about endemic violence in Rio de Janeiro and “Tarrafal” (Tinta-da- china/GOST, 2024) telling Pina’s family history around the former Portuguese concentration camp, opened in Cape Verde between the 1930’s and the 1970’s where is grandfather was interned as a political prisoner.

Currently Pina is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City and a faculty member at the International Center of Photography since 2016. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University 2017-2018 and a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow in Washington D.C. in 2018-2019. He was a Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris in 2021-2022.

About the book (from the publisher):

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise.

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Our mental tapestries, our sense of self that is woven into our relationships, environments, and lifetimes of chance, they’re something more intricate than can be fully glimpsed at any one moment. Yet we instinctively know that family rituals upheld and forsaken, the loved ones near and formerly familiar, spaces we’ve inhabited, they are all vital threads to who we have become.
Early in development, as very young children we take on object permanence, we know the dropped stuffed animal is only out of sight, not gone. We grow into object constancy, our caregivers are internalized so that we can still feel mom even when she is not close.
There is an almost magical sense of safety that comes from feeling we have a home base. With that, we fall into the groove of growing, taking in, giving back, holding close, and discarding.
We cannot recall life’s infinite moments and impacts, but we surely can reflect on the most compelling. Photographs are a stream for this process, memories and history are reaffirmed but with the passage of time their significance revised. The objects, the relationships, they are still there but somehow different. Images of our own past, others’ images that connect to our inner world, they allow us to vividly experience what once was but within the present moment.
A photobook that draws on the artist’s real family, with real bonds, conflicts, and journeys puts the photographer in position to see into their origins and put forth a narrative. The three artists featured in Penumbra’s September lecture series combine the spirit of truth-telling, cooperation, and rebellion of personal history resulting in their own specific book.
Cati Bestard touches the inevitability of time in Ca s’abuela. A project which began in her family’s Mallorca home seeks to counteract and submit to the loss of what is loved, and ultimately to understand.
Ca s’abuela’s earliest images were taken years ago by her father, Andreu Bestard Ferrari, in the 60s and 70s. Growing up during Francisco Franco’s Spanish rule, he made images using natural light. Cati Bestard knows there was an impact of political circumstance, she intuits “growing up at that time he would make pictures near the window, what did it mean to grow up in a dictatorship, looking at the window as a limit in your life and still a space to interact with the world?”
In 2019 Bestard Ferrarí passed, soon after a home that had been in the family for generations was sold to an Argentinian. Something she describes as a common occurrence, how the economy once industrial (her family made liquor for over 100 years) is now based on tourism and in turn homes are no longer staying within families. Before losing her father, before the home sold, in the years the house stood empty, Bestard photographed. She connected to the feelings she had as a small child exploring the home. The space that to a youngster felt vast in possibilities and new adventures was now vast in memories. “When I entered in 2016 it was a time capsule but with dust.
There was no electricity, the only light came through the windows giving the space a painting like quality.” Bestard explains “the book is about this house that hosted all these memories and has accumulated all these experiences, accumulated all this life. But now it is at a point when its empty of this life. There is the dust that functions as an archive of existence, because if dust is analyzed you can determine a lot of the things that have happened, history of the materiality, the illnesses, it is left from the people and the things… so I became interested in the house as this architecture that held all these bodies but is now empty.” There are indeed images of dust, including an abstract cover with no title, a trace that something or someone was there, but the details are bound in the fragments.
There are the house’s old and recent photos as well as “ghosts.” Bestard projected the Mallorca house images in her US apartment and created new works. “It’s about the impossibility of bringing the worlds together as the image becomes so diluted, it’s almost against the image.” She explains it’s about the wish to still have the feeling and experience of her family, but of finding the limits of memory. The people and the place having a permanent space within her, but it is not the same as the earlier experiences. “I was reading about how every time we access a memory, we erase part of the original content to add some contextual information of our present moment. I thought the projections were a way to address something lost in memory when we add something from the present.”
Portuguese artist Joao Pina, in harmony with Cati Bestard, accepts that the person recalling the past, like the viewer observing a photograph, is adding a piece of themselves.
Pina shares a native saying, “Who tells a tale adds a tale.” He is reflecting on the process by which his mother and great-grandfather passed on the legend of his grandfather. Pina, a seasoned documentary artist, explains that “In the telling of the story, myths were created. I approached this work to demystify the ideas, to lay down an accurate recoded history. The book is structured so that the images are speaking to each other. That the letters are speaking to each other.
There is a narrative that is visual and there is a narrative that is textual, and in the textual, I give a lot of my own experience.” Pina strives to give us objective history through what is deeply personal in Tarrafal. For Guilherme da Costa Carvalho, Joao’s maternal grandfather, the dictatorial regime he grew up under was a merciless force. A fascist ideology he understood as something entirely destructive, something to be rebelled against. Yet so powerful that it cut him from his home, his family. In 1949 Carvalho, a Communist party member, was sent to Tarrafal, a concentration camp for political prisoners on the Portuguese colony of Cape Verde.
A puzzling calculation was made by the regime, allowing Guilherme Carvalho’s parents, Herculaina da Costa Carvalho and Luis Alves de Carvalho, to visit the camp with camera and film. Whatever the original intention, to project ideas of humanly treated prisoners, to assuage worried loved ones, 75 years later we are left with the black and white images. Tarrafal puts forth those pictures, seemingly well-nourished prisoners standing tall in uniform, a pet monkey steals the spotlight in some frames. There is an incongruence between what we know to be a camp and these pictures. The pictures suggest, and Pina’s research supports, that in this moment the men felt the joy of being able to send messages to loved ones at home. They hoped that through the photographs their families could feel them.
In addition to the original photos we are given pieces of correspondence between the Carvalhos as well as Pina’s photos of Cape Verde revisited. The project puts forth a parent’s drive to protect their child, the sometimes competing needs of protecting one’s family and some larger political calling, a grandson’s wish to solidify the marks that were made, as well as a look at what is left when history moves on. September 14, 1949 Guilherme writes his parents “I shall always find my courage to face whatever comes my way and I’m sure that you are more than capable of turning this sorrow into a weapon of aggression against those responsible for the misery that — in all walks of life — has taken hold of our country, caused by individuals whom the entire nation despises and who will therefor be expelled.” He asks that the oceanic tide which pulls him be embraced, that the loss his parents experience translate into momentum for some bigger fight he has taken on.
April 25, 1950. Luiz writes his son Guilherme, following a visit: “Only those who know how much we love each other could comprehend our joy at seeing you and the bitterness we feel when we leave. But such is life, and often what we love is that which suffers most. Which is to say, if I had been blessed with more sons, I would have wished with all my heart for them to be as sound and honest as you. Political ideas are something I tend not to discuss, nor am I one to condemn them. I only know that I raised you to travel a path of honor, justice, and duty, and you were always happy to keep to that, without me having censured any action you ever took in life, not even those for which you were sent there.”
Luis and Guilherme, father and son, define memories and myths in these letters. In this forced separation admiration of a cause or of a person provides reason for what otherwise is unfathomable.
November 27, 2020 Pina writes his deceased grandfather, “It seems that contrary to what you and your comrades believed, the New Man never thrived, societies still have those who exploit and those who are exploited, just as they did in the days before capitalism. And those who are exploited are still there in every attempt at socialism our world has seen. The problem, as I see it, my Dear Grandad, remains the same: There are always some who try to take advantage of other people’s misfortune.” His grandfather’s mission is retold as an illusion. Man and society cannot separate the desire to give and be loved from the fear of exploitation and the accompanying aggression.
While Pina’s letter declares the greater conflict is still alive, the book’s contemporary color photographs are proof that this specific battle is no longer. Cape Verde, as its name suggests, is lush and alive. There are images of smiling locals, trees impervious to the memories of man, seascapes and landscapes carrying on as forces of nature.
And of course, images of a camp now oxidized, being taken back by the elements so that only a shadow of the prisoners’ existence now remains.
Pina’s great grandparents who accepted a cause to keep connection with their son, his mother’s childhood with loving grandparents in place of parents, and Guilherme himself who chose to live for an ideal, they exist in the edited and revised world of permanence. The book’s archival elements serve as a record of historical facts, Pina’s sought-after demystification. Still, peering into this book, feeling the drives and wishes, it’s easy for any viewer to create new legends.
In Tarrafal, we see how perspectives taken are intertwined over four generations. With Victor Sira’s Home Coming, we feel the ebb and flow of the currents of change.
Sira likens his country of origin, Venezuela, to an “electrocardiogram, an EKG, with the peaks and valleys of change.” While one’s heart predictably contacts and relaxes to currents, Venezuela faced a surge as oil charged through. This new energy created ideals, polarizations, and struggles no one intended.
“I wanted to to tell the story at eye level, not something monumental, simply a family trying to understand what is happening,” explains Victor as we page through his book of images taken 20 years ago during a financial boom. “I hated it (the climate of wealth with out foresight,)I had no respect, it’s as though a party was going on, and I knew the hangover was coming. They were drinking, dancing, thinking we are going to be a superpower, but it made no sense. The infrastructure wasn’t there, the money wasn’t being used to bring in goods; forget superpower, just be a regular country with happy people”
The images are explicitly without people and without opulence. In telling the story, he shares the state of withdrawal which was his refuge. “As an adult living in the US, I would return to visit my father. I saw people with no middle ground. Everyone was fighting from the position “your either for me or against.” I took these pictures to connect to the city, not to the people and the political situation. The people are like a river, they will flow through and be gone, but what about the space?” Images of Modernest architecture once envisioned as a new way of life show the space taking its own path, bringing its own lines and cracks impervious to shouted promises. They are plainly laid out with one image per page, we see building details and landscapes, empty playgrounds and cars. It is the feel of a place forgotten while still inhabited.
Like many families, Victor’s did indeed flow through. For generations, they faced a near constant pressure to adapt, to reroute and reestablish, only to have the current change once more. While the images ground us, the narratives move us. Victor shows how circumstances changed identities, how decisions were made, and family, continued.
In an excerpt, he writes, “For my grandmother and her children, living on the outskirts of Caracas, the project was at first only a distant reality, the new housing superblocks rising on the horizon like a concrete apparition. But it was only a matter of time before she and her family would also be uprooted by the new ideal. Torn from her first shanty home -- she was told she was squatting on someone else’s land -- she moved her family to Ciudad Tablita, where the shanty homes were built on top of sewage, behind a slaughter- house. In the face of such conditions, she would soon search for yet another place to make her home. But the catalyst this time was an unexpected convulsion, this one occurring on a single day, January 23, 1958, when the military reign of Pérez Jiménez came crashing down. Across the capital, people took to the streets, claiming land and apartments in the new housing district.
On that day, my ten-year-old mother, wise beyond her years, joined my grandmother and the masses hunting for a piece of land. My mom, bold as brass even then, led my grandmother into one of the towering new superblocks, selecting an apartment on the third floor. For a moment, it must have seemed like a dream to walk through the clean, bright, brand-new rooms. But my grandmother, her heart pounding with fear of what the new government might bring, decided to flee. As they left the building, my mother glanced back, witnessing other families entering inside. Only later, after the chaos and tumult had subsided, would they learn that the apartment, had they stayed inside and held onto it, would one day have been theirs to keep.”
Victor introduces us to the matriarchs of the family, his grandmother and mother, a mother whose early experience sharpened her identity and wove in a determination for progress. She had felt the sting of missing an opportunity. This woman who seized their future brought Victor and his brother to NYC in the 1990s.
Victor explains that his book has only one audience, his daughter, Sana. It was made for her with the help of his wife, Shiori Kawasaki. Nevertheless, he divulges the discussions he had with his mother in this writing, the drawing back to fundamental experiences which also shaped his brother and father. This process of considerable reflection, recalling all of the attachments and influences involved, the book has only one audience but many authors.
The permanence we develop in early childhood, it initially comes with a great deal of idealization. As infants and toddlers we are faced with all sorts of frightening experiences, hunger, illness, hostility. We turn to and eventually internalize our caregivers as some all powerful being. One only needs to imagine a crying 2-year-old turning to mommy or daddy as their balloon floats a way, surely parents can overcome the chemical properties of helium and return it. Our super-parents provide a sense of safety with which we can begin exploring the world.
As the separation process continues it becomes clear that no one is perfect, can cure all our wants and needs. We are able to depend on people emotionally even with all their foibles. Our well intentioned parents, teachers, partners, leaders cannot make us perfect, but knowing they are there, either literally or through what they have given us, it is a maturation of idealization and love.
Ca s’abuela, Tarrafal, and Homecoming use images and words to navigate, to create, beauty and resilience out of what has passed. In each of these works we can feel the pulse of some long-ago experienced emotions. How once all encompassing states have been woven into our greater selves.

ARTIST SERIES | SPRING 2024

All lectures in the Artist Series are In-Person only, and are free to attend. We ask that you kindly RSVP. Please see individual talks for more information.

Tuesday, April 2, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN

Littal Melnik: Your recent publication, Solidarity Must Be Defended, co-edited with Ezter Szakacs, is an anthology showcasing the visual arts within acts of transnational solidarity. Some of the events in the book surround the Non-Alignment Movement (founded in 1961 to advance the interests of developing countries independent of a Cold War position) while others navigate the Vietnam war, the movement for Pan-African arts, and the Algerian war against French rule. Artistic and political alignments in liberation movements throughout the Cold War era are revisited through the lens that only hindsight can provide. How did this undertaking begin?
Naeem Mohaiemen: It came out of a new reading group, expanding a completed film. In 2017, I had premiered Two Meetings And A Funeral, a three channel film about the pivot from the Non-Aligned Movement to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Once the project had premiered at Documenta 14 (Kassel, the Adam Szymczyk edition), I encountered curators, some from constituent parts of former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, who were looking into this archive as a political moment outside the primary duo-polar, dialectic dynamic of the cold war arms race. It is often challenging to find optimism about the Soviet project of communism, as it was actually experienced; and it is certainly difficult to decipher any left project within the contemporary Chinese state. The history of Non-Alignment emerges for these curators as a possible third way, a place of “could have been.” Although, I have to add that I have disagreements with the attempt to recuperate a uniformly positive reading of Non-Alignment; my film is, at times, quite critical of the foibles and blind spots that allowed the Venn diagram capture of member states by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
One of the Two Meetings screenings was in Budapest, and the curator, Eszter Szakacs, put together a reading group around the film. There were works people assumed I had read, but in fact there were case studies I had not encountered at the time of shooting. As I spent time with this reading list, Eszter and I started having conversations that exceeded the possibility of a single film screening or installation. We finally met at the March Meeting in Sharjah, and one question was, how could we make such a reading list circulate in a way similar to the way an object moves within a museum network? Our answer was that much older form of a book, an edited anthology whose design (by Zalán Péter Salát) also echoed the three channels of the film. It was a long four-year process, twice the length of the film’s shooting, with many interruptions and digressions–the final one being a disruption to the Hungarian printing press’ supply network after the Ukraine war began.
LM: The book is geographically far reaching, spanning movements in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, each with a seemingly endless number of invested and affected parties. How do calls for solidarity across borders balance those needs?
NM: Transnational solidarity is a very productive, and also contradictory, field of organizing work. Entering this space allows for someone external to a geography (if we stay with just that one vector for now, although there are many others) to organize events, and speak out, at a time of crisis when it may be difficult for someone internal to that region to do the same. Local activists working under repressive governments may find they have to depend on allies outside their borders to keep a campaign going.
The movement for justice for Salvador Allende after 1973 is an example–artists such as Cecilia Vicuna (featured in our book) had to work within exile conditions in London, alongside British artists; the Pinochet junta made it difficult to do that work inside Chile. Vicuna’s forced exile from Chile after 1973 meant that a community of British artists became her fellow travelers in the movement for justice and democracy in Chile These new neighbors, produced by the conditions of exile, may learn about movements in Myanmar, Iran, or Palestine, but may not always learn about the nuances and contradictions within these geographies and movements. In the moment of the event, the possibility of error in judgment is also there. Foucault’s experience with this dynamic, which is also the root of the book title and the narrative device in our introduction, is one where he reads the fervor within the Iranian revolution as a new alternative (another third way?) to industrial capitalism and totalitarian communism. He begins to develop a theory of the unified collective will, but he does not allow for the clashing realities spoken of by Iranian feminists, Islamic scholars, or French leftists.
Eszter and I have tried to work through these contradictions in the arguments we make in the book. This is an area of divergence for us with other projects in the contemporary arts about “solidarity”–which we have found at times to be too reverential in their approach to these past histories. We have at times felt that within transnational work, the space for allies to debate tactics is limited. Your gesture of solidarity may be welcomed but your dissenting opinions will not find space. That is the complicating and confounding aspect of solidarity across borders in what we call, “messy practice.”.
LM: The 1960 protests, Anpo, were photographed by Hamaya Hiroshi, in solidarity with the Japanese students protesting their government’s treaty with the United States. How is this alliance with a familiar subject different? What was the impact of his work? Hiroshi goes on to focus on landscape photography. Do you think this reflects a level of completion or dismay?
NM: Hiroshi was motivated by a repressive rollback by the Japanese state in support of deepening ties with the United States, on the eve of a globally reviled war in Vietnam. He took photographs with the intention of both documenting and giving energy to the protests. Those images show the amount of energy and determination within the population. The US-Japan Security Treaty does take effect but the Kisha Cabinet is forced to resign. People make the argument that the government would have taken more repressive action without the protests– bolstered by his photographs as well as those of other artists.
A turn towards landscape theory in his images may not mean becoming dismayed by politics. In 1969, Masao Adachi, strongly aligned with the radical movements in Japan, directed AKA Serial Killer, the story of a convicted murderer, through a lens turned to landscape. I saw this as the continuation of a political project without the documentary lens of some of his other films in this period. Later, Eric Baudelaire made Aka Jihadi, a homage to Adachi, which follows Arab-French men who set out in doomed journeys of cross-border alignments; that film also uses an unmoving landscape as the canvas for a complex story of failed projects.
LM: There are book chapters focused on the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. Can you speak to the experience of the participating artist-activists in the moment and how this fits into the larger picture?
NM: The FESTAC photographs (in the chapter by Marilyn Nance, and another by Cedric Vincent and late Dominique Malaquais) show the official records of this gathering of African and African American artists in celebrating Pan-Africanism. In 1977, these images were inspired by a moment aiming toward solidarity between indigenous people and diasporas of African ancestry. We now know that particular strand of Pan-Africanism did not endure; there was, in my opinion, a turning away and turning inward in the American experience from the 1980s onward. In the 1960s, Ebony published features on “Africa” as a possible utopia alternative, in the face of the ongoing fight for Civil Rights in America. By the 1970s there were African American artists turning to Africa, many of whom traveled to FESTAC. Although some of that energy endures and evolves, there is also a turning away, for complex set of factors which need a longer discussion.
FESTAC came at a specific time, a conjuncture. Jimmy Carter was in the White House as the anti-Nixon executive in an era marked by American contrition over Vietnam and Watergate appointed Andrew Young as the first US Ambassador to the UN of African American heritage. Young championed having a big “American” delegation to FESTAC in Nigeria. He may have projected that if the African American community went under government support, possibilities of a radical alignment path (e.g., akin to the Panthers in Algeria in the 1960s) would become defused by an integrative approach. Marilyn Nance, as a photographer and an official delegate to FESTAC considers this a very beautiful moment that she was part of. We may look at her images with a different, forensic view because we are not witnesses of that moment. What happened to that energy that she recalls, and that we may be trying to reconstruct? The photographs may illustrate some of this, but they may also obscure other elements. I wonder about what was happening off-stage. Marilyn has an amazing image of Fela Kuti performing. Later she shared that this was a dissident concert, because Fela refused to participate in FESTAC as it was a government-sponsored event. So her memories, accompanying her images, already point to the other side of the story.

