FLLAC: Barney, Davis, Newbegin Photo Exhibition as part of Vassar's 150th anniversary

150 Years Later: New Photography 

by Tina Barney, Tim Davis, 

and Katherine Newbegin

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center 

FLLAC at Vassar College   

Poughkeepsie, NY

Through March 27, 2011

As part of a campus-wide celebration of Vassar’s sesquicentennial anniversary, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center commissioned three photographers to create new work to highlight different aspects of campus life. The resulting photographs in the exhibition 150 YEARS LATER: NEW PHOTOGRAPHY BY TINA BARNEY, TIM DAVIS, AND KATHERINE NEWCOMING focus on the people, environment, and the culture of Vassar today. The exhibition is curated by Mary-Kay Lombino, The Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator and Assistant Director for Strategic Planning at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, and is on view since January 28 through March 27, 2011.

The approximately 40 new works created for this exhibition uncover a side of Vassar that is not often seen by the average visitor to campus. “Foregoing the typical view of architectural and natural beauty for which the college is known, Barney, Davis, and Newbegin instead focused on the idiosyncratic, the ironic, and the hidden aspects of campus life that lie beneath the surface,” explained Lombino. “They have pieced together a portrait of Vassar that reveals as much about the artists’ interests as it does about their subject.”

Each photographer’s work is presented in one of three adjoining galleries. Lombino noted that each photographer chose to represent the college in different ways — Tina Barney with intimate close-up images of people, Katherine Newbegin’s focus on dark and dingy forgotten corners, and Tim Davis’s search to capture the absurdity in everyday life.  

TINA BARNEY was born in 1945 in NYC. Monographic publications of her work include: Friends and Relations: Photographs by Tina Barney (Smithsonian 1991), Tina Barney Photographs: Theater of Manners (Scalo 1997), Tina Barney: The Europeans (Steidl 2005). Barney’s last book Players, was published in 2010. Her work is in such collections as the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“Vassar is so pretty, so stately,” noted TIM DAVIS (b. 1969, Blantyre, Malawi). “I chose ‘Move Out Day’ as a subject in order to see this ideally arranged place in a state of derangement. Cameras love chaos as much as they enjoy order and I felt privileged to be able examine this campus as it folded up and began its annual bivouac home.”

Tim Davis’s publications include The New Antiquity (Damiani 2010), My Life in Politics (Aperture 2006), Permanent Collection (Nazraeli Press 2005) and Lots (Coromandel Design 2002). In addition, he has published several books of his poetry. Davis currently teaches at Bard College while living and working in New York City and Tivoli, New York.

KATHERINE NEWBEGIN (b. 1976, Portland, Oregon. Lives and works in New York and Berlin.) remarked that it took her “several visits before I stumbled upon what I felt to be the hidden world of Vassar . . . I spent so much time wandering in basements and attics, and it was through this process that I eventually felt I was able to get under the skin of Vassar. Simultaneously, I was drawn to the student life happening on the surface, and the tension that lies between these two worlds, one silent and aging, the second so full of life.” 

This commission follows a strong photographic legacy at Vassar that dates back to the early part of the 20th century. Throughout the history of the college photographers have been invited to campus to capture the architecture, people, and lifestyle. Two fine historical examples are Paul Strand who photographed several Vassar buildings in 1915 and Albert Eisenstadt who illustrated campus life for the February 1937 issue of LIFE magazine. Several of the original photographs from these earlier commissions are in the Art Center’s permanent collection and are presented in a nearby gallery to compliment the new work by Barney, Davis, and Newbegin. 

MARY-KAY LOMBINO was appointed to the position of Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator in 2006 and, in fall 2009, appointed as Assistant Director for Strategic Planning of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.  During her time at Vassar, she has curated several notable exhibitions, including Off the Shelf: New Form in Contemporary Artists’ Books; Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection; Facebook: Image of People in Photographs from the Permanent Collection; Excerpt: Selections from the Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn Collection; Faith and Fantasy; and Harry Roseman: Hole in the Wall.  In 2009, Lombino was named a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL); and in 2005, she received a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship to study work by the late California Symbolist/Surrealist painter Dorr Bothwell. Lombino received a BA in art history from the University of Richmond and an MA in art history and museum studies from the University of Southern California in 1995. She has organized solo shows for numerous artists including Phil Collins, Ken Price, Amy Myers, Gay Outlaw, Euan Macdonald, Alice Könitz, Candida Höfer, and Mungo Thomson.

An exhibition Catalogue has been published. 

Palmer Gallery exhibition: Through the Student Lens: 1865 - 2011

James W. Palmer III Gallery

October 27 - November, 2011 (exact dates to be announced)

The James W. Palmer III Gallery in Main Building’s College Center will present the photographic exhibition titled Through the Student Lens: 1865 - 2011, curated by Hudson Valley artist Monica Church. Student photographers will chronicle various dimensions of life at Vassar and their work will be exhibited along with photographs by past students, selected from the archives.

