EXHIBITIONS

EXHIBITION SPACE

Penumbra’s Exhibition Space is a new gallery dedicated to presenting work that advances historic and alternative photographic processes in ways that are as conceptually and socially relevant as they are materially driven. The goal of this space is to foster conversations about the role of photography in contemporary society through curated exhibitions and collaborations.

Aaron R. Turner

Black Alchemy: Resolve (attempt #1)

July 6th, 2023 - September 30th, 2023

Resolve (attempt #1) explores the linear movement of light, desire, and time. In the pursuit of abstraction to create speculative narratives, Turner uses various photographic techniques and processes, including reflective and archival materials, and in-camera and darkroom manipulation.

This exhibition combines works from multiple series within and outside of Black Alchemy, and is a non-representational response to and visual analysis of objective and subjective ideas in photography as it relates to the individual lived experience of everyday life and internal contemplations.

For more information and complete list of the works included in this exhibition please click here.

Photography in Ink: A Look at Contemporary Copper-Plate Photogravure

December 1st, 2022—April 7th, 2023

Photography in Ink, a group exhibition of photogravure prints, which offers viewers the rare opportunity to expand their understanding of material photography. Photogravure is a 19th-century-derived process used to create highly tactile and compelling images by combining photography and printmaking. Known for its deep velvety shadows, rich tones, and luminous highlights, photogravure is considered one of the most expressive ways to print photographs with ink. This exhibition celebrates a selection of exceptional contemporary artists working with this rigorous process.

For more information on this exhibition please click here.

Panel Discussion

Photography in Ink: | Related Programming

Saturday, March 4 at 1 PM

NYC based artist Beth Ganz will moderate a talk with three master photogravure printers where they will discuss collaborating with the various artists they print for. The panel will include Paris based artists Fanny Boucher and Marie Levoyet, and Mexico City based artist Mike Counahan.

For more information on Photography in Ink related Programming, please click here.

Roberto Huarcaya

OCÉANOS

May 17th, 2022 - September 12th, 2022

In 2014, Huarcaya was commissioned by a non-profit organization dedicated to conserving the world's largest wild places, to visit and photograph the southeast part of the Amazon forest. After two years of trips to the area (and several failed attempts to capture its complexity), Huarcaya realized that there was no camera or lens capable of recording the brutal and immeasurable experience of the jungle. At that point he decided to eliminate the intermediary tools and started to work directly on light-sensitive papers. Since then, the artist has adopted this process to produce artworks that examine Peruvian territory and culture from the Amazonian border in the east to the Pacific shore in the west.

Ellen Carey Lecture and Demonstration

OCÉANOS | Related Programming

Thursday, June 2nd, 2022

Ellen Carey’s experimental photographic practice challenges representational subject matter and embraces an abstract approach. Traditionally, photograms are made with objects blocking light, but Carey’s images remove the barrier between light and paper, rendering light as the subject in her works. Carey will give a lecture shedding light on her process and expansive career followed by a black and white photogram demonstration.

This lecture and demonstration was part of Photogram Programming coinciding with Roberto Huarcaya's exhibition at Penumbra, OCÉANOS.

Lois Conner

Flat Earth

November 30th, 2021 - March 31st, 2022

To inaugurate Penumbra Foundation’s Gallery Space, this exhibition is a celebration of Conner’s art and working philosophy. The selected images have been intentionally decontextualized from their original bodies of work to offer a reading of a universal landscape. Through their physicality, visual rhetoric and silent narrative, the images make visible a profound understanding and respect for the genre, the medium (photography) and the documented places (with their particular cultures and histories). Conner’s photographs invite us to slow down and look carefully. And it is in this way that we might discover, in the space between the subject and object, her persistent gesture of searching. 

For more information on the exhibition, please click here.

In conjunction with Flat Earth, Penumbra Foundation published Elliptical with Lois Conner. This leporello bound publication presents a selected number of images Conner made during the pandemic.

For more information on Elliptical, please click here.