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, photography, and essays to explore forms of utopia-dystopia within families, borders, architecture, and uprisings– beginning from South Asia and then radiating outward to transnational collisions in the Muslim world after 1945. Mohaiemen is co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must Be Defended (Tranzit: 2023) and author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta/ULAB: 2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel: 2014). Several conversations around “nonalignment” as a concept container in contemporary art pivoted after the premiere of his film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at documenta 14, which was a finalist for Britain’s Turner Prize (2018). His projects are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), MACBA (Barcelona), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Kiran Nadar Museum (Delhi), National Gallery of Singapore, Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Art Review magazine’s annual list of 100 practitioners impacting contemporary art included him in the 2023 rankings. Naeem is Head of the Photography Concentration at the School of Arts, Columbia University.

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM RSVP

KEVIN KUNSTADT

Littal Melnik: In 2020’s Elephants and Whales - The Photobook Genome, you experiment with randomly pairing photos. A new connection is born with each assortment. How viable are these connections compared to the ones of your extended continuous projects?
Kevin Kunstadt: I make projects over time. An initial idea will be propelled and then put aside for another project or because the next step hasn’t yet been settled upon. In doing the random pairing project, in writing the essay–. I was opening new ways to think about photographs in a literary way. By changing a partner or an order I can reconceptualize narratives and create new meanings. I create space to be creative within the work.
Continuing with the genetics analogy, not every assortment is something that can survive. For the essay I cherry picked three out of thousands. But only by doing the experiment did I find new connections. It’s a fun activity to get beyond the initial conceptions of the work.
LM: Your ongoing work, Wet / Dry, features screen-printed and Risograph images. They appear to be purposely constructed with form, color, and texture. What were your initial intentions with this work and how have they evolved?
KK: The initial project is intensely descriptive photographic work. It’s a series of images utilizing every piece of the frame. Made in New Brunswick, Canada, these are images of shoreline, rock, and seaweed.
What you are referring to was temporarily titled “Wet/Dry part II.” It’s a project that has been an exploration of printing; looking at moments that are hidden, or that we try to hide: halftone, dot pattern, or color separation. It celebrates what isn’t usually meant to be seen, through a new kind of image. Those rocks and seaweed became the initial fodder for this whole new project as well.
LM: All For The Best, the 2020 Risograph, uses gold ink on black paper. There is a qualitative richness to this combination that I experience as a viewer. Can you speak to how this work came together; did you play with other color combinations?
KK: This began in 2015 as a response to a Murakami short story, Samsa in Love, which was inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In the story, Murakami described the outside world with an ambiguous sort of darkness. That’s the space I worked from in making the initial photos.
The images gestated for a while, as I sought a way to make them the most legible to other human beings. I played with various maquettes before hitting upon the gold ink on black paper. But the minute I saw it in that form I knew it was the right match.
Technically the photos have so much pure black that prior methods of printing had often buckled the paper. Aesthetically, it feels like an elegant solution to this. The gold shimmers, reflecting light over the solid blocks of shadow, which are now the paper itself. It’s a dark book but one with the promise of possibility.

Kevin Kunstadt (b. 1982, New York, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2004, and his MFA in photography from Hartford Art School’s international limited residency program in 2017.
Since 2010 Kunstadt has produced several photographic projects in book form, on subjects as varied as: asphalt road resurfacing, gunpowder, scrap metal, and “sneakers, bricks, and politics.” These have been nominated for the Mack First Book Award, and shortlisted for the Kassel, Luma Rencontres, Fiebre, and La Fabrica Dummy Awards. His book All for the Best was published by Penumbra in 2020.

For the past five years Kevin Kunstadt has been exploring-exploding half-tone based printing processes; his research and play in the area has led to wholly new and unexpected types of imagery, which often simultaneously utilize and celebrate those elements of printing which are commonly hidden from view entirely. The line of investigation has resulted in digital images, silkscreen, risograph, and inkjet prints, animations, books, and most recently, 'photo-paintings.'

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

JOHN LEHR

Littal Melnik: In The Last Things, 2020- present, you transform messages originally communicated on urban streets. Through the photographic process, new color, context, and finish is given. How is the past alive in this work? What is the space for the original intentions, as well as the personal experience which brought you to make this work?
John Lehr: All of the decisions I have made in the creation of this work have been driven by a desire to have each piece exist in a vivid continuous present. I want to honor these fleeting gestures, underline their significance, and make space for a meaning that is untethered from context . I think all photographs are made in collaboration. In my case there is a collaboration between a thing in the world, my subjective perception, and the problems and potentials of photography. The goal is to place these dualities in suspension, and leave the resolution up to the viewer.
LM: Works in 2018-2020 The Island Position all begin with merchants’ similar objectives, the need to communicate. As a consumer, to be “sold” evokes a range of negative and positive feelings. Looking through these images, the beauty of them supplants the negative. When you experience the finished work, how does it compare to the original experience of finding the scene?
JL: The photographs in the series describe commercial facades from across the country that advertise not only what is for sale, but more importantly the idiosyncratic decisions of the people who own them. I think of these facades as being covered in the accidental signatures of people who are participating in a system that will never deliver on its promises. These personalized pleas for attention mingle with corporate signage, generic architectural forms, and the quasi-public space of the sidewalk. All of this gets compressed into a single form: the photograph itself. The way this compression happens is through a method of depiction that attempts to represent everything within the frame as an emotive, beckoning presence. Everything in the picture is pulled into the graphic space of advertising. The final framed works are mounted to individual plinths that present the works at eye-level, off the walls of a gallery space. All of this leads to a kind of frenetic isolation where both the subject and the spectator—or viewer—confront one another individually. One has to consider a single place, and the myriad of decisions that led to its creation. On another level this hyper-singular kind of picture places the viewer back into a cycle of discovery, observation, desire, and judgement that is central to the model of capitalism I am depicting. Viewing the picture completes this cycle, activates those material decisions, and implicates our own bodies and minds as part of the model.
LM: The technologies and potentials of photography continue to grow, the mores change. What, if any, connection do you feel to earlier street photographers, the Lee Friedlander and Walker Evans of the world?
JL: I feel very connected to a genre of photography that seeks to locate meaning in the quotidian spaces of public life. The tradition of Evans and Friedlander is one I deeply respect, but I am also conscious of the difference between my time and theirs, between their intentions and my own. What has become increasingly interesting to me are the ways in which our public spaces reflect a transition from a physical culture to a virtual one. This transition strikes me as one of the most important aspects of our time, and I have tried to develop a process that represents it’s physical and psychic impact.

John Lehr (b. Baltimore, Md) is an artist and Associate Professor at Pratt Institute. His work represents the surfaces of the American commercial landscape as an embodiment of the desires and anxieties of the American people. Utilizing the expectations of the documentary as a springboard, he draws viewers into an unfamiliar relationship with the artifacts of contemporary American life. Lehr’s transformational process renders signage, facades, and discarded objects as uncanny, hyperreal, symbols of the hopes and fears of a populace at the brink of a tipping point. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Yale University. His work is included in the several permanent collections, including The Denver Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan Library and Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Nelson Atkins Museum. Recent publications include The Island Position (MACK), The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames and Hudson), Photography is Magic (Aperture), and El Camino Real (Roman Nvmerals). His new monograph, The Last Things, will be published by TBW Books in 2024. He lives and works in Elkins Park, PA.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM RSVP

HARLAN BOZEMAN

Littal Melnik: Out the E, your ongoing work on the African American Community in Elaine, Arkansas, is an intimate look at a community whose present circumstances have been severely impacted by over a century of racial and political malfeasance. How did the past and present, inside and outside perspectives, come together in shaping this work?
Harlan Bozeman: I’m not from Elaine, yet this project is deeply personal. It began four years ago when I was a graduate student in Arkansas at the height of COVID. This is when I Iearned about the Red Summer of 1919 and the Elaine Massacre, the killing of hundreds of Black people sparked by the “threat” of sharecroppers trying to organize against exploitation. Federal troops were brought in at the governor’s request to silence this movement. Feelings remain concealed in Elaine making it essential to engage with people to truly understand its social and economic dynamics. My work has primarily been influenced by relationships I've developed with people over the years. The Arkansas Delta, specifically Phillips County, is a region within the United States that has not been extensively photographed. When researching state and federal archives, there are not many documents or photographs of Elaine and it’s residents, as if the town’s legacy and history are meant to be hidden. I recognized this erasure early and wanted to make work that actively countered that removal of Black life and community while also being honest about the realities of this place.
LM: You continue to visit Elaine. There is the experience of being there as well as the continuation of the photographic work. What are the hopes and responsibilities you feel in showing these images?
HB: The impact is what’s most important. The multiple portfolios of Out The E are edited collaboratively with the people I work alongside. In this moment, I feel a need to both protect and advocate. By protect, I mean exercising discretion regarding the presentation and dissemination of this work. It's crucial to provide proper context for the images to ensure they are interpreted accurately. My work in Elaine will not exist on the wall of a private collector or any individual who does not have a direct connection to the town.
For years, I envisioned the potential for my work to serve as an archive within a civil rights museum that was in development. Located along the racial divide of Main Street in a building that stood at the time of the massacre, the museum was expected to open last year, however, due to poor management of funds and shoddy construction, the museum will not be happening. I have since decided to work with my friend James White, a lifelong resident of Elaine and researcher who has been recording the stories of elder descendants of the massacre for over ten years. We will expand what began as a photographic project into a social practice and curate an archive. This living archive will not function as a documentation of Elaine’s past but as a testament to the strong and resilient dynamic of a community that never left.
LM: The title, Out the E, can you tell me the story behind it? Is it about what has been born from the legacy about escape?
HB: It’s the title of a song by local rapper, ETO Dobb. The phrase carries a double meaning, reflecting both the act of departure and the inherent belonging to a partcular place. Conversations about the decision to leave or stay in Elaine are common among both adults and teenagers, reflecting the complex choices and aspirations individuals face regarding their future in the community. Everybody knows there are no opportunities and that upward mobility is nearly impossible if you live and work in the town. Despite these challenges, many individuals maintain a deep sense of pride in their roots in Elaine, particularly those who understand the conditons of the region historically.
LM: The collages in Failure to Appear are a departure in character from the Black and White work of Out the E, yet congruent in subject matter. Can you speak to this project?
HB: That was my graduate thesis exhibition. There were so many contributing factors to that work. At the midpoint of my graduate program, I dismissed the idea of including my work in Elaine in my thesis exhibition, an obvious decision given that Arkansas public schools do not educate students on the history of Elaine or the Red Summer of 1919. The response to my work was positive; however, I was skeptical to embrace what I believed to be an attraction towards Black death. I was sure the massacre and its legacy were the draws, while the community I collaborated with remained overlooked.
I was exhausted emotionally and physically going into my final year of school and experienced severe burnout. Making images that speak to a collective representation of Black identity in the American south is such an enormous idea that I was not interested in tackling. But I could not help but notice the parallel experiences between the different groups of people that I have been fortunate enough to build relationships with over the years.
Before making work in Elaine, I was photographing on the sea islands of South Carolina for four years, which is where my family is from. Throughout my time in grad school I was also photographing in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Stories from elders in my family mirrored the experiences of people I met in other towns. My grandmother grew up with planes flying over her head spreading cancerous pesticides like children do today in Elaine. Black families in Phillips County had their property illegally taken from them like Black families in Tulsa’s Greenwood District. It was in 2018 while making work in South Carolina, that I started researching the controversial system of heir’s property and learned how it became the leading cause of land loss, a.k.a generational wealth, for Black Americans. I mention all of that to say it was eventually time for me to begin making work that reflected my life and the profound interactions that were influencing it. I could not ignore these intergenerational connections and the constant between them: when Black bodies gather within their own spaces, this public or private enclosure we create for ourselves directly opposes the powers that be. My transition into collage was inspired by a shift in my relationship to images and the archive. Cutting away images and texts of Black life, effectively removing them from their source, negates an uninterrupted gaze and serves as, what Ariella Azoulay calls, an “apparatus of mediation.” I was not interested in reconciling these known and unknown histories, but a new context could be established by fusing them into each other through various alternative processes. One that sought to attend to the physical and metaphorical death and the vastness of what it means to live in a Black body.

Harlan Bozeman (b. 1992) is a lens-based artist whose research-driven practice has focused on confronting the erasure of Black culture and its histories, and investigating the legacies of slavery and its aftermath in the American South. His previous work explored the Gullah Sea Islands communities, specifically Wadmalaw Island where his family is from, and the narratives that serve to prolong their cultural significance.

A graduate of the University of Arkansas, Bozeman earned an MFA in Studio Art and recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Bozeman holds a BA in Journalism from DePaul University in Chicago. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, British Journal of Photography, Der Grief, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Bozeman is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock..
harlanbozeman.com

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

SHANNON EBNER

Shannon Ebner is an artist whose work explores the visual, material and temporal circumstances of language, mostly using photographic means. Attuned to language and its use, Ebner's work is especially concerned with how language appears; where it appears in terms of its site, physical or virtual, and its relation to architecture and landscape; and to whom if anyone, some example of language is attributed. Through photographs, books and installations, Ebner raises questions about the way aspects of language coincide and contribute to our sense of identification, relation, voice and trust in any given instance.

Shannon Ebner (b. 1971, New Jersey) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions have been presented at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford; ICA Miami, Miami; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and MoMA PS1, New York. Ebner’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at museums and institutions such as Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; V-A-C Foundation, Venice; Tate Modern, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; ICA Boston, Boston; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; and Künstlerhaus, Klagenfurt; among others. Ebner was included in the 10th edition of Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; the Daegu Photo Biennial, South Korea; the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice; the 6th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, Venice; and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York. Ebner’s work is included in numerous public collections in both the US and abroad. She is currently chairperson of the Photography Department at Pratt Institute where she is also the series editor for Pounds Per Image (PPI), a Pratt Photography Imprint that is co-published by Dancing Foxes Press.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

MyeongSoo Kim

Myeongsoo Kim (born 1980, Korea), creates process-based works which explore the ineffable, expressive and material limits of images and objects as personal, reflective conduits. He holds a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. His work has been exhibited across the United States, including the BRIC Biennial at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY, in 2019, a solo show at CUE Foundation in 2020, a two person show at Below Grand in 2021, and a solo show at YEH art gallery at St. John’s University in 2022. His most recent exhibition Land Marks, opened in November 2022 at Island Gallery in New York. Kim lives and works in New York, NY.
mkima.com

ARTIST SERIES | FALL 2023

All lectures in the Artist Series are In-Person only, and are free to attend. We ask that you kindly RSVP. Please see individual talks for more information.

Wednesday, September 20, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

DIANA MICHENER

LM: You have unique willingness to understand very difficult moments. The works on the errors of embryologic development and on cadavers show very poignant subjects, so poignant they could be mitigated with a stated purpose of advocacy or education, yet you find the ability simply to be with them. How did you develop this strength?
DM: I photograph with a camera and film and the objects photographed are in front of the lens. I do not invent or place any additional objects, people or landscapes in the image that were not there. The subject matter is real, present. For an image to gather emotion and meaning other than itself, I need to transcend the reality of the reality and create a visual metaphor. I always say film is “hard to heat up.” I do not wish the image to become something it is not, I only want it to be a stimulus for ideas and feelings provoked by looking at the image.
I work in series. When I have an idea, I search for something that will transport my ideas. I ask the subject to take an imaginative leap, like a tumbleweed gaining force amplifying itself and transcending the immediate.
I am often asked how I have the strength to photograph some of the subjects I choose. It is not really about strength, it is about desire. I do not want to close my eyes to any aspect of the human condition. I want my eyes open, curious, constantly restless, looking to find out what it is to be human. I believe by intensely looking, I will find the beauty and wonder in the not known.
LM: The landscapes realistically depict the stunning power in nature. The tonal range of the prints adds a quiescent character. What were your considerations in the printing?
DM: With the landscape series, I did not name or locate the places where the images were taken. I didn’t title them because it would be too specific. I wanted the vastness, the quiet magnitude, and the infinite scale of the sky and the earth to fill the frame of our minds. The absence of any people implies our insignificance.
I do not respond to high contrast landscapes. For me, they become artificial and overly dramatic on paper. I am a great fan of Ansel Adams’ technical prowess and a devoted advocate of his zone system. I always use his methods when I photograph, develop and print. In the landscape series, I desired the prints to have a trance-like, far away feeling with a transformative mystery and aura .
LM: Bones, your recent publication, is a series of images showing these organs. Organs that provide the living with structure and protection. Also, with blood formed in the marrow. They are also the last traces of the dead, our most archival elements. Did the qualities of the subject influence your choice of Platinum Printing or was there another reason? How was this project influenced by your earlier works?
DM: Bones carry with them and within them reverence, they are the witness of a life, the remains. I wanted to honor them and give them the beauty I felt they deserved. I chose to make platinum-palladium prints. It is a handmade process. I made a template the size of the image and I spread the liquid on Hahnemule paper with a glass rod. I did not use a brush for coating the paper because I did not want the texture from the brushstrokes to add another visual element and interfere with our perceptions of the bones. Platinum produces a lush, rich black, and because it is the deepest color and does not absorb light, symbolically, I felt it was appropriate.

