General Conditions @ Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY

Through November 29, 2025

Jack Shainman Gallery presents GENERAL CONDITIONS at The School at Kinderhook, NY. Bringing together work by over two dozen artists working across a wide range of media and at scales both intimate and grand, the exhibition offers a sustained reflection on the social and political climate of our time by considering how we respond—individually and collectively—when many of the most basic components of public life can no longer be taken for granted.

Featured artists include: El Anatsui, Emanoel Araújo, Shimon Attie, Shannon Bool, Diedrick Brackens, Yoan Capote, Geoffrey Chadsey, Ifeyinwa Joy Chiamonwu, Gehard Demetz, Pierre Dorion, Donyel Ivy-Royal, Hayv Kahraman, Jesse Krimes, Deborah Luster, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Jackie Nickerson, Gordon Parks, Mary Ann Peters, Kenny Rivero, Rose B. Simpson, Paul Anthony Smith, Becky Suss, Alina Tenser, Carlos Vega, Charisse Pearlina Weston, Deb Willis, Jaclyn Wright, and Elizabeth Zvonar.

As artist Alina Tenser notes, the idea of ‘general conditions’ “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague. In the world of construction, the term holds power precisely because of its evasiveness, allowing those in control to shift goalposts in ways that serve their interests. Its ambiguity makes it nearly impossible for the opposing or disadvantaged side to challenge, negotiate or fully grasp the terms at play. This dynamic eerily mirrors the structural changes we’re witnessing in federal policy, where language and bureaucracy are weaponized to obscure, justify and enable horrific systemic shifts. In both cases, the lack of clear definition breeds a sense of injustice and impending doom, leaving those affected with no firm ground on which to push back.” With social stability seeming to be an ideal of the past and civic norms disappearing by the day, the artists in this exhibition provide us with a bevy of new strategies for thinking about and confronting the crisis of ‘general conditions’ felt by us all.

While each of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS stands as vivid expressions and bold aesthetic statements in their own regard, many cohere around recurring themes. For example, Richard Mosse’s Heat Map photographs examine the control and exploitation of refugees and migrants as they attempt to move safely across borders. Using a military-grade telephoto camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, across great distances, Richard Mosse documented refugee camps and staging sites, seeing them as landscapes of human displacement where millions struggle for survival.

Displacement is a theme that Hayv Kahraman also considers in her multimedia works on paper, linen and flax fiber. Her pieces regularly show fragmented or disembodied pairs of eyes set within spacious compositions or, in others, hanging from the branches of trees that remain defiant within their fragile landscapes. For Hayv Kahraman, the disembodiment that her works figurally express serves as a metaphor for the psyche of refugees forced to flee their homes. Kahraman understands this experience personally, having first fled her native country of Iraq and again, more recently, as a result of having to evacuate her home and studio due to the recent wildfires in Los Angeles.

With Utah’s West Desert as both setting and subject, Jaclyn Wright combines original and archival photographs with regional maps and elements of performance to show the impact of late capitalism and settler colonization on the landscapes of the Western United States. Her photographs are composites of historical and contemporary imagery that investigate the codification of the natural world by state officials and business interests alike. Working with mediums and techniques such as, tapestry, embroidery and photograms, Shannon Bool regularly explores how hierarchy is embedded into historical narratives and their visual expressions. In his large-scale and often allegorical paintings that look to the histories of religion and the cosmos alike, Carlos Vega likewise explores the hidden structures of social life and the meanings embedded within them.

Many of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS express moments of personal defiance and solidarity against the systems of oppression that, by keeping people in positions of uncertainty and even desperation, try to maintain a status quo of injustice and inequity. Gordon Parks’ photographs of Black communities in a still-segregated South show individuals navigating politically fraught circumstances with resolution and grace. The multi-directional colored wooden planes that Emanoel Araújo arranges in his sculpture compositions take a rigid and geometric frame as their background before transcending it through their formal expressivity. Working at a comparatively monumental scale, Rose B. Simpson’s ceramic and mixed-media sculptures of worldly yet ethereal figures, just recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, are specific expressions of the artist’s ancestry and cultural heritage that also uphold the value of the human spirit.

What the variety and complexity of the works in GENERAL CONDITIONS demonstrates is that no single approach for understanding the present historical conjuncture will do. Instead, these artists provide multiple strategies that we can use to better interpret, represent and hopefully seize control of the conditions around us.

THE SCHOOL / JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY

jackshainman.com

GENERAL CONDITIONS

Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY, May 17 - November 29, 2025

Gordon Parks @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - Half and the Whole

Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Through February 20, 2021

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole, on view at both gallery locations. As a photographer, film director, composer, and writer, GORDON PARKS (1912-2006) was a visionary artist whose work continues to influence American culture to this day. In collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation, this two-part exhibition featuring photographs that span from 1942–1970, demonstrates the continued influence and impact of Gordon Parks’s images, which remain as relevant today as they were at the time of their making. The exhibition is accompanied by a short essay written by Jelani Cobb, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and Columbia University Professor, who writes of these photographs: “we see Parks performing the same service for ensuing generations—rendering a visual shorthand for bigger questions and conflicts that dominated the times. Bearing witness.”