FRANCES LEHMAN LOEB ART CENTER 

124 Raymond Ave 

Poughkeepsie, NY 12604

fllac.vassar.edu

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence - Photo Exhibition at the ArtIC - Art Institute of Chicago

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence 

Art Institute of Chicago

December 8, 2007 - February 24, 2008

Lauren Greenfield. Alli, Annie, Hannah, and Berit, All 13, before the First Big Party of the Seventh Grade, Edina, Minnesota, 1998. Restricted gift of Anstiss and Ronald Krueck in honor of RenŽe Harrison Drake, with love and admiration. © Lauren Greenfield/VII (from Girl Culture/Chronicle Books).

The Art Institute of Chicago’s photography exhibition will showcase a collection of perceptive, subtle images focusing on the subject of female adolescence. Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence — on view in Gallery 1 — features more than 40 photographs and one video by 11 contemporary artists, ranging from documentary pieces examining peer groups and body image to posed individual portraits. These pictures reveal the complexity, power, and common humanity of the transitional moments between girlhood and womanhood. Adolescent girls find themselves on the cusp between child and adult. It is a time of physical and emotional changes, of yearning for freedom while secretly cherishing constraints, of finding the pleasures as well as the terrors of one’s own appeal to the world. Increasingly, the dividing line between innocence and adulthood seems more and more blurred. Not surprisingly, then, this simultaneously beautiful and awkward stage has provided photographers with a wealth of material. In recent years, many contemporary photographers have explored female adolescence with empathetic images, featured in this exhibition, that evoke universal experience. Girls on the Verge includes works by a wide spectrum of photographers, all of whom bring their own perspective to the topic. Artists Tina Barney and Sally Mann, for example, looking at their own families and communities, have helped to pave the way for younger photographers. Although they approach their work from different vantage points, both Melissa Ann Pinney and Lauren Greenfield aim their cameras at “girl culture”; Pinney focuses on her daughter, while Greenfield compiles records of girls and women from all walks of life. Mark Steinmetz and Judith Joy Ross have produced restrained yet poignant black-and-white images of adolescents. In her portraits of teens on the beach and her video of a lip-synching young girl, Rineke Dijkstra presents her subjects as simultaneously confident and vulnerable, while Hellen van Meene directs adolescent girls into contrived poses that highlight the clumsy grace of their changing bodies. Finally, Lalla Essaydi, Céline van Balen, and Katherine Turczan photograph young women from non-Western cultures, who are somewhat removed from the overt sexuality and consumerism of the modern West. Girls on the Verge, featuring works from the Art Institute’s permanent collection and includes recent new acquisitions, is a provocative view of the universal experience of adolescence. 

 Photographer Lauren Greenfield will provide an insight into her works included in Girls on the Verge on Thursday, January 31, 2008, at 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall. 

About Art Institute of Chicago

Susan Bright, Art Photography Now, Aperture

Susan Bright

Art Photography Now

Aperture, 2005

“As all the work in this book testifies, photography is no longer a ‘mortal enemy’ or a ‘humble servant’ to art. It is currently enjoying significant re-evaluation in terms of its profile, acceptance and status.”— Susan Bright

Photography helped shape art in the late twentieth century; in the twenty-first, it has begun to dominate it.Art Photography Now (Aperture, November 2005), is a survey that presents the work of eighty of the most important and best-known art photographers in the world today ––including Tina Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, Martin Parr, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Martin Parr, Mario Testino, to name a few. 

Susan Bright, former curator of the National Portrait Gallery, London, has organized the book into seven sections -- City, Portrait, Document, Object, Landscape, Fashion, and Narrative — each of which explores the diverse subjects, styles, and methods adopted by the artists. Introductions to each section outline the genres and consider why photographers are attracted to certain themes and how issues like memory, time, objectivity, politics, identity, and the everyday are tied to certain approaches. 

Each photographer’s work is then presented in sequence, with commentaries by the author highlighting the art’s most important aspects. Quotations from the artists appear alongside to offer valuable insights into the motivation, inspiration, and intentions behind the work. With an introduction that sets out the historical relationship between art and photography from the early nineteenth century and discusses the art world’s embrace of the medium in recent decades, Art Photography Now is a truly comprehensive guide to the essential aspects of contemporary photography. It is a visual feast and an essential resource for curators, collectors, scholars, practitioners, and anyone who wants a comprehensive, up-to-date exposure to the state of photography today. 

Susan Bright is an independent writer, lecturer, and curator. A former curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and director of the Association of Photographers Gallery, both in London, currently she is an associate lecturer in photographic history and theory at the London College of Communication, acting director of the M.A. contemporary art course at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, and a course leader at Tate Modern. She has curated a variety of photography exhibitionsand has written numerous articles and essays for a number of catalogues, journals and magazines, including Photoworks, Source, Contemporary, Tema Celeste, and Showstudio. 

Art Photography Now Edited by Susan Bright 

Aperture November 2005 

9 x 10 ¾ in. (22.8 x 27.3 cm) 

224 pages, 250 four-color images 

Hardcover with jacket 

ISBN 1-931788-91-X $50.00 U.S.