Solo Exhibitions:
2016-2017: Anima, Animals - Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris; 2013: Figure Studies – MEP, Paris; 2010: Figure Studies – Nature Morte, Berlin; 2005: Dogs, Fires, Me – Pace/MacGill, New York City; 2001: Silence Me - MEP, Paris; 2001: Morning After Morning – Photo Museum of Ireland, Dublin; 2001: The Wrestlers – Pace/MacGill, New York City; 2000: Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Women’s College, Lynchburg; 1997: Solitaire – Pace/MacGill, New York City; 1996: Heads - Yale School of Architecture, New Haven; 1993: Corpus – Pace/MacGill, New York City; 1981: Beds – Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York City

Group Exhibitions:
2002: R.A.W. or Sirens of the Titan, Kunstmuseum of Appenzel, Switzerland; 2004: Festival Transphotographiques, Lille; 2000: Performance for the Camera, Galerie Christiane Chassay, Montreal; 1983: Coast to Coast: Recent Work, Houston Center for Photography, Houston; 1981: Daniel Wolf Gallery, New York City

Collections:
MoMA, Whitney Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Denver Art Museum, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Randolph Macon Women’s College, The Art Museum at Princeton University

Books:
Mortes (Steidl, 2023), Bones (Steidl, 2023), 28 Figure Studies (Steidl, 2021), Trance (Steidl, 2020), Susie Glenn: A Memoir of Childhood (Enitharmon Editions, 2017), Figure Studies (Steidl, 2010), Sweethearts (Steidl, 2010), Three Poems with Jim Dine (Steidl 2006), Dogs, Fires, Me (Steidl, 2005), Silence Me (MEP, 2001)

Diana Michener lives and works in Paris, France, and Walla Walla, Washington.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

ADAMA DELPHINE FAWUNDU

LM: Photographing Hip hop artists in the 90s was being at the center of such a poignant moment in the genre’s history. Is there a specific memory you would like to share? How did those experiences shape your later courage in expression?
ADF: My work today as a multidisciplinary artist is very much tied into ideas that I was interested in 30 years ago when I started as a photographer documenting Hip Hop culture in NYC. The beauty is 30 years later, I can reflect and understand what wasn't so clear to me back then. Back then, I was very focused on the storytelling aspects of the culture, and I was excited to see this new form of Black culture unfold right in front of my eyes. The 90’s was a special moment, some people call it the Golden Era. . Today, I can appreciate the deep rooted elements indigenous African cultures that reside within Hip Hop culture. After many years of traveling throughout the African continent, I can look at these photographs with a new set of lenses, I can also make a clear connection with the works that I am making now.
One specific memory, is the day that I co-organized a discussion on women in Hip Hop. A group of us gathered at a producer named Nikki Nicole’s house. We all cooked together and had fascinating discussion. Imagine sitting in a living room with people like Lauryn Hill, Nefertiti and Nikki D, talking about the need to use music as vehicle for social change. It was awesome.
LM: You were an integral developer of the MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora publication (2018.) A project of this scope shows a great deal of devotion and integrity. Can you speak to some of the expectations, fears, and wishes of this work? Also, to the experience of gathering the voices of so many women?
ADF: MFON was inspired by the work of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and her book Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers. This book highlights Black women who made photographers from the early days of photography up until the 80’s. Laylah Amatullah and I produced MFON to give exposure to the contemporary women and non-binary artist of African descent. We were quite successful at doing this, with coverage in publications such as The New York Times, Vogue and the BBC. We gave talks at various institutions such as the Tate Modern in London, Harvard University and World Press Photos in Amsterdam. When we originally reached out to publishers in 2004, we were turned down because the publishers didn’t think that we had an audience. In 2014, we resisted the fear of not being able to publish our dream book and self-published. The book is currently sold out and we get tons of requests for a second edition. The beauty about this project is that we’ve created an international network of women and non-binary photographers of African descent.
LM: The For Mama Adama works have an almost instinctual preverbal quality in their usage of process (cyanotype, lumen, block printing) and symbols. How did you reach a balance between the inspiration, your grandmother’s textile work, and the visceral aspects of making the work?
ADF: For Mama Adama is really special work that actually started at Penumbra with cyanotypes. I had been working with my grandmother’s fabrics for a few years, thinking about how to use them without figurative bodies with a strong focus on the body and memory.
I approached this series using my Grandma Adama’s fabrics as a starting point. I used them to create new shapes and symbols using her patterns, then created my own patterns. I constructed negatives from them and used those for my cyanotypes. It felt like this spiritual conversation that I was having with her and also with my broader ancestry.
I made this work in the Fall of 2020 at a very weird time during the pandemic. Some of us were thinking about what really mattered and how do we move forward. It made me really even more concerned about how we think about our earth and our indigenous knowledge.
It was also a time when I got to see what my hands would make. I’m used to taking photos and videos and using the camera as my main tool. To allow my hands to move intuitively and be in the work was revealing. People used to see my grandmother’s work and say “that’s Adama’s work, her hands are in it,” I felt that with this project.
LM: The current exhibition at The Newark Museum of Art includes the work of Sierra Leonean artist Olayinka Miranda Burney-Nicol (1927-1996) alongside your own recent works. Images displayed involved you inserting yourself at sites of Black resistance in Africa and the Americas. Can you speak to the power of ancestral memory?
ADF: If you visit the exhibition you will feel the energy. It’s vibrating energy that makes us think about our past, present, and future. Ever since I started working more intuitively with my hands using collected materials that weighted with memory and stories, I’ve thought of these works as “beings.” It was very exciting to learn that in Yoruba cosmology, what some may call art objects are considered to be alive, breathing with energy. I feel the same about my works, they are definitely alive and charged with the power of ancestral memory. The energy that hopefully help us to understand that we can shape our futures in a beneficial way.
I was excited to work with the archive of Olayinka Miranda Burney-Nicol, to spend time with her block prints and drawings, read more about her life and be inspired by her work. She was a Krío woman from Sierra Leone, a modern artist making interdisciplinary work. I realized how much I have in common with her. Olayinka traveled extensively throught Africa, Europe and the United States and researched indigenous African cultures extensively. Without effort I was in a natural conversation with her, the alignment was really exciting. When my uncle and aunt came to visit the exhibition, they were so surprised to see her name, they all grew up in the same neighborhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a visual artist born in Brooklyn to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She has presented public installations at Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Rutgers/Project for Empty Space, Audible and Federal Hall in New York City. Solo exhibitions and performances include Art@Bainbridge/Princeton University, Penumbra Foundation, the Newark Museum of Art, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, The Miller Theater at Columbia University, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco), African American Museum in Philadelphia and Granary Arts, amongst others.

Her work can be found in the collections at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Princeton University Museum, Bryn Mawr College, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, The David C. Driskell Center (University of Maryland), The Petrucci Family Foundation, The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, as well as private collections. Fawundu’s projects have been supported by Rema Hort Mann Artist Grant and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and the Brooklyn Historical Society Community Initiative Grant.

Fawundu is the a co-founder and author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora – a journal and book representing female photographers of African descent. She was featured in the critically acclaimed Netflix documentary, In Our Mother’s Garden, directed by Shantrelle P. Lewis. In 2022, Adama Delphine Fawundu was awarded a CatchLight Fellowship. She is a full-time professor at Columbia University.

Wednesday, November 1, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

HOLLY LYNTON

LM: Simply by looking at images from your recent book, Bare Handed, and the Meeting Tonight and Ten Thousand Haystacks series, I feel an intimate connection to the subjects, the people shown living a rural life. The photographs were made over many visits to the same communities. Can you speak to the role these individuals have in your life and you in theirs?
HL: They really are relationships. Like all relationships, they are nuanced and change with time and circumstance. The foundation is a collaborative process that begins with me reaching out months in advance of photographing. There is the concrete element of gaining permission to photograph, but it’s also a way to learn about each other before the camera comes into play. For me, to understand to learn details about the ritual, tradition, or activity, and for them, to understand my intentions. Later, in person, I spend a week or more during each visit. This allows for a combination of spontaneous and planned photographs. It also leads to conversations, shared meals, and experiences. I am still the photographer, but also simply a person who is there. I usually return year after year, which is an element that allows for the relationships to become more familiar, to deepen. Over time, trust grows and with it the intimacy and rhythm of the images.
I was on location at a ranch where I’ve been photographing for six years when you sent these questions. People often consider the role of the photographer and what it means to enter and document a community, however I have not often been asked about how they perceive me, so I asked the rancher directly. Here is some of the response: “A chance encounter that became so much more… What began as a work project developed into lifelong relationship that neither of us may have expected…She’s seen the kids grow up…. It’s a relationship built on asking questions, having a dialogue.”
Of course, there is variety. While often a friendship develops, it also happens that there is just a momentary collaboration between me, the photographer, and the person I am photographing.
As a photographer, I’m always striving to make a representative image. I’m also thinking about how to protect people’s privacy, to see and respect them— aspects of any good relationship.
LM: Many of these images are of touch, an element of life which is integral to love, to play, to explorations, and to work. In these photographs you translated the sense of touch to that of sight. What were your technical and artistic considerations in achieving this?
HL: My work is highly intuitive and visceral, so I am not certain I can describe exactly how I do it, except that I also experience fully—with my whole body – most everything I am photographing. I have ridden on buckrakes, gaining a face full of dust, then climbed to the top of the haystack and returned down with hay everywhere. I have spent long hours on a shrimp boat in the middle of the night in air that is so thick you can see it, and entered enclosures with wolves. I will forgo photographing (or photograph and reject the photos) if the light is not right. Photographing gesture is inherent to my practice; it has been a focus since I began photographing as an undergraduate. I am always looking at how we communicate through gesture, how it creates both ambiguity and connection. I become excited when I see a certain gesture that will create a narrative that moves in multiple directions. I also draw on art historical references—from biblical stories and mythology to the history embedded in the land in the U.S. I love chaos, so the more going on in a scene the better. Watching people engaged in a repetitive action for hours, often physical labor, is where I am very comfortable photographing. Their movements become like a dance I can watch and learn, and then I know when to photograph. I also have a background in dance. There are times when I see a photograph happening but cannot move my camera fast enough. Those are tantalizing. Taken literally, much of what I photograph involves people touching—nature, tools, each other. A series I made during the pandemic, Unmasked Relationships, was about teenage siblings and how they were the only same aged “peers” able to touch each other during that time. Building relationships with the people I photograph and having permission to be there also helps me to develop an intimate connection.
LM: The Bees! There are images of a beekeeper peacefully engulfed by the animals. What was it like being in that space?
HL: I photographed Les over a period of three days. At first, I felt fear— the fear of being stung and surrounded by all those bees. This was the first photograph I made for my series Bare Handed, which began with my considering the dichotomy of fear (or danger) and control that I saw reflected in the U.S. media about the wilderness and the land in general. But Les had no fear.
When we made the photographs, I wore a long sleeve button shirt like Les, and at first, a face veil, but it was hard to see through; I eventually discarded it. At times, Les opened a hive, and if he sensed the bees were not in the mood to be disturbed, he closed it back up. He was gentle with them and spoke to them in Spanish, calling each bee: “mamacita.”
Many people report that you can decipher babies’ cries (I never could in those first days of having a newborn), they also say you can tell if a bee is happy or irritated with you by the buzzing. I was not so sure about that either, but one time a bee flew up close to my ear and would not let up. I had to walk her off – and Les said, “yeah she’s not happy with you.” You must move slowly so as not to scare or anger them. It was a little nerve wracking, because bees would land on the camera or my hands while I was photographing, and I could not see them because I was looking through the lens. I was not sure if I could move my hands.
The photo of the bees on his face was Les’s idea. He said he could not hear anything through all the buzzing. It was a meditation for him. Bees don’t like hair, which is why they are not in his beard. It was inspiring to watch, and photographing with Les changed the focus of Bare Handed– it moved it away from fear and danger to mediation and spiritual practice.

Holly Lynton is an artist working primarily in photography with a multidisciplinary, research-based practice that includes writing, historical research, and collaborative works in other media. Her background in psychology inspires her to explore core aspects of humanity, filtered through local contexts. Her photographs are made in rural communities in the United States with a focus on their agricultural history, current industry, and ritual. Through her images, she underscores the importance of having unmediated experiences with nature and explores issues of sustainability. Currently, her work is investigating the intersection of spirituality, labor, and the environment. By incorporating recognizable symbols and allusions, Lynton highlights how cultural visual memory influences what we see in photographs.

Her works are held in public collections such as the Nelson Atkins Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Beinecke Library, MoMA Library, the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Lynton has received an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and the Syngenta Photography Award. Yale University awarded her a postdoctoral research fellowship in 2019 at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for her series Meeting Tonight, an exploration of Methodist camp meetings in South Carolina. Her book Bare Handed was published by L’Artiere Edizioni in 2022. In the fall of 2023, a solo exhibition of her work, Beyond the Bounds, will be on view at the Do Good Fund in Columbus, Georgia.

Wednesday, November 8, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

CARMEN WINANT

LM: I very much wish I had walked through the My Birth MOMA installation. A work using thousands of images of the peri-labor period. You captured the intimacy of what at its core is a two-person process (birthmother and child) with the Intersubjectivity of those supporting the process and also those having taken part in a different birth. How did you use the space to create the elements of intimacy and shared experience?
CW: Do you mean the physical space? If so- it was important that the installation be in that narrow hallway that connected the two larger galleries. We made many jokes about it operating as a birth canal in its own right but in fact there was some truth to that – I wanted the low ceiling, the facing walls, for it to feel as though one was entering an artwork instead of gaze upon it from a safe distance.
I like that you picked up on and responded to the shared-ness of the birth, which was at the center of the project. Even its title, My Birth, (taken from a 1932 Frida Kahlo painting) queried this relationship: whose birth? How, and in what ways, is this experience shared? Both between a care network and between mother and child.
LM: Your 2020 publication, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures, strives to both name the realities of domestic abuse and to celebrate the triumphs of the survivors and their supporters. Helplessness is one of the worst forms of suffering, in experiencing and witnessing. As an artist, how did you create your own emotional space to tolerate that very vulnerable feeling within the work?
CW: That is a hard question to answer. It was difficult. Building relationships as I go is a big part of my process; this research/trust building takes time, and I want it to feel reciprocal. So that is a part of my response: it helps to know and care for the people from whom the material comes. If they trust me, that helps me trust myself. But it is undeniably hard. I kept my emotional guard up when working on that project for three years and once it was installed, I started crying and sort of never stopped. I can’t talk about that project now without crying.
LM: The title, White Women Look Away, is feels like both a command and an exposure, can you speak to the intention? The collages themselves are striking. The looks of perfection are reminiscent of The Stepford Wives or Don’t Worry Darling. The real qualities of the individual are discarded in favor of the idealized Eurocentric version. What were your considerations in the selection of these images?
CW: You know, I made that work some time ago, 2017 I think, and it seems to resonate because it continues to come up. Which is nice, it just always surprises me. It was a part of a larger project called Anita Told the Truth about, obviously, Anita Hill’s bravery and 1991 testimony. It was important for me to acknowledge the implicitness of so many white women in that process, and as a gesture to the larger refusal of so many white women in society (even within feminism) to decenter themselves or otherwise unplug for patriarchal violence.
I had a few books from the same series in my studio – a how-to about hair braiding – and I thought to use them for the strangeness of their swiveled heads. This often happens with material I have on hand, that it opens up into an idea that would otherwise appear to be unrelated.
In a way, that work was meaningful for me – a pivot point. I have worked to very intentionally center multi-racial and intergenerational (and sometimes transnational) feminism in my work more and more. Perhaps this was the beginning of reckoning for me too.

Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University; her work utilizes installation and collage strategies to examine feminist modes of survival and revolt. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, and as part of the CONTACT Photography Festival, which mounted twenty-six of her billboards across Canada. Winant's recent artist’s books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements and A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022). Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is a mother to her two sons, Carlo and Rafa, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

STEFANIE SEUFER

LM: You are an artist using photography’s most basic elements to create highly unique work within this medium. Can you speak to how this began, to the concepts behind it?
SS: Initially I was intent on reportage, documenting the experiences of migrants. These are developing stories on both a societal and individual level, they are full of potentials. Editing to a handful of moments felt like a limit on the subjects' possibilities. I hated the idea of fixing them within time. I began photographing nature and architecture, uncovering all the little mistakes that are inherent to making a picture. I saw a vulnerability within photography, a metaphor for the human condition where things are much more complex than a decisive moment. I began using analog means to negotiate fundamental functions and possible pitfalls of photography. The predominantly cameraless images and sculptural works revolve around concepts such as fleetingness, movement and instability of the individual situation, as well as social systems. I make work about dysfunctional systems not by literally photographing them, but by making visible inherent fragility.
LM: The Towers work establishes an intentional alliance of photographic materials with architectural elements. What initially inspired this union? The repetition of form with the contrast in color gives the viewer a subtly different experience with each tower. Was there a similar experience in making them?
SS: I’m interested in material properties, in the possibilities as well as potential dysfunction. In the Towers series folds and creases in the paper extend photography into space, into three dimensionality.
A flat piece of paper evokes an illusion of architecture with several contradictions: flat/three dimensional, paper/stone ore metal, geometric/dynamic, light/solid, fragile/monumental.
The playful use of illusions is also concerning the color: the colors derive from advertising aesthetics, at least the names of the colors in the titles: Atlas Grey, Dark Aubergine, Ipanema Marine Pearl, Just Yellow can be found in the color palettes of different car brands (Porsche Cayenne etc.). The promising and dazzling names of the colors I translated in the darkroom into visible colors of my own interpretation.
LM: A Parrot’s Song deals with concepts of imitation, copy, and replica, issues central to art making and the human experience. How did you approach processing the repetitions, the similarities and differences with each iteration?
SS: Time and time passing play an important role in my work. Repetitions make time visible, time that passes. Repetition is related to deviation and chance and many other aspects.
The first work with repetition was blind. It is based on simple darkroom basics: Testing the right time of exposure for a negative to be printed by repeating short intervals. The work blind is also based on chance, which is another phenomenon I’m focused on. Blind is followed by other works based on repetition: Falter (folded). The repetitive process of folding and exposure leads to a relief like piece, with color fields in different saturation.
The Towers are based on the same processing continued to sculpture.

Stefanie Seufert explores the relationship between visibility, language and architecture through cameraless processes. She holds degrees in photography from Lette Verein Berlin and cultural studies from Universität der Künste, Berlin, where she also lives and works. Her work has been exhibited at Berlinische Galerie (2019, 2023), Camera Austria International (2010, 2023), DZ Bank Frankfurt, Ezkenazi Museum of Art, Fotogalerie Wien, Austria; Kunsthaus Kollitsch Klagenfurt, Austria; Louisville Photobiennial, Louisville; Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Museum für Fotografie Berlin, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, Kasbah Museum Tanger, Morocco , among others. Seufert́s work is in the collections of Berlinische Galerie, DZ Bank Frankfurt, NBK Berlin, Stiftung Kunstforum Berliner Volksbank, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and various private collections.

Her work has been supported by the following Grants and fellowships: work stipends Kunstfonds Bonn 2022 and 2023, research grant by the Senate Department for Culture and Community, City of Berlin, travel grant by the Senate Department for Culture and Community, City of Berlin, exhibition grant by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, and others.

Stefanie Seufert has published two artist books with Camera Austria International.

Wednesday, December 6, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

LM: In your project An Indian from India you place yourself alongside portraits of Native American’s taken by a white photographer. These works seemingly forming an alliance of different cultures who had been grossly unseen - confused in Columbus’ history, who had both suffered greatly under colonialism. What was your experience in making this work, in reversing the dynamic and going from subject to narrator?
APM: The seed of this project started when, as an immigrant, people would ask me, "Where are you from?" Because of an amalgamation of accents, they would confuse whether I am an "American Indian" or an "Indian from India." That started my interest in the photography history in both North America and South Asia. I became aware of the strange similarities of representation through the colonial lens. It also made me aware of the unequal power between the photographer and the subject. Especially in film cameras, where the photographer created the image, the subject never knew how they were being represented. As a result, I decided to turn the camera on myself and represent the "other Indian" or "East Indian. (The confusion started because Christopher Columbus got lost looking for India and found North America instead.) Using the self-portrait pushes back at the photographer-subject power structure. It gives me the agency to control my representation and use mimicry and humor to get across my concept and message. I see the images as metaphorically holding hands with the Indigenous/Indian to reverse the viewer's gaze to disorient their understanding of our collective history. The work asks the viewer to rethink their perspectives, labeling, and understanding of those outside the majority.
LM: Watching your Smithsonian interview featuring The Unremembered–Indian Soldiers from the Italian Campaign of WWII I’m struck by the sense of togetherness this work has brought viewers. You described audience members marveling at newly discovered history as well as individuals sharing personal family narratives. Can you speak to this power of art in allowing people to explore, see, and share?
APM: This history is known within the South Asian military. But this history is not included in our history books as it is complicated as 2.5 million Indians fought for their colonizer, the British, just before the region of South Asia became independent through a bloody partition of the area into what is now Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Over the years, my work has increasingly become collaborative, and collaborators are empowered to tell their lesser-known histories, trusting that my retelling their stories through transforming their visuals will bring back part of their identity.
On my recent Fulbright to India, I traveled around the country presenting my work at universities and cultural centers and through press articles, asking audiences to share their stories on this history. Many shared their stories and photographs. Others discovered that their family member had been a part of World War II, which added to the marvelment. I think part of the marvel was also seeing some of my process and how I would transform their family photographs to elevate their narrative. As an artist, reframe the complex narratives to make them accessible to any audience. I believe that art can play a role in rising above politics to expand the dialog and discussion. My artwork portrays, through visual storytelling, the missed nuances, shadows, and ironies associated with marginalized histories.
What amazes me is that I walk into these stranger’s homes, and they open up to me. We initially bond by looking at their photo albums. This is one of the strengths of photography. The power to trigger memories and shared storytelling.
LM: You were born in England, spent time in India, and have been living in the US. How has the art community allowed you to express and define the nuances of your own identity?
APM: Several artists who work between cultures fall into an in-between space. What Homi Bhabha calls the third space and the notion of “cultural hybridity.” This hybridity allows us to be cultural chameleons belonging to more than one place. It also allows for an insider/outsider perspective.
I don’t think it is about the art community allowing or not allowing me to express the nuances of my identity. My choice to teach at a university that supports my creative work allows me the independence to express and define the nuances of my own identity.