PROJECT GALLERY

The 300 square-foot Project Gallery offers emerging and mid-career artists a place to exhibit new work, enabling them to present projects and explore ideas without the need to conform to commericial expectations. The exhibitions are developed in conjunction with Penumbra’s editorial or educational programming.  

Lucy Helton with Jason Geistwiedt

Lost in Transmission

Jun 8th, 2023—Jul 31st, 2023

Consisting of works from over three years of Helton’s research on environmental transformation and fascination with basic image transmission using low-energy radio waves, and the mixed-media installation QSL, done in collaboration with Geistweidt, the exhibition utilizes radiofax, SSTV (slow-scan television), and HAM radio, to communicate and build data and images concerning time, communication, local weather patterns, and climate change.

Lucy Helton was a 2019 Penumbra Workspace A-I-R.

Helton’s book, Solastalgia, published by Penumbra Foundation, will be released in late Summer 2023.

Tine Guns

Cinebooks

Nov 17th, 2022—Feb 6th, 2023

Tine Guns is an artist who uses mediums such as film, photobooks and installations to explore perception, memory, and the fragmented notion of time in the human experience. In recent years she has searched for ways to translate sequencing methods from cinematic montage into the artistic practice of the contemporary photobook. Cinebooks gives a first overview of these books.

Guns presented and discussed her research and photobooks as part of the Fall 2022 Artist Series.

Read more about Guns’s exhibition here.

Sophie Barbasch

Obras

Sept 22nd, 2022—Nov 7th, 2022

Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Barbasch lived in Fortaleza, Brazil for a year, photographing the Transnordestina, a railroad under construction in the Northeast that ties the desert to the sea. Obras revolves around the notion of suspension, both literal and metaphorical. The photographs are not about documenting from a stable viewpoint so much as about referencing a shifting subjectivity. They grapple with the slippery question of what it means to belong in a place and whether we can actually ever know anything simply by looking.

With Barbasch, Penumbra Foundation published Obras in 2022, and was featured in Nowhere Diary, Lensculture, and Photobookstore as a photobook of the year.

Sophie Barbasch was a 2021 Penumbra Workspace A-I-R.

For more about the exhibition, click here.

Dylan Hausthor

the flowers aren’t growing, the eggs are hatching, it’s almost dawn

July 12th, 2022—Sept 12th, 2022

the flowers aren’t growing, the eggs are hatching, it’s almost dawn is a collection of seven myths made in the last four seasons—myths that explore the complexities of storytelling, faith, folklore, and systems and characters that haunt us.

Dylan Hausthor was a 2021 Penumbra Workspace A-I-R.

For more about the exhibition, click here.

Martyna Szczęsna

ARRAY

February 17th, 2022—March 23rd, 2022

Szczesna's work examines utopian constructs using both the formal and intangible qualities of photography and site. In Array, her ongoing series of life-sized photograms, Szczesna maps chance urban ecologies created in the interplay between the artificial illumination of L.E.D. streetlights and the projected shadows of trees reorganized according to the logic of the light source's cellular, technological structure.

Martyna Szczęsna was a 2020 Workspace A-I-R.

For more about the exhibition, click here.

Adama Delphine Fawundu

For Mama Adama

PROJECT GALLERY | July 1st—August 8th, 2021

In these works, Fawundu appropriates motifs found on her grandmother's fabrics and transforms them into patterns of exploration. Experimenting with color, form, scale and surface and using textiles, papers and different photo-graphic processes, Fawundu examines the relationship between materiality and identity. 

Fawundu was interviewed about the translation of the creative DNA of her forebearers For Mama Adama in Ebony Magazine.

Adama Delphine Fawandu was a 2020 Penumbra Workspace A-I-R and a member of the 2022 Workspace A-I-R jury.

View the exhibited artwork here.

Mary Ellen Bartley

Scene in a Library

May 6th—June 21st, 2021

In 2019, Bartley spent six weeks at Penumbra making hundreds of prints, using a toner-based copier machine. All images were forged using the Taubman collection of 19th and early 20th century photographic manuals, treatises, and monographs, housed at the Foundation’s location in New York City.