On view at the galley's 20th Street location is a selection of works from Gordon Parks’s most iconic series, among them Invisible Man and Segregation Story. These images, many of which have rarely been exhibited, exemplify Godon Parks’s singular use of color and composition to render an unprecedented view of the Black experience in America. The earliest photograph in the exhibition, a striking 1948 portrait of Margaret Burroughs—a writer, artist, educator, and activist who transformed the cultural landscape in Chicago—shows how Gordon Parks uniquely understood the importance of making visible both the triumphs and struggles of African American life.

The gallery's 24th Street space features images of protest and portraits of leaders in the fight for social justice and racial equality, among them Malcolm X, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, and a woman only known via Gordon Parks’s searing portrait, Ella Watson. In the weeks and months since the murder of George Floyd, these images—many made over half a century ago—resonate louder than ever. Of particular note are 1963 images of protests relating to incidents of police brutality, equally striking for their relevance as for their contemporary compositions. Regardless of subject, Gordon Parks was more than a keen observer, he was a witness who through his photographs was able to channel the humanity that powered such struggles. As Jelani Cobb writes:

Parks was also aware that no group of people, no culture, was simply the sum of its worst tragedies. Always, there is a glimpse of the joy that perseveres even in the most hostile circumstances, the glint of light peering through foreboding clouds. The snatched-from-the-headlines quality of these images attest to the fact that our conflicts have not changed, but neither has the willingness to confront them. There is nothing in Parks’s body of work that includes the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” but it didn’t need to. He’d already shown that they do, minute after minute, across the void from his time to our own.

GORDON PARKS was born in Kansas in 1912. He relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota as a teenager and began taking fashion photographs for a local clothing store. In 1940, he moved to Chicago, where he operated a portrait studio on the city’s South Side. After being awarded the prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, he moved to Washington D.C. and worked for the Farm Security Administration. In 1948, after working as a freelance photographer for publications such as Ebony and Vogue, he was hired as the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine. He held the position at the magazine until the early 1970s, completing groundbreaking assignments that are some of the most important and iconic documentation of the civil rights movement. Parks was also a noted composer and author, and in 1969, became the first African American to write and direct a Hollywood feature film based on his bestselling novel The Learning Tree. This was followed in 1971 by the classic motion picture Shaft. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1988, and continued working until his death in 2006. That year, he established The Gordon Parks Foundation to continue his influential legacy. Current institutional exhibitions include Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime” in the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and Gordon Parks X Muhammad Ali, The Image of a Champion, 1966/1970 at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

524 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

jackshainman.com

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Tailor-Made: Fashion Photographs from the Collection of Peter Fetterman – Phillips Online Auction

Tailor-Made: Fashion Photographs from the Collection of Peter Fetterman
Phillips online auction
June 18 – 25, 2020

SARAH MOON

Fashion 10 (N.Y. Times), 1998

Estimate: $20,000 – 30,000

Photo © Sarah Moon, Courtesy of Phillips

Phillips announces Tailor-Made: Fashion Photographs from the Collection of Peter Fetterman, an exclusive online auction that celebrates a century of fashion photography, tracing the history of women’s fashion through 64 quintessential images spanning from the 1920s to today. Drawn from the collection of esteemed gallerist and collector Peter Fetterman, Tailor-Made includes work by legendary fashion photographers Lillian Bassman, Sarah Moon, Sheila Metzner, Gordon Parks, Ormond Gigli, William Klein, and Horst P. Horst, among many others. The sale will be live to bidders worldwide June 18 - 25 on Phillips.com. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Equal Justice Initiative to help further their mission to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the US, and to challenge racial and economic injustice, and to protect basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.

GORDON PARKS

James Galanos Fashion, Hollywood, California, 1961

Estimate: $5,000 – 7,000

Photo © Gordon Parks, Courtesy of Phillips

For more than 30 years, Peter Fetterman has collected and championed the work of the photographers represented in this sale, with many of them becoming close personal friends. “While the essence of fashion is beauty and dreams,” states Peter Fetterman, “these photographers taught me so much about the context in which their images were made. The photographers represented here shaped my eye and my taste, for which I owe them all a great debt. Further, in the context of rampant injustice now being foregrounded in this country, I’m pleased to support the Equal Justice Initiative whose work I deeply admire.”

Sarah Krueger, Head of the Photographs Department in New York, states: “It is a pleasure to partner once again with Peter Fetterman on a sale of such exciting material. While fashion photography is a regular presence in our auctions, it is a new and entirely thrilling experience to work with a collection like this, assembled over the years with such singular focus and flare.”