Stefanie Seufert has published two artist books with Camera Austria International.

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP

Christina Fernandez

LM: Your current work, Suburban Nightscapes (2022- ongoing), brings forth images of your son. What was your experience making and exhibiting work depicting him?
CF: My work strikes a balance between the role of observer and participant. I go back and forth between these two like many lens-based artists. When Diego was young, a toddler, I created work about our neighborhood the series Sereno is the result. I would take Diego on walks near our home and photograph the in – between spaces. All while keeping an eye on my active toddler. The work El Sereno Ruin (Diego) pictures him running to his scooter in blur motion using the foundation of a torn down apartment complex as his playground.
The dynamic shifted through his middle school years. He did not want to be in front of the camera. The View From Here series was born out of road trips we took together in my Jeep. His sense of adventure became a collaborator in my image making.
Suburban Nightscapes is a homage to the young man he has become. The blur in the images represents the passage of time. It is a celebration of young manhood and friendship, the bonds that are formed apart from parents.
In making this work I see and experience the new world he and his friend’s have built. I’m also letting go as he continues to grow and become more independent. Another aspect to the work, that will transpire in the next year will be about the process of my aging and an examination of my role as mother/artist.
LM: Lavanderia (2002) seemingly brings the continual presence of background labor to the phenomenon and urgency of graffiti. You used a large format camera. What were your technical and aesthetic considerations in expressing this?
CF: On a technical level, I used camera movements to reduce glare and my reflection in the storefront glass. I was working with long exposures which created blur motion trails as figures moved. In making this work I connected to Daguerre’s image of Boulevard du Temple (1838.) Daguerre created what is thought to be the first photograph of a person(s). The photograph has two people, a man standing still as he receives his shoeshine and the laborer in blur motion as he shines the shoes. The still man has definitive form while the worker is a ghost image. The theme carries through in the Lavanderia series.
The graffiti is very present in some of the images. There is a boldness there but also a reality of the taggers coming under the cover of night. It straddles a shadow existence with the making of a permanent assertion.
LM: In your 2023 National Gallery of Art interview you state “This whole idea of going somewhere to recoup your identity or to build an identity is incredibly problematic.” Many of your images appear deeply personal, connected to your identity. What potentials and limitations have you experienced in the process of making these works?
CF: I approached going to Mexico from a place of naïveté. Like many people that come from immigrant families I genuinely wanted to discover and connect with something from my ancestral past. What I found was different from what I imagined. There were parts that were very difficult to face, specifically the treatment of indigenous people.
The work that came out of my travels to Oaxaca, the Untitled Multiple Exposure series and Bend both address the gaps between what is imagined and what is actuality and this for me is what makes going back a problematic project. I think that my work that deals with identity leaves that question unresolved and presents it as an ongoing process, rather than something that is fixed.

Christina Fernandez, a Los Angeles–based artist, has spent over three decades conducting rich explorations of migration, labor, gender, her Mexican American identity, and the capacities of photography itself.

She earned her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1989 and her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1996. She is associate professor at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California, where she has been on faculty since 2001. Fernandez’s projects have been featured in major exhibitions including Home—So Different, So Appealing (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017), Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008), East of the River: Chicano Art Collectors Anonymous (Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2000), Flight Patterns (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000), and InSite97 (San Diego and Tijuana, 1997).

Her work has also been exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; Self Help Graphics and Art, Los Angeles; and Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, among other venues. In 2021, Fernandez was one of the first artists honored with the prestigious Latinx Artist Fellowship, an initiative of the US Latinx Art Forum. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is the first major monographic museum exhibition of her work.

ARTIST SERIES | SPRING 2023

All lectures in the Artist Series are In-Person only, and are free to attend. We ask that you kindly RSVP. Please see individual talks for more information.

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

LETHA WILSON

Letha Wilson was born in Hawaii, raised in Colorado, and currently works in Craryville and Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Syracuse University, and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Letha attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009, and her artwork has been shown at many venues including Mass MoCA, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Art in General, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and International Center for Photography. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times, The New Yorker, among others. Letha has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Sharpe -Walentas Studio Program, among others. In both 2019 and 2014 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography, and was awarded the Windgate Artist Residency at SUNY Purchase in Fall 2022. Letha’s exhibition "Folds and Faults" is on view at Higher Pictures Generations through Feb 18, 2023.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

Sabiha Çimen

Sabiha Çimen was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and is currently based between Istanbul and New York. Her work focuses on women in Islamic culture through intimate portraiture and still life imagery. Çimen graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University with an undergraduate degree in International Trade and Finance, and a Masters degree in Cultural Studies. An associate photographer at Magnum Photo Agency, she has received numerous awards including the W. Eugene Smith Grant (2020), Light Work Artist in Residence (2020), World Press Photo, Long-Term Projects, 2nd prize (2020), Canon Female Photojournalist Grant (2020), PH Museum, Women Photographers Grant, 3rd prize (2018). Çimen’s first monograph, HAFIZ, published by RedHook Editions, received the First PhotoBook Award at the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards.

Wednesday, March 29, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

PHIL CHANG

Phil Chang received his MFA from The California Institute of the Arts and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. Solo exhibitions include The Fulcrum Press (2023), M+B (2022, 2017, and 2014), The Suburban (2019), Praz-Delavallade (2015), The California Museum of Photography (2015), and LAXART (2012). Chang’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Eastman Museum, and Transformer Station. His work has been written about in Artforum, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Artforum.com, nonsite.org and has appeared in Aperture, Blind Spot, Photography Is Magic, and The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Chang’s publications include Four Over One, an artist’s book published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Jonathan Maghen. Chang’s academic appointments include California State University, Bakersfield, the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Otis College of Art & Design, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Phil Chang lives and works in Los Angeles.

Wednesday, April 12, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

ALAN HUCK

Alan Huck is a photographer, writer, and educator based in Chicago. His first monograph, I walk toward the sun which is always going down, was published by MACK and shortlisted for the 2020 Rencontres d’Arles Photo-text Book Award. He serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Collective mentorship program and teaches various interdisciplinary photography courses through the Penumbra Foundation.

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

Keisha Scarville

Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with transformation, place, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the 2022 Fotofest Biennial, Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, Lightwork Syracuse, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Higher Pictures Generation Gallery, and Baxter Street CCNY. She has participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Stoneleaf, Baxter Street CCNY, BRIC Workspace, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Transition, Nueva Luz, Small Axe, Oxford American, Hyperallgeric, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at Parsons School of Design.

Wednesday, May 10, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

Aaron Turner

Aaron Turner is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience in two main areas of the U.S., the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Aaron also uses the 4x5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, and abstraction. Aaron received his M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts Alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, and 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Wednesday, May 17, 2023 | In-Person 7:00PM

Nadezda Nikolova

Nadezda Nikolova's work reflects her deep connection to landscape and fascination with the photo-based object. Using light, wet plate collodion, paper cut-outs, cliché verre, and brushes, she creates camera-less compositions that allude to organic forms found in nature. Rather than transcribing the observed, she records intuitive responses that speak to the felt and ineffable experience of being fully present in the landscape: a sense of wonder, awe, and permeating immanence, while simultaneously meditating on loss, hope, and meaning. Born in 1978 in former Yugoslavia, Nikolova studied 19th century phototrophic printing processes at the University of Kentucky and the George Eastman Museum. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is currently based in Oakland, California and is represented by HackelBury Fine Art and Esther Woerdehoff Gallery.

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2022

Wednesday, September 28th, 2022 | 7:00PM

PRADIP MALDE

Pradip Malde is a photographer and professor at the University of the South, Sewanee, TN. Much of his work considers the experience of loss and how it serves as a catalyst for regeneration. He received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, which resulted in his book, From Where Loss Comes and is represented in the collections of the Museum of the Art Institute, Chicago; Princeton University Museum; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Yale University Museum and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, among others.

Malde studied photography at what is now the Arts University of Bournemouth, England, and completed a MA at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 1979. He moved to Orkney, Scotland in 1980. It was there that he began, with Dr. Mike Ware, to reformulate the platinum/palladium printing process, which resulted in the publication of Platinotype, Routledge, 2021, and led to a set of extensive collaborations with the Imogen Cunningham Trust, the Margrethe Mather Estate, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, among others.

pradipmalde.com

Pradip Malde will also be signing his book From Where Loss Comes. To learn more about the book or purchase, please click here.

Wednesday, October 12th 2022 | 7:00PM

TIM CARPENTER ‡ BRAD ZELLAR (IN CONVERSATION)

Tim Carpenter (Illinois, 1968) is a photographer, writer, and educator who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is the author of several photobooks, among them Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road; Local objects; township (with Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Brad Zellar); Bement grain; Still feel gone (with Nathan Pearce); The king of the birds; and A house and a tree. Local objects was included in the 2018 exhibition “American Surfaces and the Photobook” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was listed for the Kassel Photobook Award 2018.

Tim received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and in 2015 co-founded TIS books. He is a faculty member of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program, serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Mentorship Program, and is a co-proprietor of Distant Zine.

Brad Zellar is a writer and editor who has collaborated with photographer Alec Soth on a number of projects, including The LBM Dispatch, a series of seven newspapers that explored the status of American community in the age of cyberspace. Zellar has also made books with Adrianna Ault, Raymond Meeks, Tim Carpenter, and Jason Vaughn, and is the author of Suburban World: The Norling Photos, Conductors of the Moving World, House of Coates, and Driftless. His novel, Till the Wheels Fall Off (Coffee House Press), was released in July. He lives in St. Paul.

Wednesday, October 19th, 2022 | 7:00PM

SUSAN LIPPER

Susan Lipper has published her work in the trilogy of books comprised of Grapevine (1994), trip (1999), and Domesticated Land (2018). She is recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.

susanlipper.com

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022 | 7:00PM

MYRA GREENE

Myra Greene currently resides in Atlanta, GA where she is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Art & Visual Culture and Director of the Photography Program at Spelman College. Through her last bodies of artistic work, Greene utilizes the media of photography and fiber to explore representations of race and the body. At the center of her practice is a consideration of how our understanding of color is completely dependent on context – materially, culturally, and historically. Recent exhibitions including Spectrum at the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, continue these interests, interweaving three different bodies of work that present a diverse yet unified consideration of our relationship to and interpretation of color, race, and identity.

Named the 2021 Georgia State Fellow from South Arts, Greene’s work is in the permanent collection of The High Museum in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Myra Greene’s work has been featured in national exhibitions in galleries and museums including The New York Public Library, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Williams College Museum of Art, Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Sculpture Center in New York City. Myra Greene was born in New York City and received her B.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico.

myragreene.com

Wednesday, November 16th, 2022 | 7:00PM

TINE GUNS

Tine Guns (BE. 1983) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. She is working on her PhD, entitled The Photobook as a Visual Page-Turner: To Move and be Moved (LUCA / KU Leuven), and participated in Bioscopic Books: Artist’s books as seen through the cinema eye (LUCA). She currently teaches at the Mixed Media Studio of LUCA, School of Arts Gent.

She has exhibited in Cinematek/BOZAR Brussels, Netwerk Aalst and Casino Luxembourg. Her films were screened at festivals like Jean Rouch Festival in Paris and biennials like Ostrale in Dresden. Her photos were selected for Voies Off Arles, Antwerp Photo and Salut d’honneur Jan Hoet. In 2015 she was selected for .tiff Young Artists Belgium after a nomination by FOMU Antwerp, while her artist’s book The Diver was shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award. She was awarded the 2017 Biennial Prize for Visual Arts by the Province of East-Flanders.

tineguns.com

Wednesday, November 30th, 2022 | 7:00PM

ERIC WILLIAM CARROLL

Eric William Carroll’s work on photography, science, and nature explores the differences in how we experience, organize, and represent the world. Through his photographs, installations, and performances, Carroll creates visual and emotional connections that span enormous distances in space and time. As a public scholar, Carroll activates archives and collaborates playfully with artists and non-artists alike. At the heart of his practice is a genuine sense of curiosity and humor that questions traditional binary relationships.

Carroll’s work has been shown widely and has been included in exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Aperture Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Pier 24 Photography, among others. Carroll has participated in residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Rayko Photo Center and the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary, and was the winner of the 2012 Baum Award for Emerging Photographers. Born and raised in the Midwest, Carroll is currently based in Asheville, North Carolina.

ericwilliamcarroll.com

Wednesday, December 14th, 2022 | 7:00PM

FIONA ANNIS

Fiona Annis is a Canadian artist whose work explores the enigmatic nature of photography. Her practice is not limited to a single technology, method, or subject, but investigates the fundamental elements of photography, such as light, paper, chemistry, and time. With a sustained engagement with analogue materials and processes, Fiona integrates this historic knowledge with a deeply contemporary approach. Hers is an artistic path that evokes both the legacy of the past and the promise of a future.

Fiona has exhibited in art institutions worldwide including: The AC Institute (New York City), The Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal), Goldsmith’s University (London), Low Salt Gallery (Glasgow), Museo Novecento (Naples), Gallery44 (Toronto), VU Photo (Québec City) and The Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton). Her artwork is featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Civilization in Quebec City, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the public art collection of the city of Ottawa. Fiona is the recipient of residency fellowships by the Brucebo Foundation (Capodimonte Museum of Astronomical Instruments, Italy), the Jarislowsky Prize (Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada) and the Quebec Research Fund for Society and Culture (Penumbra Foundation, New York City). Fiona is also the co-founder of The Society of Affective Archives, with projects that include exhibitions and large-scale permanent public artworks. Annis has a master’s degree from the Glasgow School of Art and an interdisciplinary doctoral degree from Concordia University.

fionaannis.com

Online: April 10th, 2021, 11:00 AM (EST)

NOÉMIE GOUDAL

(FROM PARIS, FRANCE)

Born in 1984, Noémie Goudal graduated from the Royal College of Art and the St Martins School in London. She lives and works in Paris. Her recent solo exhibitions took place at the Finnish Museum of Photography (Helsinki, 2018), Fotografiska (Stockholm, 2018), Le BAL (Paris, 2016), The Photographers’s Gallery (London, 2015), the FOAM (Amsterdam, 2015) and The New Art Gallery Walsall (UK, 2014). In 2019, her work has been shown at the Musée des Beaux Arts of Le Locle in Switzerland, at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery in Australia and at the Kuntsverein in Hildesheim, Germany. She has participated in numerous group shows in institutions such as the Saatchi gallery in 2013 or the Venice Biennale in 2015 (Pavillion of Azerbaijan). Goudal’s work is held in the permanent collections of FOAM museum (NL), The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (IN), Fotomuseum Winterthur (DE), The New Art Gallery Walsall (UK), Musée de la Roche-Sur-Yon (FR) and private collections in America, Europe and Asia. She has received awards from leading photographic organisations including HSBC Prix pour la Photographie in 2013 (France), in 2018 she has received the Mention of Honor of the Shpilman International Prize (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem), she has been nominated for the Prix Pictet and for the Deutsche Börse Prize from 2016 to 2019, and for the Foam Paul Huf Award (Holland) in 2013, 2014 and 2018. In 2018, she did a residency at the Richard Neutra House in Los Angeles, and is currently in residency at La Manufacture de Sèvres in France. Goudal is represented in London by Edel Assanti (London) and Les Filles du Calvaire (Paris).

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2020

Online: November 19th, 2020, 02:00 PM (EST)

CHRISTIANE FESER

(FROM FRANKFURT, GERMANY)

Christiane Feser was born in Würzburg, Germany in 1977. She studied photography at the Offenbach University of Art and Design in Germany. Feser was recently included in the exhibition Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Other museum exhibitions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Firenze, Italy; the Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar, Germany; Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Museum for Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Germany. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, the Mönchehaus Museum and the DZ Bank Art Collection among others. The artist lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.

Online: October 27th, 2020, 7:00 PM (EST)

KIM BEIL: GOOD PICTURES, GREAT MISTAKES

BOOK PRESENTATION: GOOD PICTURES: A HISTORY OF POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIM BEIL
(in conversation with Adam Katseff)

Good Pictures tracks 50 stylistic trends through the history of the medium, from the origin of the Rembrandt Effect and hand-painted photographs in the nineteenth century to the intentional use of motion blur, grainy film, and lens flare in the twentieth century—and, of course, selfies, digital filters and more today. This talk focuses on a recurring theme within these trends: the adoption of former photographic failures for aesthetic effect. Beil will trace the history of several trends that mined the mistakes of previous generations for new visual material. These trends challenge the notion of photography as a history of straightforward technological progress and, instead, suggest that seeking out the medium’s limitations is as important as any new tool or technique.

About the Author:

Kim Beil teaches art history at Stanford University and writes about modern and contemporary art for publications including Artforum, Art in America, and Photograph. She thinks of Instagram as research and can be found @kim.beil

Online: October 15th, 2020, 07:00 PM (EST)

ROBERTO HUARCAYA

(FROM LIMA, PERU)

Roberto Huarcaya was born in Lima in 1959. He obtained a degree in Psychology at the Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima, 1978-1984), and studied cinema at the Instituto Italiano de Cultura (Lima, 1982) and Photography at the Centro del Video y la Imagen (Madrid, 1989), and taught Photography at the Universidad de Lima (1990-1993), at the Gaudi Institute (Lima, 1993-1997) and at the Centro de la Fotografía, now Centro de la Imagen (Lima, since 1999) of which he is the founder and director. He has held solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in Lima, Buenos Aires, London, Sao Paulo, Lisbon, and other cities throughout Latin America and Europe, among which stand out “Deseos, Temores y Divanes” (Lima, 1990), “Fotografías” (Lima, 1992), “Continuum” (Lima, 1994), “La Nave del Olvido” (Lima, 1996, Paris, 1997 and Barcelone, 1998), “Temps Rêvés” (Paris, 1998), “Ciudad Luz” (Lima, 2000), Devenir (Guayaquil, 2003 and Santiago, 2004), El Último Viaje (Buenos Aires, 2004), Antológica (Lima, 2004), “Entre Tiempos” (Lima, 2005), “Ambulantes” (London, 2007), “Obra Reciente at Dina Mitrani Gallery” (Miami, 2011), “Sala Luis Miró Quesada Garland, El Ojo Ajeno Gallery (Lima, 2011) and the Casa de América de Lisboa (Portugal, 2011), “Anemogramas”, Casa Rimac (Lima 2014), Bienal de Korea (Daugu 2014), Dina Mitrani Gallery (Miami, 2015), Parque Rodo Gallery in Montevideo, (Uruguay 2016) Venice Biennale, (Italy 2016), Lisbon, (Portugal, 2107). His work is in the collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, the MOLAA Museum of Latin American Art in California, the CoCA Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, the Lehigh University Art Collection, the Art Museum of Lima (Peru), the San Marcos Museum in Lima (Peru), the América Foundation in Santiago (Chile), the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center in Havana (Cuba), and the Hochschild and Mulder Private Collection, among others.