In her image-making process, Mary Ellen Bartley playfully explored the possibilities that the surface of these historical objects offer, both visually and tactilely. The result, Scene in a Library, is a limited edition artist book containing 28 images in six leporello signatures, a fold out and a photogravure, presented in a foil stamped slipcase. The exhibition displays the publication in its entirety, a selection of copies that were not included in the publication, and a number of the actual volumes used to produce these works.

Published by Penumbra Foundation, Scene in a Library is included in the MoMA Library Special Collections.

For more about the exhibition, click here.

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE RESIDENCY PROGRAM

The Penumbra Workspace Program benefits six emerging artists* (three New York City-based and three US-based) with access to time, facilities, critical and technical support, and honoraria. The extension of the program ranges from two weeks to four weeks depending on the time requested by the selected artists. Participants have liberal access to the workspace facilities. They are expected to use their time to pursue their own projects: researching, photographing, scanning, printing, working on an exhibition or editing a book.

Since the creation of the Workspace Program in 2017, Penumbra Foundation has welcomed 28 artists-in-residence into our community.

It is free to apply. Each year, Penumbra invites an all new jury of arts professionals to select residents and finalists. This selection process not only helps to ensure that the Workspace Program remains open and equitable, but also serves to expose applicants to an ever-changing group of reviewers.

Many Workspace residents go on to exhibit in our Project Gallery, give talks, present books, and teach classes at Penumbra.

For a complete list of residents present and past, and jurors, please click here.

PHOTOBOOKS

The Risograph Print & Publication Residency

The Risograph Print & Publication Residency provides the opportunity for artists to propose a photographic project to produce in print form, at our Risograph facilities in New York City. It is particularly well suited to the production of small edition photographic artist’s books.

Now in its third year, Penumbra has partnered with EUREKA!, an arts organization founded in 2020, in Kingston, NY, whose mission includes connecting and expanding the community, providing artists with an alternative platform for showing work and making new site-specific work, hosting education and skill-based workshops, and publishing free Zines and art publications.

From 2021-2022, the Risograph Print & Publication Residency partnered with the MUUS Collection.

At the conclusion of each Residency, artists present their books to the public at our annual Risograph Book Launch.

Learn more about the Risograph Residency and the 2023 residents here.

The Long Term Book Program

The program combines online seminars, critiques with guest artists, and one-on-one sessions, as well as optional in-person and online workshops. Working with one main, and two additional instructors throughout the program, while also receiving assignments and feedback from guest critics, participants have both continuity and variety of support. The learning process is based on regular production of physical maquettes, leading participants to deepen their understanding of the book form and allow them to continue redefining it for themselves. Reading and writing assignments, as well as individualized exercises throughout the year develop the skills and knowledge necessary for a photobook maker.

This program has been developed in collaboration with the Image Threads Collective.

For more information including instructors, click here.

To view Program Chair Jenia Fridlyand in conversation with artist Dayanita Singh, please click here.

ARTIST SERIES

The Artist Series, organized by Leandro Villaro, brings to life the work of featured photographers and other notable guest artists and scholars, offering a unique opportunity to engage with them in an intimate setting as they discuss their work and process.

Begun in 2015, the Series runs in two seasons per year, with seven guest speakers per season.

All lectures are free to attend and in-person.

Spring 2023 artists included: Letha Wilson, Sabiha Çimen, Phil Chang, Alan Huck, Keisha Scarville, Aaron Turner and Nadezda Nikolova.

Past guests have included: Tim Carpenter in conversation with Brad Zellar, Noémie Goudal, Christiane Feser, Kim Beil, Mark Steinmetz, Dru Donovan, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Mona Kuhn, Erin Shirreff, Ellen Carey, Marco Breuer, Alison Rossiter, James Welling, and many others.

For a complete list of esteemed speakers, please click here.