Fashion photography has long been a driver of innovation in the medium, both technically and aesthetically, and this depth and breadth of creativity is demonstrated throughout Tailor-Made.

Highlighting the sale are works by Sarah Moon, whose bold, impressionistic use of color and deft manipulation of light and movement result in images that defy expectations. Sheila Metzner is another of fashion photography’s iconoclasts, and her Campidoglio plays with scale and movement within a setting that is simultaneously classical and surreal. Lillian Bassman rounds out this trio of women photographers for whom mood, atmosphere, and gesture embody elegance and style.

SARAH MOON

Fashion 4, Yohji Yamamoto, 1996

Estimate: $40,000 – 60,000

Photo © Sarah Moon, Courtesy of Phillips

SHEILA METZNER

Campidoglio, 1986

Estimate: $12,000 – 18,000

Photo © Sheila Metzner, Courtesy of Phillips

LILLIAN BASSMAN

More Fashion Mileage Per Dress, Barbara Vaughn, 

Harper's Bazaar, New York, 1954

Estimate: $12,000 – 18,000

Photo © Lillian Bassman, Courtesy of Phillips

Driven to create ever-new imagery to keep pace with the evolving styles, photographers continually created new modes and innovative ways to showcase fashion. Melvin Sokolsky placed his models in bubbles on location in New York and Paris, creating iconic images of mid-century technology and culture, while Ormond Gigli surmounted the many logistical and technical challenges in making his instantly recognizable Models in the Windows, New York City.

ORMOND GIGLI

Girls in the Windows, New York City, 1960

Estimate $30,000 – 50,000

Photo © Ormond Gigli, Courtesy of Phillips

William Klein abandoned the controlled confines of the studio to make images that have more in common with his street work than conventional fashion photography. Jerry Schatzberg and Gordon Parks, who both worked in cinema, bring a sense of movement and narrative to their imagery. While Georges Dambier, Norman Parkinson, Brian Duffy, and William Helburn create impossibly elegant images of modern women moving through the metropolis.

The photographs in Tailor-Made: Fashion Photographs from the Peter Fetterman Collection demonstrate their makers’ expansive understanding of what makes a great, compelling, and enduring fashion photograph, and the auction offers collectors a unique opportunity to acquire works from this remarkable collection. 

*Estimates do not include buyer’s premium; prices achieved include the hammer price plus buyer’s premium.

PHILLIPS NEW YORK - 450 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022
PHILLIPS LONDON - 30 Berkeley Square, London, W1J 6EX
PHILLIPS HONG KONG - 14/F St. George’s Building, 2 Ice House Street, Central Hong Kong
PHILLIPS GENEVA - Hôtel La Réserve, 301 Route de Lausanne, Geneva

www.phillips.com

Gordon Parks, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University - Bare Witness

Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
March 21 – July 1, 2007

As part of an ongoing series of exhibitions based on the photographic collection of the Los Angeles-based Capital Group, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presents a retrospective of the works of the late Gordon Parks. “Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks” features 73 works chosen specifically by Parks for The Capital Group as examples of his most potent imagery. 

Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Gordon Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, documented crime and poverty, as well as its opposite - glamour. An African American photographer who began working professionally in the 1940s, Gordon Parks tackled the harsh truth and dignity of the black urban and rural poor in the United States. He photographed aspects of the Civil Rights movements and individuals associated with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims. Gordon Parks established himself as a foremost fashion photographer, providing spreads for respected magazines such as Vogue. For 25 years, from 1945 to 1970, he served as staff photographer for Life, the magazine of current events that mirrored mid-century American society. In addition to his documentary and fashion photography, Gordon Parks was a filmmaker, author, musician, and publisher, a renaissance man whose career embodied the American ideal of equality and whose art was bound up with his personal life.

“ 'Bare Witness' includes many of Parks's iconic images, such as those made for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and the Standard Oil (New Jersey) photography project,” said Hilarie Faberman, Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cantor Arts Center. “Whether photographing celebrities or common folk, Harlem gang leaders or intellectuals, children or the elderly, individuals who were well or barely dressed, Parks brought his straightforward, sympathetic eye and mind to bear witness to late-20th century civilization. As writers on Parks have noted, his photographs balance the dichotomies of black and white, rich and poor, and document and artifice, revealing his strengths and struggles as an artist and man.”

The exhibition includes an illustrated catalogue with an essay by photography scholar Maren Stange who writes frequently on modern American culture. A member of the faculty at Cooper Union, Stange's recent publications include Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures (2003) and Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950 (1989). Following its showing at the Cantor Arts Center, the exhibition will travel nationally to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia (January 24 - March 30, 2008), the St. Louis Art Museum (May 30 - August 24, 2008), and Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington (mid-September 2008 - January 4, 2009).

The exhibition, associated catalogue, and related programs are made possible by The Capital Group and the Hohbach Family Fund.

CANTOR ARTS CENTER, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
328 Lomita Drive (at Museum Way), Stanford, CA 94305-5060
ccva.stanford.edu