Online: Tuesday, September 29th, 2020. 7PM (EST)

Artists Christine Elfman and Whitney Hubbs discuss, through presentations of their work, their ongoing projects and different photographic practices. Elfman and Hubbs are recipients of the 2020 Penumbra Workspace Program. Australian-British artist and 2020 Penumbra Workspace Program jury member Odette England moderates their conversation.

About the participants:

Christine Elfman is a visual artist who makes photographs about and through the process of fading. She makes pictures out of their own disappearance, to see how the desire for pictorial permanence gives way to change and the invisible. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts and BFA from Cornell University. Her recent awards include a Light Work Grant in Photography and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Exhibition. Elfman currently lives in central New York. She is represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco.

Whitney Hubbs is a photographer who obsesses about giving it up to become a drawer or a musician, but in reality she likes taking pictures too much. She changes her photographic mind a lot, meaning her subject matter varies because she doesn’t want to get bored. Hubbs was raised and educated in California but currently lives and teaches in western New York. She is represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in NYC.

Odette England has shown in more than 90 solo, two-person and group exhibitions worldwide. She is the Visiting Artist-in-Residence at Amherst College, a resident artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York, and director of the Winter Garden Photograph project, for which she received a grant from the Mellon Foundation. She received a four-year fully-funded Research Training Program Scholarship to complete her PhD at the Australian National University in 2018, and has an MFA in Photography with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design.

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2019

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019 | 7:00PM

MARK STEINMETZ

Mark Steinmetz is a photographer who resides in Athens, Georgia (USA). He has published several books with the Nazraeli Press (Paso Robles, CA): South Central, South East, Greater Atlanta, Summertime, Italia, The Ancient Tigers of my Neighborhood, Paris in my time, The Players, and a three volume set, Angel City West. Stanley/Barker (London) has published 15 Miles to K-ville, and Past K-ville. Summer Camp (Nazraeli) and Carnival (Stanley/Barker) are due out later this year. Steinmetz’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and others. He has taught photography at Harvard University, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, Emory University, and The University of Hartford MFA Program. Steinmetz is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Steinmetz had one-person shows at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans) in 2015, and at the Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York) and Lothringer13 Halle (Munich) in 2017. His work on the Atlanta airport, Terminus, was shown at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) in the spring of 2018, and he had a one-person show at Fotohof in Salzburg, Austria in early 2019. Mark Steinmetz is co-director of The Humid, a photographic workshop and gathering space, with his wife, Irina Rozovksy. He is represented by Claxton Projects in Brooklyn.

marksteinmetz.net/

Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 | 7:00PM

DRU DONOVAN

Dru Donovan received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2009. Donovan’s work has shown nationally and internationally at venues including the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum, the 2019 Portland Biennial, at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Donovan’s photographs have been published in Aperture Magazine, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine, and Matte Magazine. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. In 2011-2012 she participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency. Awards received include the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016. Donovan currently teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where she lives and works.

drudonovan.com/

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019 | 7:00PM

LIZ NIELSEN

Liz Nielsen is a Brooklyn based artist whose works have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Paris, London, Budapest, Amsterdam and Berlin. Her photographs are printed in the analog color darkroom with handmade negatives and found light sources. Each photograph is Unique, ranging in size from 100" x 100" to 8" x 8".
Liz earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004, her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, and her BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University in 1997. Nielsen's works have been reviewed in The New Yorker, The Financial Times, The British Journal of Photography, The New York Times, LensCulture, FOAM magazine, and ArtSlant among others.
Liz is represented by Danziger Gallery in New York, SOCO Gallery in North Carolina, Horizont Gallery in Budapest, Black Box Projects in London, and NextLevel Galerie in Paris.

liznielsen.com/

Tuesday, October 29th, 2019 | 7:00PM

ODETTE ENGLAND

Odette England received an MFA with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012and a PhD in Art & Art History from the Australian National University in 2018. England’s work has shown nationally and internationally in more than 85 exhibitions. Venues include: George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, NY), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe, NM), Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, IN), Center for Photography at Woodstock (Woodstock, NY), Perth Center for Photography (Perth, Western Australia), MacDonald Stewart Art Center, University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada). England has been published in American Photo, Photograph, The Brooklyn Rail, Photo District News, Hotshoe International, the British Journal of Photography and Australian Art Monthly, among others. Awards England has received include the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Emerging Photographers Award (UK winner, twice) and the CENTER Project Launch Award. England is also a recipient of The Print Center Honorary Council Award for Excellence (2018). Recent artist residencies include the prestigious invitation-only Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida (2018). England is represented in the US (east coast) by Klompching Gallery.

klompching.com/odette-england-1

Tuesday, October 15th 2019 | 7:00PM

RICHARD T. WALKER

Richard T. Walker’s videos, photographic works, sculptural installations and performances take solitude, human nature and dialogue as their subjects. Focusing on the experience of our surrounding environments, his works highlight clashes between innate desire, cultural interpretation and the reality of lived experience. Selected solo exhibitions include; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; di Rosa, Napa, California; The Contemporary Austin; ASU Museum, Tempe, Arizona; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Carroll/Fletcher, London; Angels Barcelona; Spike Island, Bristol; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; and Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis. Richard was has shown in multiple group and 2 person exhibitions at venues including; CAPITAL, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Museum of Modern Art, Rio De jenero; Kulturhuset Stockholm; Witte De With Rotterdam and K21 in Dusseldorf. He received an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London (2005) and is currently based in San Francisco. He has been a recipient of the fellowship at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and received an Artadia Award in 2009. He was an Irvine Fellow at the Montalvo Art Center and has been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2017 he was awarded a Fleishhacker Eureka Fellowship Grant.

richardtwalker.net/

Tuesday, October 8th, 2019 | 7:00PM

RODRIGO VALENZUELA

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. Recent solo exhibitions include Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA (2018); Portland Art Museum, OR (2017); McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte, NC (2017); Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita (2016); and Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2015). Group exhibitions include the Kitchen, New York (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2018); Drawing Center, New York (2017); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2016); Tacoma Art Museum (2016); and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2016). He received a Core Program fellowship from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and his recent residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2017), an Art Matters grant (2016), the Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award (2014), the Texas Contemporary Award (2014), and a University of California Institute for Research in the Arts grant (2013).

rodrigovalenzuela.com/

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES SPRING 2019

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019 | 7:00PM

MARY ELLEN BARTLEY

Mary Ellen Bartley is known for her photographs exploring the tactile and formal qualities of the printed book and its potential for abstraction.

She has exhibited in numerous institutions including The Queens Museum, The Walker Art Center, Houston Center for Photography, Parrish Art Museum, and The Watermill Center.

One aspect of her practice is working in unique libraries and archives where she responds to collections and their habitats developing projects over time spent with them. Bartley was a Watermill Center 2015 Artist in Residence and worked with the library there creating the installation and book Reading Robert Wilson. In 2017 she created an installation Library Copies at The Queens Museum working with Andrew Beccone’s Reanimation Library. Her series Reading Grey Gardens made at the legendary East Hampton estate was exhibited at The Drawing Room Gallery last fall. Bartley’s current project is from her work with the library and music archives at The Pollock Krasner House.

maryellenbartley.com

Friday, April 5th, 2019 | 7:00PM

MONA KUHn

Mona Kuhn is best known for her large-scale photographs of the human form. Her approach is unusual in that she develops close relationships with her subjects, resulting in images of remarkable intimacy, and creating the effect of people naked but comfortable in their own skin. In addition, Kuhn's playful combination of visual strategies, such as translucency explores our connectedness with the environment. A sublime sense of comfort and intelligence permeates her works, showing the human body in its most natural state while simultaneously re-envisioning the nude as a contemporary canon of art. Kuhn was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1969, of German descent. In 1989, Kuhn moved to the US and earned her BA from The Ohio State University, before furthering her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently and independent scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Mona Kuhn’s first monograph, Photographs, was debuted by Steidl in 2004; followed by Evidence (2007), Native (2010), Bordeaux Series (2011), and Private (2014). Mona's upcoming books titled Bushes and Succulents (Stanley Barker Books) and She Disappeared into Complete Silence (Steidl) are being released this Fall 2018, during Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, Paris. Occasionally, Mona teaches at UCLA and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.Mona Kuhn’s work is in private and public collections worldwide, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Kiyosato Museum in Japan. Kuhn's work has been exhibited at The Louvre Museum and Le Bal in Paris; The Whitechapel Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London; Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland; Leopold Museum in Vienna, and Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Mona Kuhn lives and works in Los Angeles.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019 | 7:00PM

Kristine potter

Kristine Potter is a photographer currently based in Nashville, Tennessee and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. She has earned a BA in Art History and BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia and received a MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2005. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at such spaces as: The Georgia Museum of Art, The Neuberger Museum of Art, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, Equinom Gallery in San Francisco, 601 Art Space, and The Girls Club Foundation. Potter’s work is in numerous public and private collections including at the Georgia Museum of Art, and has been published in Contact Sheet, Paper Journal, California Sunday Magazine, The Photobook Review, the catalog “Re-Framing the Feminine,” and in a single signature book by Roman Nvmerials Press. Her first monograph “Manifest”was published by TBW Books in 2018.

Tuesday, March 12th, 2019 | 7:00PM

Whitney hubbs

Born and raised in Southern California with a brief stint in Portland, Oregon, Whitney Hubbs was involved in the punk rock riot grrrl community from a young age, where she made fanzines, organized art shows, participated in performances and worked as an activist. She later received her BFA from the California College of Arts in 2005 and an MFA at UCLA in 2009. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University. Hubbs is currently represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in New York City. She currently lives in New York state.

Hubbs is an Assistant Professor at Alfred University.

whitneyhubbs.com/

Tuesday, March 5th 2019 | 7:00PM

ERICA BAUM

Erica Baum (b. 1961, New York) has become internationally known for her photographic work delving into and mining found sources of text and image. Recent museum and public exhibitions include Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, The New York Public Library, The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, The Jewish Museum, New York, 2017; Photo-Poetics:  An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Reloaded - Concrete Trends, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany; After Dark, Mamco, Geneva, all 2015. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include A Long Dress, Bureau, New York (Jan. 2019) Erica Baum Naked Eye Nature Morte, Galerie Crèvecouer, Paris, France; Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, New York, 2017; The Following Information, Bureau, New York, 2016; Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, 2015; The Paper Nautilus, Bureau, New York, 2014; Erica Baum, Kunstverein Langenhagen, Langenhagen, Germany, 2013; Erica Baum: Blanks/Naked Eye Anthology, Melas Papadapoulos, Athens, 2013; and Naked Eye Anthology, Bureau, New York, 2012. Selected biennials include; AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence  of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012. Her work is held in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and the Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

In COnversation

Tuesday, February 19th, 2019 | 7:00PM

LOIS CONNER & VICTORIA SAMBUNARIS

Image © Lois Conner. From the series Campagna. Courtesy of the Artist. — Image © Lois Conner. From the series *Campagna*. Courtesy of the Artist.

‘I am an obsessive collector and observer of the landscape. What initially sends me out into the unknown is often a photograph or painting that haunts me because of its absolute unfamiliarity. What I end up uncovering is unpredictable, surprising, and often exhilarating. Trying to describe that encounter visually through photography is nearly impossible. It's also invigorating trying to twist what the camera faithfully describes into something of fiction. The camera's elongated rectangle can, through the confluence of light, circumstance, chance, and a dozen other factors, conjure up a world, one seemingly half-imagined, or one that breathes with the life of thousands of years of history. Sometimes it simply acknowledges the beauty of the land.’

Carrying her 7”x17” and 8”x10” cameras by bicycle, boat, cart, or thrown over her shoulder, she navigates the land slowly. Her photographs allow the viewer to approach the landscape with a more cumulative perspective. Although human presence is not explicit in all of her photographs, it is subtly implied in a way that allows the world to be believably rescaled.

Conner has been awarded numerous awards, including an Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship, as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts.

Her books include: A Long View, Shanghai Center of Photography, 2018; Lotus Leaves, Wairarapa Academy, New Zealand, 2018; Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial, Princeton Architectural Press, 2014; Beijing Building, Rossi and Rossi, London, 2012; Life in a Box, Hanart, Hong Kong, 2010; Twirling the Lotus, Rossi and Rossi, London, 2007; and China: The Photographs of Lois Conner, Callaway, NY, 2000.

loisconner.net

Image © Victoria Sambunaris. Untitled, (Train crossing Great Salt Lake, UT), 2016. (Click to see full image). Courtesy of the artist. — Image © Victoria Sambunaris. *Untitled*, (Train crossing Great Salt Lake, UT), 2016. (Click to see full image). Courtesy of the artist.

Each year, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey in which she investigates specific aspects of the contemporary American landscape. Equipped with a 5x7 inch field camera, she crosses the country by car for several months per year. Her large-scale photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political and industrial interventions, where nature and culture meet in unexpected, nuanced relationships.

Her ongoing series, “Taxonomy of a Landscape” pays special attention to the contradictory currents that she has thoroughly researched and which is clearly evidenced in her images of the landscape. There we often find the intrusion of industrial manufacturing onto the land as both a symbol and as the continuing use and need of natural materials being transformed and transferred nation-wide as central to future technological and consumer transactions. The central contradictions are imbedded in most of the images – the needs and habits of a society that, at the same time, is destroying the landscape and the resources it needs to subsist.

Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999. She is the recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. “Taxonomy of a Landscape” debuted at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY in 2011 and traveled throughout the country. Her first monograph “Taxonomy of a Landscape” was published by Radius Books in 2014. Sambunaris is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery.

victoriasamburanis.com | #victoriasambunaris

Tuesdays, October 2nd—November 13th | 7:00 pm

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2018

Tuesday, November 13th, 2018 | 7:00PM

ANSLEY WEST RIVERS

Ansley West Rivers is an artist whose photographic practice focuses on the intersection of landscape and humanity. Her work is featured in many public and private collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, The Judge Collection, LaGrange Art Museum and The Mayo Collection. Additionally, West Rivers's work has been shown at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (San Francisco, CA), Sous Les Etoiles Gallery (New York, NY), Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver BC), EUQINOM Projects (San Francisco, CA), The Brower Center (Berkley, CA), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), Carmel Visual Arts (Carmel, CA), Hathaway Gallery (Atlanta, GA), United Photo Industries (DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY), The Print Center (Philadelphia, PA), The Wiregrass Museum (Dothan, AL), and Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA). West Rivers has an upcoming solo exhibition of Seven Rivers at the Telfair Academy of Art in Savannah, Georgia. She received her BFA from the University of Georgia and MFA from the California College of the Arts. She currently lives in the Low Country of Georgia where she restored a 1930s cabin for her studio on her family’s organic farm. ansleywest.com

Tuesday, October 30th, 2018 | 7:00PM

RACHELLE BUSSIÈRES

Rachelle Bussières (b.1986, Quebec City, Canada) received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2015. She is the recipient of the 2015 Graduate Fellowship Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, California; and the Award for Excellence from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation in 2008 and 2009. In 2015, she received an Honorable Mention for the Snider Prize from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her work has recently been exhibited at Johansson Projects, the General French Consulate (San Francisco, CA), the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA), R/SF Projects (San Francisco, CA), Galerie l’Inlassable (Paris, FR), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and Present Company (New York, NY). In the last two years, she was awarded residencies at the Banff Centre in Alberta, the Vermont Studio Center and the SIM residency in Iceland. She is currently a Charter Resident at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.

rachellebussieres.com

Wednesday, October 24, 2018 | 7:00PM

ADAM PUTNAM

Adam Putnam is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has appeared in various exhibitions and institutions worldwide including 2008 Whitney Biennial; the 2nd Moscow Biennial, Busan Biennial, South Korea, MoMA P.S.1 and The Astrup Fearnley Museum (Oslo). Curatorial projects have included an exhibition of Martin Wong entitled Everything Must Go at P.P.O.W. and Blow Both of Us at Participant Inc. Recent projects have included solo exhibitions P.P.O.W. gallery, Galveston Artist Residency Gallery and the Munchen Kunstverein (Munich).

ppowgallery.com/artist/adam-putnam

Tuesday, October 16th, 2018 | 7:00PM

Jordan Sullivan

Jordan Sullivan is an artist based in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY. His work within landscapes and urban environments explores the borders that exist between abandonment and loss, hope and resilience, the spirit and the body. Sullivan’s work is held in a number of international collections and has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Rubber Factory (New York City), Next Level Gallery (Paris, FR), MAMA (Los Angeles, CA), and Ampersand Gallery (Portland, OR). Sullivan is the author of 28 photobooks, zines, and artist books, most recently Looking After Angels (Paradigm Publishing, 2018), Death Valley (Ampersand Editions, 2017), and Remaining Light (Silas Finch Foundation, 2017). His artist book, Natural History, was featured in the International Center for Photography Triennial (2013), and a number of his books are included in the library collections of SF MOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, The Amon Carter Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others. His photographs and curatorial projects have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, The New York Times T Magazine, Lenscratch, Elephant, Russh, Juxtapoz, and The New Yorker. Sullivan, though self-taught as a photographer, studied fine arts at the University of Michigan and University College London.

jordan-sullivan.com

Tuesday, October 9th, 2018 | 7:00PM

ERIN SHIRREFF

Erin Shirreff was born in British Columbia, Canada, and now lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Palazzo De'Toschi, Bologna (2018); Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2018); Fonderie Darling, Montreal (2017); and the Kunsthalle Basel (2016). A survey exhibition of photographs, sculpture, and video was co-curated by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 2015-16. Her work was recently included in these group shows: Le lieu du film, Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018); Slow Objects, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2017); Gray Matters, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2017);Photography Today: Distant Realities, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2016); L’image volée, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); and Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). Shirreff's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, LACMA, The Museum of Modern Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

erinshirreff.com

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018 | 7:00PM

MARCO BREUER

Marco Breuer has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. One-person museum exhibitions include Line of Sight at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, New Pictures 2: Marco Breuer at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Circa 1999 at the MIT List Visual Art Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Morgan Library & Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Drawing Center, and White Columns in New York; the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas; and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the George Eastman Museum in Rochester; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany. Breuer is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship (2006) and the inaugural Larry Sultan Photography
Award (2015). Monographs of Marco Breuer’s work include SMTWTFS (Roth Horowitz, 2002), Early Recordings (Aperture, 2007), and Color (Blackdog, 2015). Breuer has been a guest lecturer at Yale School of Art, Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the San Francisco Art Institute, among others; and has taught photography at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and in the MFA program at Bard College.

marcobreuer.com

Image © Marco Breuer. Untitled (C-1656), 2014. Chromogenic paper, folded/burned/scraped. 22-1/2 x 16-13/16 inches, unique. Collection of Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.

IN CONVERSATION

Friday, September 14th, 2018 | 7:00PM

ASPEN MAYS AND KLEA MCKENNA IN CONVERSATION WITH CURATOR JOSHUA CHUANG

Image © Klea McKenna. From the series Generation: Snakes InThe Garden, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist. — Image © Klea McKenna. From the series *Generation: Snakes InThe Garden,* 2018. Courtesy of the Artist.

Klea McKenna is a visual artist whose work has been shown and published internationally at venues such as SFMOMA, Datz Museum of Art in Korea, The Museum of Photographic Arts and the Hecksher Museum in NY. Her photograms are held in the collection of the SFMOMA, LACMA, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection and the Mead Museum of Art . McKenna is represented by Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles and Euqinom Projects in San Francisco. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and their young daughter.

A new body of work, GENERATION, opens this September in both Los Angeles (Von Lintel, September 8th) and New York (Gitterman Gallery, September 12th).

kleamckenna.com | @klea_mckenna

Image © Aspen Mays. Hugo 3, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures. — Image © Aspen Mays. *Hugo 3*, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.

Aspen Mays was born in 1980 in Asheville, North Carolina and received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Center for Ongoing Projects & Research in Columbus, Ohio and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Mays was a 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Chile, where she spent time with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Art Papers, the New Yorker and the New York Times. She is currently Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. Mays lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

A new body of work, opens this September in New York (Higher Pictures, September 15th).

aspenmays.com

Joshua Chuang is The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Associate Director for Art, Prints and Photographs, and The Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library.

Tuesdays, February 21st—March 28th | 7:00 pm

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES SPRING 2018

Thursday, April 5th, 2018 | 7:00PM

BINH DANH

Binh Danh emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war —work that deals with “mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality.” His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on nineteenth-century photographic processes, applying them in an investigation of battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, and many others. He currently is a professor of photography at Arizona State University.

binhdanh.com

Image © Binh Danh.Shoshone Falls, Idaho. Daguerreotype, 6.5 x 8.5 inches, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Haines Gallery, and Lisa Sette Gallery. — Image © Binh Danh.Shoshone Falls, *Idaho*. Daguerreotype, 6.5 x 8.5 inches, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Haines Gallery, and Lisa Sette Gallery.

Tuesday, March 27th, 2017 | 7:00PM

IN CONVERSATION: STANLEY WOLUKAU-WANAMBWA & STEFFANI JEMISON

Image © Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Courtesy of the Artist.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and former editor of the contemporary photography website The Great Leap Sideways (2011—2017). He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, Marton Perlaki and Paul Graham, been an artist-in-residence at Light Work, guest edited the Aperture Photobook Review, and written for Aperture, FOAM magazine and The Photographer’s Gallery. He has lectured at Yale, Cornell and The New School, and is a faculty member in the photography department at Purchase College, SUNY.

Steffani Jemison uses time-based, photographic, and discursive platforms to examine "progress" and its alternatives. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including MASS MoCA, Western Front, Nottingham Contemporary, Jeu de Paume, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Drawing Center, LAXART, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and others. Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kadist. Jemison has completed many artist residencies and fellowships, including the Rauschenberg Residency, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, the Studio Museum in Harlem AIR, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She is the 2017-2018 Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

steffanijemison.com/

Tuesday, March 20th, 2018 | 7:00PM

CHUCK KELTON

Chuck Kelton makes chemograms and photograms inside the darkroom; transforming light, chemistry and paper into abstract landscapes. Both chemograms and photograms are made without the use of cameras or negatives, rendering each print entirely unique. The image in a photogram is the result of exposing photographic paper to light—writing with light. Whereas the image in a chemogram is the outcome of exposing photographic paper to developer and fixer—writing with chemistry. Kelton's gold chloride and selenium toned chemograms coax a surprising palette of fiery oranges and lush violets from gelatin silver paper. In a smaller suite of work, Kelton combines chemogram and photogram techniques; the shift marked with a cracked, folded horizon line separating swirling tones from smooth, matte black. Kelton's work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and publications and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bibliothéque nationale de France; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; International Center of Photography, New York; and New York Public Library. The artist lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

vonlintel.com/Chuck-Kelton

Image © Chuck Kelton. Paradise, # 18. Gelatin silver photogram and chemogram,, 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm), Unique. Courtesy of the artist.

Tuesday, March 6th, 2018 | 7:00PM

JAMES WELLING

James Welling was born in Hartford, CT, in 1951. Welling studied drawing at Carnegie Mellon University and video at the California Institute of the Arts. Welling's is a photographer best known for his photographs of everyday materials such as phyllo dough and aluminum foil. Welling' never formally studied photography, he set up a darkroom in 1976 and began learning about printing and developing with a series of architectural photographs of Los Angeles, CA. He emerged in the 1970s as an artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were and remain contested and problematized. In 1985, Welling received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work is currently held in several collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

jameswelling.net

Tuesday, February 27th, 2018 | 7:00PM

THERESA GANZ

Theresa Ganz was born in New York City. She earned her BA from Vassar College in Film and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in Photography. She works in photo-based collage, installation and video. Her work has shown nationally and internationally at, among others, The Datz Museum of Art in Korea, the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, The Bell Gallery at Brown University, San Francisco CameraWork and The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin and at various commercial spaces in New York and San Francisco. Her work was included in the 2016 DeCordova Biennial. Her work has also been featured and reviewed in publications including ArtForum, Mousse Magazine, Outpost Journal and Magazine Gitz. She was the 2015 winner of the ArtSlant Prize. Her work is the collections of Providence College and the RISD Museum. She will have site specific multimedia installation opening at Smack Mellon in New York in 2018 and another installation that will be travelling to various institutions in 2017 and 2018. She is a founding member and director at Regina Rex in Brooklyn. She currently resides in Providence, RI where she is faculty at Brown University.

theresaganz.com

Image © Theresa Ganz. Serpentine Pano Inverse. Watercolor on archival pigment print, 47" x 72", 2016. Courtesy of the artist. — Image © Theresa Ganz. *Serpentine Pano Inverse. W*atercolor on archival pigment print, 47" x 72", 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Tuesday, February 20th, 2018 | 7:00PM

ALISON ROSSITER

Alison Rossiter has worked with the materials and processes of light sensitive gelatin silver based photography since 1970. She studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts in Alberta, Canada. The darkroom is essential to her work with traditional methods of established processes. In 2003 observation into the field of photograph conservation as a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art led to a profound appreciation of the history of photographic materials. She has studios in New York and New Jersey.

alisonrossiter.com

Tuesdays, October 10th—November 16th | 7:00 pm

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2017

Short interviews by Leandro Villaro

Thursday, November 16th, 2017 | 7:00PM

IN CONVERSATION: RAYMOND MEEKS & TIM CARPENTER

Moderated by Stanley Wolukua Wanambwa

LV: Can you walk me through the process of making one of your books, for example, furlong: halfstory halflife. What interests me is first, what you "see" when you start working on the book, and then, what it is that "looks back" at you once you finished it.

RM: I’ve made four small edition, self-published books since I began working at Furlong in 2014. Each book was meant as an attempt to cull together a season of pictures into a concise and coherent “chapter” of an ongoing story. These artist books also presented an opportunity to share the work-in-progress with a small gathering of collectors and patrons who’ve expressed an interest this work and in funding my efforts toward this project. In terms of what “looks back” at me with each completed volume, they’ve all been different. The first two books (furlong: blue evening and furlong: Adriana dreaming) where essentially a small catalogue of images that formed a loose narrative. Cabbage White, the third book—-included a small “free-verse” poem that alluded to a “coming of age” that playfully paralleled the pictures where the presence of cabbage white butterflies entering the frames became analogous to this time of life for adolescence and youth.

In Halfstory halflife, I decided to focus a narrative on a single subject, Chris Pickett. I witnessed a fearlessness, though also what I’d describe as self-destructive behaviors that mark this transitional time of life—-an inability to maintain a working car, hold a steady job or girlfriend, balance a checkbook, etc. It is a free-fall that’s not without tenderness and grace. What I’ve noticed now, in retrospect---what looks back, is that this body of work also serves as a compassionate self-portrait.

LV: I would like to ask you about your relationship to the written word. The absence of words in your books seems to give them a particular place/space.

RM: For me, words (poetry or prose) essentially have to serve the same purpose as that of a picture…that is, they expand, transform or provide context for what is already begun—not as a device or means of clarifying or explaining. They can charge or heighten in ambiguous ways. This said, I love the merging of visual and word narratives and hope to one day contribute pictures to a work of fiction, perhaps of a novella length, where my pictures can serve as pause or a break but also function with similar motives I consider with the addition of text to a collection of pictures.

Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on family and place. In November 2014, a mid-career retrospective of his books was organized by Light Work in Syracuse, NY. The exhibition featured more than twenty books, including self-published works and numerous volumes from a variety of publishers. In 2011, Meeks and publisher Kevin Messina (Silas Finch) co-founded Orchard Journal, which was established as a collaborative conversation between artist, subject and viewer. Featured artists have included Wes Mill, Deborah Luster and Mark Steinmetz. He is currently at work on a new set of Journals under the title Dumbsaint to be published by TIS Books in 2017-18. Meeks is a 2016 recipient of the Siskind Fellowship Grant. raymondmeeks.com

Tim Carpenter (Illinois, 1968) is a photographer and writer who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and later that year co-founded TIS books (tisbooks.pub), an independent photobook publisher. His books include A house and a tree (TIS); The king of the birds (TIS); Local objects (The Ice Plant); township (TIS/Dumbsaint); and Bement grain (TIS/Dumbsaint). timcarpenterphotography.com

Tuesday, November 7th, 2017 | 7:00PM

ARTHUR OU

LV: Can you tell us about the origins of your work? What is the starting place?

AO: It's a tough question, because there have been many starting points. The question for me is not so much what to photograph, but more about how a picture can be made. In a sense I rarely go out to photograph or work in the studio without some idea already in my mind. Whether it's an art work or a photograph that I am trying to think through, or some ideas that I came upon that prompted further investigation, the camera is a tool for me to find depictions that can somehow address or reflect these encounters, and the different ways that they have influenced my thinking about photography.

LV: In your new series of images “A Day of Times” (now on view at Brennam & Griffin Gallery), there is a dialogue with other written (and visual) works. Will you talk about "A Day of Times" in light of this dialogue, that for example reference, as we also see in some of your previous pieces, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein?

AO: It's hard for me to work without considering those who help shape my own understanding of photography, so I do hope my work can always be in dialog with the work of others, whether visual or textual. In the new series, I am thinking about seriality, repetition, color field painting, Photoshop gradations, Edward Weston, and Jim Welling's Aluminum Foil photographs. Wittgenstein has been a specter that comes and goes in my work. This series is not so much directly related to him although since the notion of time or change is very much part of the structure of this project, his description of the future being not a linear path but a curve that constantly changes directions somehow perfectly describes the phenomenon of waves, if not of course also about the course of history as we are living through it now.

Arthur Ou works in photography, painting, sculpture, and installation. He has exhibited internationally, most recently in “Images that Speak” at the Presentation House in Vancouver, Canada, and “Astoria,” at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria. His work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Aperture, Blind Spot, Camera Austria, Art in America, and The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson). His work is featured in the book, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (University of Chicago Press, June 2015), by Walter Benn Michaels, and Photography is Magic (Aperture, September 2015) by Charlotte Cotton. He has published critical texts in Aperture, Afterall.org, Artforum.com, Bidoun, Foam, Fantom, Words Without Pictures, and X-Tra. He is the author of The World Is All That Is The Case, published by Roma Publications in 2019. Ou received his MFA from the Yale School of Art Photography Program. He is an associate professor of photography at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

brennangriffin.com

Wednesday, November 1st, 2017 | 7:00PM

ELLEN CAREY

LV: In your second "umbrella concept" Struck by light, you present a collection of works made with the color photogram technique. How and why did you start working with color photograms?

EC: I love the darkroom, and at the end of the 1980s, I went back to that first love, in black and white. My question: “What does an abstract photograph look like?” was followed by the challenge of trying to make one. I was clueless. Research began, looking at the dawn of photography in the 19th century, to Talbot and Atkins, all photograms, being sensitive to the abstract narrative. I had studied art history in KCAI as an undergraduate. The Nelson-Atkins Museum gave me first-rate artworks to view. Graduate school took me to SUNY@Buffalo for my MFA; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has a fantastic collection in abstraction and minimalism, in the context of painting and sculpture. In photography, I looked at Man Ray and the Surrealists, Moholy-Nagy and Bauhaus. Pre-conceived notions of abstraction and photography were absent; I embraced the unknown and immersed myself with experimentation. The summer of 1989, it was very, very hot. I was lost, in fact, thinking that I was finished as a photographer. Then a picture happened. It asked more questions, which included color, I started with a muted palette, gaining momentum to bolder ones; the visual impact was radically different. In 2000, I began the discipline of color: in printing, in research. Light or no light, some or half-light, that it was a material, materials have meanings. Wherever light struck became my umbrella concept, adding context to content, form and shape, shadows anew.

LV: In 1983 you were invited to work at the 20x24 Polaroid Studio. Can you briefly share how that particular experience impacted the future of your art?

EC: Each time I work on the Polaroid 20 X 24, it is a totally amazing experience. I love Polaroid, my failures as well as my successes, worked with many cameras and film, but this camera, the BIG one, was an interesting mix of challenges, demanding that my creativity, imagination and skill rise to unprecedented heights. It had to be BIG too, an incredibly fulfilling and deeply rewarding experience, every time. This fateful encounter that began in 1983, continues, like a roll of film, a journey and inspiration. To be standing at this particular intersection of art and technology, science and instant photography, bringing new ideas, new nomenclature, new picture signs to our global photographic culture, it had to be me, through this machine, to talk about abstraction and minimalism, size and scale, color and non-color, form with feelings. Now that the work is getting recognized, all the things I had to go through, the peaks and valleys of my life’s journey, all of it was incredible. Ellen in Irish, Celtic, Gaelic, means “bringer of light”, this is my destiny.

Ellen Carey (b.1952 USA) is an educator, independent scholar, guest curator, photographer and lens-based artist, with 53 one-person exhibitions. and several hundred group exhibitions. Widewalls named her one of the top ten photographers working in abstraction worldwide; she lives and works between New York and Hartford, where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford.

ellencareyphotography.com/

Tuesday, October 24th, 2017 | 7:00PM

KLEA MCKENNA

LV: In your latest project “Automatic Earth”, you deal with a camera-less process that explores the "sculptural space" of the photographic paper. Can you talk about this?

KM: I’ve always thought of photograms as a kind of imprint because unlike a photograph, a photogram records a physical encounter between the subject and the material; the mark of an interaction. The photographic rubbings I’ve been making lately take that idea further. I hand emboss the photo paper, in total darkness, into textures from the landscape and it’s that relief that creates the image. So rather than being made through sight or the sight of a camera, these representations are translated through touch – through my own body and the physical labor it takes to make them.

LV: Can you comment on the “inner laws” of the matters and subjects with which you are working?

KM: I’m not certain that I entirely understand the question, but I’ll take a crack at it: My methods are extremely unreliable, moody and sensitive beyond even my comprehension. The slightest change in wind, humidity, ambient light, pressure, density, distance, etc... results in an entirely different image. A tiny ripple in the paper caused by humidity can render itself like a lunar mountain. So I am at the whim of physics, nature, weather, even the person thousands of miles away, who coated the emulsion on my paper will have a say in the image I make. You might think that this would have caused me to become an expert at controlling or calculating these minute factors, but it’s done the opposite. It’s taught me to surrender to unpredictability and to acknowledge that my work is an imprint of all the forces that have acted on my material, even the unintended ones.

kleamckenna.com | @klea_mckenn

Tuesday, October 17th, 2017 | 7:00PM

AHNDRAYA PARLATO

LV: Can you talk about the conception of the book "A Spectacle and Nothing Strange", published in 2016 by Kehrer Verlag?

AP: A Spectacle and Nothing Strange is a collection of photographs made over ten years; it draws from three bodies of work. The book forms its cohesion through content and concept rather than subject matter. In terms of subject matter, there’s a mix of landscapes, still lives, and people. Many of the images are an intervention into the world; however, some of them are simply found. The images create an adjacent world to a world to ours, not Other, but within.

LV: Last year, Adam Bell wrote a very nice review of the book for photo-eye's blog and he paraphrased Jonathan Green, claiming "photos don’t tell the truth nor do they lie, they can only transform". Do you agree? In what way has this project "transformed" you or your work?

AP: I do agree. I don't believe in the notion of Objective Truth, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Even just what one means when they say, "Truth." Are we talking about a felt Truth, a seen Truth an experienced Truth? All of these, "Truths" are different. In my work in particular, I try to tap into a more subjective, felt Truth, perhaps even a Truth that defies logical reasoning.

Ahndraya Parlato was born in Kailua, Hawaii. She has a B.A. in photography from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her first monograph, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange was recently published by Kehrer Verlag. A book of her collaborations with Gregory Halpern, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, was published by Études Books in 2014. She has been nominated for the ICP Infinity Award, the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, and the SECCA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ahndraya has received grants from Light Work as well as the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

ahndrayaparlato.com

Tuesday, October 10th, 2017 | 7:00PM

MATTHEW BRANDT

LV: Could you talk about the conceptual meaning behind your technical decisions?

MB: Every technique and material has its own set of circumstances and hence content. In my work I try my best to balance these relations with photographic subject matter.

LV: Some of your images are made with materials that bring a political allusion to the surface. Others are clearly marked by a sense of humor. And some of them have both. Can you say something about this?

MB: This is related to the previous answer about technique and content. I hope my work might encourage reactions within a viewer, whether it is laughter or a reminder… it is always nice to relate to the living.

Matthew Brandt was born in California in 1982. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and his MFA from UCLA. Brandt's work is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Matthew Brandt was one of seven artists featured in the 2015 exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography. A solo exhibition of his work, Sticky/Dusty/Wet, was presented by the Columbus Museum of Art and traveled to the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014. Brandt's first monograph, Lakes and Reservoirs, co-published by Damiani and Yossi Milo Gallery, was released in Fall 2014. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

matthewbrandt.com

Tuesdays, February 21st—March 28th | 7:00 pm

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES SPRING 2017

Short interviews by Giada De Agostinis*

GREGORY HALPERN | Tuesday, March 28th, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Gregory Halpern has exhibited internationally and published four books of photographs, including ZZYZX (Mack, 2016), A (J&L Books, 2011), Omaha Sketchbook (J&L Books, 2009) and East of the Sun, West of the Moon (Études, 2014), a collaboration with Ahndraya Parlato. He is also the editor, along with Jason Fulford, of The Photographer’s Playbook: Over 250 Assignments and Ideas (Aperture, 2014). He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. The Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation voted ZZYZX Photobook of the Year in 2016, and in 2014 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

gregoryhalpern.com

You've been working and shooting in many cities and areas in America, but we have seen a work of your own hometown Buffalo only recently published in the latest Aperture issue American Destiny. What is your relationship to Buffalo? How has the city informed and affected your work or your destiny as a photographer throughout these years?

The place is deeply a part of me and shapes, in many ways, how I see the world. The city’s population is half of what it was at its peak, and although there has been something of an urban resurgence (a Brooklynization, if you will, in small pockets) a huge portion of city remains plagued by abandonment and joblessness. The art world and academia operate largely outside of, and insulated from, those realities. I should say that while I feel connected to the place and defensive of it, I’m not entirely of it, and certainly not anymore. When I go back now, I vacillate between feeling completely out of place, while simultaneously at home.

Many of your works are the result of fruitful collaborations, as with Jason Fulford, and with your partner Ahndraya Parlato. Could you talk more about these collaborations and how your practice changes or gets influenced when you are working with other people?

Ahndraya and Jason have had major impacts on my work; they have helped me arrive at final edits, and have helped me see the work more clearly while it was still in-progress. I don’t work in a vacuum, and I’m open to what others see in my work, especially if I trust their judgement as artists. So I think to some degree, the influence of Jason’s playfulness, or of Ahndraya’s surrealism, for example, has shown up in my own work, much to the work’s benefit I think.

In all of your works, your images talk through symbols, sometimes aggressive sometimes dreamy, always leaving the viewer to imagine what's behind them. Could you talk more about your personal experience in California which is the subject of your latest work ZZYZX?

My personal experience with California began with that great American tradition of driving there (from the East Coast)…. Romantic, cliché, and nonetheless perfect… It’s like being driven by a desire, towards an idea, fleeing something, discovering your country, yourself and your place in it…. Later, I moved to California for graduate school (fleeing my East Coast undergraduate experience at Harvard and hoping, maybe to recreate myself in a place, like so many others try in California, a place without the weight of history, or at least with a healthy disrespect for it)… I chose CCA because Larry Sultan taught there. Larry was, as much as anything, a California artist and really a Southern California artist (in spirit) even though he lived in San Francisco. Anyway, it took me years before I felt like I was able to make successful pictures in there. Beginning in 2006, after I had moved back East, I started flying out to California about once a year to photograph. I started spending increasingly more time each year, starting off with a couple weeks, eventually staying for a month or more, and then finally moving back out there for a year when I got a Guggenheim complete this project…

LAUREN SEMIVAN | Tuesday, March 21st, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Lauren Semivan (b. 1981) was born in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a BA from Lawrence University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at many galleries and museums including the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, The Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Hunterdon Art Museum, and Cranbrook Art Museum. She has been a finalist for The John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, and SF Camerawork’s Baum Award for Emerging Photographers. Her work was recently published in Black Forest: Four Visual Poems (Candela Books, 2014) and has appeared in The New Yorker, Artforum, and Photograph magazines. Semivan’s work is part of permanent collections at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University. She lives and works in Detroit, MI, and is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York, and David Klein Gallery in Detroit. Her second solo exhibition with Benrubi Gallery opens this June.

laurensemivan.com | benrubigallery.com

What led you to photography? How did you start?

I studied music (violin) from an early age but became frustrated with restrictive interpretations of classical repertoire.

I discovered the large format view camera while studying with John Shimon and Julie Lindemann at Lawrence University. The view camera felt primitive but complex at the same time like the violin. I became fascinated with the idea that in photography you could make your own world in which anything could happen or exist. I think the experience of studying music so intensely has greatly informed the way that I work. This particular image was one of the earliest I made using the studio wall as a backdrop. I thought of these early pictures as etudes.

You often gather items from your daily life and let them be part of your photographs. What is your relationship to these objects? How do they become part of your practice? Or how do you relate to them when you're shooting?

I am drawn to specific objects for their abstract interpretive potential. I take walks in my neighborhood with no specific thought in mind, but poetic relationships between concepts or ideas and objects I encounter reveal themselves to me. Then try to incorporate them into an image. I can relate it to the surrealists and objective chance. In Nadja, Andre Breton talks about objects or events presenting a signal. Sometimes I am drawn to objects first for their photogenic qualities, and then more significant meaning reveals itself in the context of the other elements within the photograph.

In your Observatory project, you state that "Knowing and feeling are not separate" and also that your work "draws upon a tension that exists between irrational and physical worlds." Could you tell us more about this?

I rely on my intuition when I am working, and I consider the things that we feel or sense just as important as what we know empirically or quantitatively as fact. Both are physical in some way or another, and this is what connects art and science. I am continually seeking out knowledge of myself and my experiences through my own environment and through metaphor, even though I may not know exactly what it is I am doing at the time, the act of looking and seeking meaning in the first place feels like the more important part.

BRYAN GRAF | Tuesday, April 4th, 2017 | 7:00 pm (previously scheduled for Tuesday, March 14th, 2017). Due to the impending snowstorm, we have rescheduled this lecture.

Bryan Graf navigates the photographic medium with a discursive interest in the history of photography and it’s relationship to design, painting, and narrative fiction. His practice involves mixing tracks (or prints) that have visceral, optical and conceptual relationships with each another.

Recent solo shows include The Sun Room at Yancey Richardson, New York, NY and Moving Across The Interior at Halsey Mckay, East hampton, NY. Grafʼs work has recently been featured in Second Nature: Abstract Photography Then and Now at the Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation at the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. Grafʼs work has appeared in numerous publications, including Blind Spot, Harpers and The New York Times.

He has published three books: Wildlife Analysis (Conveyor, 2013), Moving Across the Interior (ICA@MECA, 2014), and Prismatic Tracks (Conveyor, 2014). He is a 2016 grant recipient from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

bryangrafstudio.com | yanceyrichardson.com

I read you started doing photography with your friends while skateboarding. Could you tell us more about those days? What drove you to take the camera?

It was a pretty causal way to get into photography. I was more interested in skateboarding than photography at the time. As a lot of kids growing up in the 90’s did, I used those disposable film cameras to photograph my friends while we were skateboarding and hanging out. After a while I became more and more interested in photography and started making it a priority to wander around and shoot.

A lot of your photography plays around the idea that images should not lead viewers to any conclusion, but rather be a way to explore their feelings. How much do you let your own feelings filter into your working process?

It’s not so much about ‘feelings’ as it is about firmly believing that prescribing a precise content for viewers to receive and digest is not productive, or interesting. I’m not a doctor, I’m not here to give you a pill to swallow which encapsulates a finite and preconceived reception for my work. I’m much more interested in my photographs being pieces of persuasion, and that the content derived from the work is a subjective, personal experience that can vary from person to person. I believe that content is cumulative and can come from the tension, or debris, between images more so than individual images.

Is there a contemporary artist (not necessarily in photography) who is a current inspiration for your work?

My friends Gregory Halpern and Curran Hatleberg always amaze me with their ability to infuse a poetic tone with razor sharp observations that build over time to form these complex, multi-layered tomes that I find are akin to the narratives, and economy of description, found in short stories by Raymond Carver and Joan Didion.

ABELARDO MORELL | Tuesday, March 7th, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. Morell received his MFA from The Yale University School of Art in 1981.

His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1998) by Dutton Children’s Books, A Camera in a Room (1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books (2002), Camera Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell (2005), published by Phaidon Press.

His work has been collected and shown in many galleries, institutions and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, The Chicago Art Institute, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Houston Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum and over seventy other museums in the United States and abroad.

abelardomorell.net | houkgallery.com

Your images made with the camera oscura technique made us explore different worlds, entering an oneiric imagery. How do you choose the interiors where you set up the camera when you're travelling? Could you tell us more about the process and the whole experience of setting this up or how it has evolved throughout the years?

Usually I find a view that I want to enter a room- that’s the most important part- finding a place with a room is secondary but the qualities of the space matters too. Often, the architectural details of a room really work well with the incoming image.

Because I use a digital camera my exposures now have gone from hours to a couple of minutes. These shorter exposures can capture more specific moments of light events which I like very much- It’s nice to actually see clouds in these rooms.

You have a show opening in New York on March 9 called Flowers for Lisa, a romantic homage to your partner. How has this relationship influenced your practice and creativity?

Lisa and I have been together for 40 years. In a way these flower pictures serve as a poetic narrative of our life together and the many events - good and not so good - that we have shared.

Your vision seems to be very much imbued by painting. We see a lot of contaminations from art movements such as surrealism and impressionism in your photographs. But you also use your own painting to create images. Could you tell us more about this intertwined relation between painting and photography?

I have always loved paintings. Because I don’t really have much skill in drawing or painting I have felt insecure making art that way. With the Flowers For Lisa project and the Cliché Verre work I have ventured into the painting territory and combining it with photographic information. I would say that I’m interested in the sort of hybrid these two media make

YOUNG SUH | Tuesday, February 28th, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Young Suh lives and works in Albany (in the San Francisco Bay Area, California). His photographic work addresses the complex nature of the human involvement in managing natural resources and the shifting concepts of nature in the contemporary society. Over the last 12 years he has completed two major projects, “Instant Traveler” and “Wildfires.” He had solo exhibitions with Haines Gallery, San Francisco, Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, Clifford Smith Gallery, Boston, and Gallery ON, Seoul, Korea. His work was also shown at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Seoul International Photography Festival. His latest work has been exhibited at Mills College Art Museum. It is titled “Can We Live Here? Stories from a Difficult World,” a multimedia exhibition of photography, video, and performance created in collaboration with poet Katie Peterson. He is currently Associate Professor and Co-Chair of Department of Art and Art History at University of California, Davis.

Can you talk about who inspired you in your earlier career? Is there a photographer or a painter you get inspiration from?

I love Robert Frank, not just the famous book, The Americans, a classic of both photography and American road trip literature, but the whole career, including the strange films like Me and My Brother. I don’t think Frank ever really worked around the idea of a “project” and at least right now I don’t want to do that kind of work – even in The Americans he gets distracted a lot. The book is actually one long distraction from one place to another. Frank brings art into life – he considers the two at the same time, and he lets the pictures get messy as his life gets messy. Nan Goldin and Alex Soth are photographers I admire for the same reason, though they led far more exciting lives than I ever do.

Your projects, facing environmental issues, reveal a suspended narrative between dream and catastrophe, could you tell us more about it? What makes you choose these themes? What is your own relationship to nature?

Nature terrifies me. My wife is from California and she loves open spaces and the mountains and feels safe in them. I don’t – the American West fills me with fear and something like the National Parks makes me feel apprehensive, because it marks the land with some idea that we could mythologize it, control it. At first, when I was photographing parks and wildfires, I was interested in how humans tried to control nature. This is a major issue during a time when climate change has shown us exactly how human activity has raised the temperature of the planet. Images of people struggling in nature are still compelling to me, but I’ve gotten less interested in people trying to control it than in those times when people are at the mercy of it. We humans are not yet in control of nature completely. So I got interested in taking pictures of people with animals, for example, because I wanted to see what people looked like when they weren’t in control. We should preserve those experiences, value them, and investigate them.

How California and Korea influenced the use of light in your photography?

In California there is too much of it and in Korea, a winter country at a slightly higher latitude, there is not enough. I have noticed in my pictures I either have a surfeit of light (for example, trying to fit a fire into an already-hot day, or icy glaciers against a slate-gray sky) or a lack of it (I made a film once of the lights of a ferryboat at night slowly going off). I’m a moody person and I like dramatic extremes of light, and in California you notice that in ordinary situations. Light is the opera of our lives in California – people say that this is a “chill” state but the intensity of light never tells us to calm down the way, say, a Northeastern winter day does.

FARRAH KARAPETIAN | Tuesday, February 21st, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Farrah Karapetian makes photography physical. Her work "marries two traditions in photography — that of the staged picture and of the image made without a camera" (LA Times 2015.) Her photograms and the sculptural negatives she makes en route to their exposure move in and out of abstraction and figuration and "disrupt and call attention to our era’s deeply entrenched response of permitting the constant newsfeed of documentary to slide by us as political ephemera"(Georgia Review 2015.) Her work is in public collections that include the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. She has had multiple solo exhibitions and is represented by Von Lintel Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Danziger Gallery (New York, NY.) Current exhibitions include A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016); The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography (2016); and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016.)

farrahkarapetian.com | danzigergallery.com

As a student, or even before or after, how did you start developing your passion for photograms? What inspired you earlier in your life to choose this path as your visual language?

I was inspired to make this photogram by two things: finding in the New York Times a documentary photograph of a house blown apart by a hurricane, and thinking about the notion of shape as form in high Modernist painting. My formal practice evolves in the service of meta-narratives about the dissemination of culture. What news do we see, how do we usually see it, how can I spend more time with it, and how can my work motivate you to do the same? Photography is such a physical medium. You can't do it sitting down. I am fascinated by how photography makes me move, and how I can use it to make other people move as well.

Some of your work (specifically Soundscapes, Shape of Sound and Cymbalscapes) is clearly influenced by music: what is your relationship to it? What do you like to listen?

Leo Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with the line, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Think about this in terms of constants and variables in art-making: any accident or conflict, if you pay attention to it, can be productive. By "pay attention", I mean that one has to a) set up parameters and have expectations; b) notice that something has occurred that was not what one intended; and c) decide whether or not to pursue the unintended consequence of accident and incorporate it into a new set of parameters. As much as photographers usually like to talk about technique and anecdote, what they're really talking about is the medium's steadiest bed fellows: chance and control.

How has California influenced your practice? is there a place or a museum you always come back to as it affects your vision or you're emotionally bound to it?

I make negatives, but I always want the way that I do that to be significant. There are no defaults left for long in my practice. Any one material means something: glass is vulnerable, the photograph has a reputation for facticity, resin has something to do with history, and so on. Here is a negative I made out of glass and steel, using the logic of light to describe a linear shadow on the wall from the drumset's armature and a volumetric one from its cymbals. Moholy Nagy made sculptural negatives too. Mine just have reference points embedded in their abstract arguments. The referent gives you somewhere to start before you spin out alongside me in a body of work.

* Giada De Agostinis is a freelance editor. She earned an MA in Publishing from Oxford Brookes University and divides her time between the Aperture Foundation and Paper Journal's editorial departments.

AN EVENING WITH ANDREA MODICA & LARRY FINK

Thursday, February 23rd, 2017 | 7:00 pm

Image © Andrea Modica. Lunenburg, Vermont. Courtesy of the artist. — Image © Andrea Modica. *Lunenburg*, Vermont. Courtesy of the artist.

Andrea Modica was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches at Drexel University and the International Center of Photography. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, she is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of a Knight Award. Modica has exhibited extensively and has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts.

Her publications include Treadwell (Chronicle Books, 1996), Human Being (Nazraeli Press, 2001), Barbara (Nazraeli Press, 2002), Fountain (Stinehour Editions, 2008), L’amico del cuore (Nazraeli Press, 2014) and As We Wait (L'Artiere, 2015).

Andrea Modica’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

andreamodica.com

Besides working as a professional photographer for over fifty-five years, Larry Fink has had one-man shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art amongst others. On the European continent, he has had one-man shows at the Musee de l’Elysee in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Musee de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium. He has been awarded two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Photography Fellowships. He has been teaching for over fifty-two years, with professorial positions held at Yale University, Cooper Union, and lastly at Bard College, where he is an honored professor.

larryfinkphotography.weebly.com

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2016

Tuesday , November 15th, 2016

Image © Milagros de la Torre. Under the Black Sun (Policemen), 1991-1993. Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminum. 80 x 60 in. — Image © Milagros de la Torre. *Under the Black Sun (Policemen)*, 1991-1993. Archival pigment print on cotton paper, mounted on aluminum. 80 x 60 in.

MILAGROS DE LA TORRE is an artist working with the photographic medium since 1991. Her images involve extensive research and examine intimate representations of violence, its residual effect on the individual, and the structures of remembrance. She studied Communication Sciences at the University of Lima and received a B.A. (Hons) in Photographic Arts from the London College of Communication. Her first solo exhibition, curated by Robert Delpire, was presented at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She received the Rockefeller Foundation Artist Grant and was awarded the Romeo Martinez Photography Prize and the Young Ibero-American Creators Prize. In 2003, her artist book Trouble de la Vue was published by Toluca Editions, Paris. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2012), The Dora Maar Fellowship from The Brown Foundation (2014), The Peter S. Reed Foundation Award in Photography (2016) and was the recipient of a ‘Merited Person of Culture Award’ from the Minister of Culture in Peru (2016). Her work has been exhibited broadly and is part of permanent museum collections in America and Europe. In 2012, The Americas Society, N.Y. presented "Observed", a solo show, curated by Prof. Edward J. Sullivan and the Museo de Arte de Lima, MALI honored her with a mid-career retrospective exhibition. Born in Peru, De la Torre lives and works in New York.

rolfart.com.ar | tolucafineart.com

Tuesday , November 8th, 2016

Image © Suné Woods. Landings, 2015, 10.5”x 17”, mixed media collage. — Image © Suné Woods. *Landings,* 2015, 10.5”x 17”, mixed media collage.

SUNÉ WOODS is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work takes the form of multi-channel video installations, photographs, and collage. Woods practice examines absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. She also uses microsomal sites such as family to understand larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms, & formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence/presence of a physical body.

She has participated in residencies at Headlands Center of the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Light Work. Woods is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative, The John Gutmann Fellowship Award, and The Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer.

sunewoods.com

Tuesday , November 1st, 2016

Image © Meghann Riepenhoff. Littoral Drift #05 (Recto/Verso, Rodeo Beach, Sausalito, CA 08.01.13, Two Waves, Dipped); unique cyanotype, 24"x48". — Image © Meghann Riepenhoff. *Littoral Drift #05 (Recto/Verso, Rodeo Beach, Sausalito, CA 08.01.13, Two Waves, Dipped)*; unique cyanotype, 24"x48".

Born in Atlanta, GA, MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF is based in Bainbridge Island, WA and San Francisco, CA. She received a BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, where she is a member of the visiting faculty. Her work is represented by Yossi Milo Gallery and Euqinom Projects. She has been exhibited at the High Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, Galerie du Monde, San Francisco Camerawork, Aperture, and the Center for Fine Art Photography. Her work is in the collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Worcester Art Museum, and has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Aperture PhotoBook Review, The New York Times, TIME Magazine Lightbox, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation grant, and is speaking at What Light Can Do, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming lecture series.

meghannriepenhoff.com

Tuesday , October 25th, 2016

Image © Sarah Palmer. Light Passes, Archival Pigment Print, 30" x 24", 2016. — Image © Sarah Palmer. *Light Passes*, Archival Pigment Print, 30" x 24", 2016.

SARAH PALMER was born in San Francisco and lives in Brooklyn. She is an artist and an educator whose work has been exhibited most recently in "Original Copy" at the 2016 SPRING/BREAK Art Show, as well as at the Foam_fotografiemuseum and the Wild Project in recent years. She was awarded the 2011 Aperture Portfolio Prize and made a self-published artist book, Waves, in late 2015 and early 2016.

sarahpalmer.net

Tuesday , October 18th, 2016

Image © An-My Lê. 29 Palms: Night Operations III, 2003-04. Gelatin silver print, 26 1/2 x 38 inches. Courtesy of Murray Guy Gallery and An-My Lê. — Image © An-My Lê. *29 Palms: Night Operations III*, 2003-04. Gelatin silver print, 26 1/2 x 38 inches. Courtesy of Murray Guy Gallery and An-My Lê.

AN-MY LÈ was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960. She left Vietnam during the final year of the war in 1975 before finding a home as a political refugee in the U.S. Lê received an MFA from Yale University in 1993, and between 1994 and 1998 she made several trips back to Vietnam to discover and photograph her native country in peacetime. Since then Lê has explored the military conflicts that have framed the last half-century of American history: the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. But she approaches these events obliquely; instead of addressing her subject by creating reportage of actual conflict, she photographs places where war is psychologically anticipated, processed, and relived: Vietnam War re-enactments in Virginia and North Carolina (in her series Small Wars); and the US Marines’ training in the “virtual” Afghanistan and Iraq of the Californian desert (in 29 Palms). Lê has had solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Art Museum, the Charles Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg; DIA: Beacon, New York; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and P.S.1 MoMA, New York, among many other institutions. Lê is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation in 2012. She is a professor of Photography at Bard College.

anmyle.com / murrayguy.com

Tuesday , October 11th, 2016

Image © Aspen Mays. Bandanna, 2016, gelatin silver photogram 24 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Higher Pictures and the artist. — Image © Aspen Mays. *Bandanna*, 2016, gelatin silver photogram 24 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Higher Pictures and the artist.

ASPEN MAYS was born in 1980 in Asheville, North Carolina and received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Center for Ongoing Projects & Research in Columbus, Ohio and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her work has also been included in the recent exhibitions, State of the Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Tales from a Dark Room at the New Mexico Museum of Art, and Double Back: Photographic Reflexivity at the University of Maryland. She is currently Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. Mays lives and works in Oakland, California.

a s penmays.com / higherpictures.com

Tuesday , October 4th, 2016

Image © Eileen Quinlan. The Crow, 2016. Gelatin silver print, 25 x 20 inches (63.5 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery and the artist. — Image © Eileen Quinlan. *The Crow*, 2016. Gelatin silver print, 25 x 20 inches (63.5 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery and the artist.

EILEEN QUINLAN was born in Boston, MA and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA from Columbia University. Quinlan frequently participates in group shows and has mounted more than a dozen solo shows internationally since 2005. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, and FRAC (Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain), France, among others. Recent shows include joint solo exhibitions at Campoli Presti Galleries in London and Paris, and group exhibitions Image Support at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Transmission, Recreation and Repetition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Lens Work at LACMA in Los Angeles, and New Photography at the Museum of Modern Artand What Is a Photograph at the International Center for Photography, both in New York. Quinlan's work is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery, in New York.

eileenquinlan.com \ miguelabreugallery.com

AN EVENING WITH SUSAN DERGES (in conversation with NAomi Itami)

Friday , September 16th, 2016 | 7:00PM

Image © Susan Derges. Eden 5. From the series: Eden & The Observer. Lambda print. 40 X 95 inches, 2004. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery and Susan Derges. — Image © Susan Derges. *Eden 5*. From the series: Eden & The Observer. Lambda print. 40 X 95 inches, 2004. Courtesy of Danziger Gallery and Susan Derges.

Born in London, England in 1955, SUSAN DERGES currently lives and works in Dartmoor, Devon. From 1973-1976 she studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in London. From 1981 to 1985 she lived and worked in Japan, returning to London in 1986 with the influences of Japanese minimalism and integrating this into her discovery of camera-less photography processes. Throughout her career Derges has been the recipient of many awards, fellowships, and residencies where she has been able to further pursue her artistic interest in science. She has received residencies at the Museum of the History of Science attached to the University of Oxford, The Eden Project Education Centre in Cornwall, Stour Valley Arts Project in Kings Wood, Kent, and Maudsley Hospital in London, among others. She has been exhibited throughout the world in both solo and group exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited at Purdy Hicks Gallery in London, Johyun Gallery in Seoul, Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, Paul Gasmin Gallery in New York, Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, and Tokyo Design Centre, among many others. Her work can be found in many collections, including: Arts Council of England, Victoria & Albert Museum, San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Eden Project, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Hara Art Museum, among others. Susan Derges is represented by Purdy Hicks Gallery in London and Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. Derges latest New York exhibition will be opening on September 14th, 2016 at Danziger Gallery.

susanderges.com

Naomi Itami is a cross-disciplinary artist working in lens-based media and sound. Formerly an international opera singer, she holds several Masters degrees including one from the LCC in Photography. She writes on the arts and is a frequent contributor to various publications including Hotshoe Magazine, Photomonitor and LensCulture. A Bay Area native, she currently resides in London, UK.

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES WINTER/SPRING 2016

Tuesday, April 19th, 2016

HANNAH WHITAKER is an artist and Triple Canopy contributing editor based in New York. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from ICP/Bard College. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris, and Locust Projects in Miami. She recently published her first book, Peer to Peer, with Mörel Books. In 2012, she was nominated for the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Prize.

http://hwhitaker.com/

Tuesday, April 12th, 2016

John Chiara © Sanderson at Corporation, Coahoma County, Mississippi, Camera Obscura Ilfochrome Photograph, Unique, 34'' x 28'', 2013 — John Chiara © *Sanderson at Corporation*, Coahoma County, Mississippi, Camera Obscura Ilfochrome Photograph, Unique, 34'' x 28'', 2013

Bay Area photographer JOHN CHIARA captures cityscapes in a process that incorporates a hybrid of photographic media. He creates one-of-a-kind photographs in a variety of hand-built cameras, the largest of which is a 50” x 80” field camera transported by the artist on a flatbed trailer. Once a location is selected, he situates and then physically enters the camera, maneuvering in near total darkness positive color photographic paper on the camera’s back wall. Throughout the exposure, he controls how the light enters the lens by using his hands to burn and dodge in the image. These large-scale photographs are developed by hand in a spinning drum process that agitates the chemistry over the photographic paper that lines the interior of the drum – a process that often leaves behind traces on the resulting image.

http://www.johnchiara.com/

Tuesday, April 5th, 2016

Image © Sharon Harper. Wind Turbines, La Palma, Canary Islands, Chromogenic-Print, 2013. — Image © Sharon Harper. *Wind Turbines*, La Palma, Canary Islands, Chromogenic-Print, 2013.

SHARON HARPER's work explores technology and perception in relation to the natural world. She is the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography and has been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center and the Monastery of Halsnøy, Norway. Her work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Harvard Art Museums, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, California, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and The New York Public Library among other collections. She received an MFA in photography and related media from the School of Visual Art in New York. She is currently Professor of Visual Art, Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

http://www.sharonharper.org/

March 29th, 2016

Image © Lucy Helton. "Transmitted Geological Landscape 8φ 64° 48' 13'' Nλ 23° 46' 41'' W", Thermal Print. 2014

Born in London and based in New York, LUCY HELTON received her master’s degree in fine art photography from Hartford Art School, CT, in 2014. Her first book "Actions of Consequence" was nominated for the MACK First Book Award 2014, shortlisted for the Kassel Dummy Award 2015, and The Anamorphosis Prize 2015. "Actions of Consequence" was also included in the 2015 Best Photo Book selection by the Humble Arts Foundation. Her most recent book "Transmission" (Silas Finch, 2015) is a communication from our future to our recent past and it was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award 2015. Helton is immersed in photo book making and has participated in various book fairs and festivals in New York, L.A., London, Germany and France.

http://www.lucyhelton.com/

March 22th, 2016

Image © John Cyr. "Ansel Adams' Developer Tray", 2011

JOHN CYR (b. 1981) is a New York based photographer and Assistant Professor of Photographic Imaging at Suffolk County Community College. Cyr earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2010 and his work has been featured in various publications including the New York Times, BBC News, ARTnews, TIME, NPR, Popular Photography, the Telegraph and Photo District News and is the author of the powerHouse published monograph, Developer Trays. Cyr's photography is represented in many notable public and private collections including: George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York; The Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.; and The New York Public Library, New York, New York. John Cyr is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago.

http://www.johncyrphotography.com/

March 8th, 2016

VICTOR SIRA is a Venezuela-born photographer/artist whose work has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Andrea Frank Foundation Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Sira is a faculty member at the ICP–Bard MFA Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, where he teaches the course The Book: Imaginary Studio, A Non Stop Process. In 2011, he co-founded, with Shiori Kawasaki, Bookdummypress (bdp), a publishing company, studio, and bookstore that specializes in artist publications.

http://victorsira.com/

March 1st, 2016

Image © Chris McCaw. Sunburned GSP #835 (Mojave), 2015. 20"x24" unique gelatin silver paper negative — Image © Chris McCaw. *Sunburned GSP #835* (Mojave), 2015. 20"x24" unique gelatin silver paper negative

At age thirteen, CHRIS McCAW’s mom forced him to take a photo course at the community center. He got hooked instantly. Concurrently, McCaw spent his youth in the punk and skateboarding scenes, taking the “DIY” motto of those cultures and applying it to photography. The first camera he built in 1995 was a 7x17” view camera to make contact negatives for platinum prints. Over the ensuing decades—and particularly with his Sunburn project—McCaw has used photographic materials, especially expired gelatin silver paper, in groundbreaking ways. His work is held in numerous public collections, and in 2012 a monograph Sunburn was published by Candela Books. His second solo exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery will be opening on March 4th. 2016.

http://www.chrismccaw.com/

PENUMBRA ARTIST SERIES FALL 2015

December 1st., 2015

Image © Vera Lutter. Radio Telescope, Effelsberg, XVI: September 13, 2013. 94 1/8 x 84 inches — Image © Vera Lutter. *Radio Telescope, Effelsberg, XVI: September 13, 2013.*
94 1/8 x 84 inches

VERA LUTTER was born in Kaiserslautern, Germany. After receiving a diploma in fine arts from the Munich Academy in 1990, she studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In addition to several solo shows, Lutter has undertaken a number of commissions. Recent solo shows include The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2005); Foundation Beyeler, Switzerland (2008); Carré d’art Musée d’Art contemporain, Nimes (2012); “Inverted Worlds,” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2015, traveling to New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana, through 2016); and “This is a Photograph,” Penland Gallery and Visitors Center, North Carolina (2016). Lutter’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, among others. Lutter was the recipient of the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Grant in 1993, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2001, and the Pollock–Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002.

November 24th, 2015

Image © Yamini Nayar. Akhet, 2013, Chromogenic Print, 50x40 inches

YAMINI NAYAR was raised between Detroit, MI and New Delhi, India, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Nayar has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, Center for Photography at Woodstock , Art Academy of Cincinnati, was recently an NYU Visiting Artist Scholar and a recipient of an Art Matters Foundation research grant to travel to Chandigarh, India. Nayar has exhibited her work internationally at venues including the Museum of Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, DeCordova Museum, MA, Sharjah Biennial, UAE, Saatchi Gallery, UK. Nayar's work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum NY, Saatchi Museum, Queensland Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Queens Museum and US Arts in Embassies. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and magazines including Passages: Indian Art Today (Daab Media, 2014), Lines of Control, Partition as a Productive Space (Green Cardamom 2012), Unfixed: Postcolonial Photography in Contemporary Art (Jap Sam Books, 2013); and Manual for Treason: Sharjah Biennial (2011), and featured in the New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, Art India, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Vogue India, Artpapers, and Art Economist. She is the recipient of a 2014 Art Matters grant, and is as a Thesis Advisor in the MFA Photography Dept of the School of Visual Arts in New York. Nayar's work is represented by Thomas Erben, New York and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai.

November 17th, 2015

Image © Dillon DeWaters "Configuration NoZero After-Ernst", 2015

DILLON DEWATERS is an artist working in traditional and experimental photography and video. He received his MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photography/Bard College in 2010, where he was awarded the ICP Director’s Fellowship in 2009, and his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University in 2002. He has participated in many group exhibitions, including, “Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship,” at Higher Pictures gallery in summer 2012, “Useful Pictures” at Michael Matthews Gallery and “Beyond the Barrier” at the Camera Club of New York, both in spring 2013, and “Lightplay” at Moscow’s Gallery 21 in winter 2013. In 2012, he was awarded a Tierney Fellowship by the Tierney Family Foundation. He has been Director of Photography and Imaging at Vik Muniz Studio since 2011. His work was published in Conveyor 5: Spectre // Spectrum, and he was commissioned by Conveyor to create the Indigo artist’s book for their “Visible Spectrum” book series. His work was included in The Future is Forever exhibition at ICP at Mana Contemporary.

November 10th, 2015

Image © Jon Goodman. The picnic table, Kapahu Living Farm, Kipahulu. Photogravure. — Image © Jon Goodman. *The picnic table*, Kapahu Living Farm, Kipahulu. Photogravure.

JON GOODMAN may be considered the catalyst in the modern revival of the photogravure process. He is a master printer of photogravure and a photographer. Goodman came to photogravure as a photographer and continues to make his own creative pictures with the camera. His landscape and still life prints have been exhibited nationally and internationally; outside of this country he has had one-person exhibitions in Scotland, France and Switzerland. His work has been collected by many museums, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museé de L’Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland) and the Bibliothèque National (Paris). In 2005, Goodman published Photography in High Places: The Work of Bradford Washburn. This lavish portfolio printed in an edition of 100 (10 of which are limited Chine-collé) represents Goodman’s foray into the publishing marketplace.

November 3rd, 2015

Image © Marina Berio, Family Matter 3, 2008/2013, gum bichromate print with blood, 10.2 x 10.2 in. — Image © Marina Berio, *Family Matter 3,* 2008/2013, gum bichromate print with blood, 10.2 x 10.2 in.

MARINA BERIO's work interrogates the material underpinnings of photography. She has made family pictures out of blood, and large-scale charcoal drawings of her negatives. Berio studied photography, drawing, sculpture and art history in college, and then earned her MFA in Photography at Bard. She has been awarded grants by the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and been invited to several residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Millay. She has exhibited at various art spaces internationally, including Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, Von Lintel Gallery, Smack Mellon, and Artists Space in New York; Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art in Boston; Les Rencontres d’Arles, Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris; and Otto Zoo and Acta International in Italy. Her work has been published in Conveyor, Foam and Fantom. Berio is Chair of the General Studies Program at the International Center of Photography in New York.mageI

October 27th, 2015

KUNIÉ SUGIURA was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1942. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, in 1967. Since she arrived in the United States from Japan in 1963, Kunié Sugiura has created innovative works that expand the uses of photography while exploring its relationship with drawing and painting. By the early 1970s, she had established the paradigms for her mature work: a lifelong interest in multimedia experimentation and the photographic manipulation of images from nature. In 1980, while searching for a way to make more dynamic drawings, she adopted the classic black and white photogram technique which she has used ever since. Works by Kunié Sugiura have been exhibited at major museums throughout Japan, Europe, and the United States and are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, among many others. Sugiura is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York, NY.

October 20th, 2015

Image © Paula McCartney. Black Ice #1 and #2. Photograms

PAULA McCARTNEY makes photographs and artists’ books that explore the idea of constructed landscapes and the way that people interact with and manipulate the natural world. McCartney earned an M.F.A. in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received grants from the Aaron Siskind Foundation the McKnight Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Her work has been exhibited across the US and is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Museum of Modern Art’s Artist Book Collection.Princeton Architectural Press published her first monograph, Bird Watching, in 2010. Her second monograph, A Field Guide to Snow and Ice, was published by Silas Finch in 2014.

October 13th, 2015

Image © Lothar Osterburg. Return to the Tower, 2015, Photogravureon Somerset White34 x 28.5 in on 34 x 28.5 in — Image © Lothar Osterburg. *Return to the Tower*, 2015, Photogravureon Somerset White34 x 28.5 in on 34 x 28.5 in

LOTHAR OSTERBURG is known as one of the foremost photogravure artists in the country who is also working on stop motion video collaborations with his wife, composer and performer Elizabeth Brown. A 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship recipient, the same year he also received an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Bard College research grant, he has been awarded two New York Foundation for the Arts grants for printmaking in 2003 and 2009, a grant from the AEV Foundation in 2009 and residencies at MacDowell in 1996, 1997 and 2002, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1999 and a 2011 residency at the Liguria Studies Center of the Bogliasco Foundattion in Italy. Exhibition highlights include major shows at ICPNA in Lima, Peru in 2010, the Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA in 2007, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College in 2002, the Zoller Gallery at Penn State University in 2003 as well as part of the 2013 100 year anniversary show at Grand Central Terminal “On Time”. His work has been shown in solo shows at Lesley Heller Workspace in 2009, 2011 and 2015, Moeller Fine Art in 2003, 2004 (New York) and 2011 (Berlin), as well as Wendy Cooper Gallery in Madison, WI, Lunday Fine Art in Houston, TX and many more. He received a degree in printmaking and experimental film from the Art Academy (HbK) Braunschweig, Germany. After moving to the US in 1987 he worked in various print studios including as Master Printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. He started his own print studio specializing in photogravure in 1993, moving it to New York City in 1994. He has taught photogravure workshops across the country, from Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Maui’s Hui No’Eau Visual Arts Center, RISD, Mass Art or Tulane. Having taught at Columbia University and Cooper Union he has been on the faculty of Bard College for more than 15 years.

October 6th, 2015

Image © Andrew Moore. The Yellow Porch, Sheridan County, Nebraska 2013 — Image © Andrew Moore. *The Yellow Porch,* Sheridan County, Nebraska 2013

American photographer ANDREW MOORE (born 1957) is widely acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over many years, which record the effect of time on the natural and built landscape. These series include work from Cuba, Russia, Times Square, Detroit, and the High Plains of the United States. His newest book, entitled Dirt Meridian, is published by Damiani Editore and will be released in the Fall of 2015. The photographs were made over a ten-year period along the lands that lie west of the 100 the meridian and addresses the history and mythology of this region known as “flyover country”. The book also includes a preface by the noted author Kent Haruf, as well other essays and an extensive set of endnotes. Moore’s photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the George Eastman House and the Library of Congress amongst many other institutions. He has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, the JM Kaplan Fund, and the Cissy Patterson Foundation. Moore’s other publications include Detroit Disassembled, Making History, Governors Island, Russia; Beyond Utopia, Cuba and Inside Havana. He also produced and photographed "How to draw a bunny," a documentary feature film on the artist Ray Johnson. The movie premiered at the 2002 Sundance Festival, where it won a Special Jury prize. Presently he teaches a graduate seminar in the MFA Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Previous LECTURES

2015 - Yola Monakhov Stockton, Tatiana Gulenkina, Stacy Renee Morrison, Joni Sternbach

2014 - Benjamin Lowy, Lisa Elmaleh, David J. Carol, Paris Visone, Eliot Dudik, Charlotte Dumas, Kate Breakey, Ben Busch, Tomas van Houtryve, Paolo Cirio, Thomas Allen, Robert Bowen, and Mike Slack

2013 - Robert A. Schaefer Jr., Harvey Stein, Julie Pochron, Lauren Henkin, and Harvey Wang

2012 - Sze Tsung Leong, Jerry Vezzuso, Ellen Wallenstein, Philip Levine & Andrew Moore, Ángel Franco, Michelle Bates, Amy Arbus, Ellen Susan, Jerry Spagnoli, and Philip Perkis

2011 - Joni Sternbach, Marcia Lippman, and Lori Nix

2010 - Dan Estabrook, Bryan Whitney, and Edward Fausty.

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