Ways of Seeing: Four Photography Collections @ New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

Ways of Seeing 

Four Photography Collections 

New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe

January 20 - June 16, 2024

Jeff Brouws 

Mobil/Trailer, Inyokern, Calif., 1991

Chromogenic print, 18 × 18 in. 

Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art 

Gift of Jamie Brunson and Dr. Mark Levy, 2021 (2022.15.2) 

Photo Courtesy of Jeff Brouws / Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco 

Showcasing three groups of recent donations and one promised gift to the New Mexico Museum of Art collection and highlighting individual approaches to collecting art, Ways of Seeing includes nearly forty photographs ranging from a 1903 photogravure by Gertrude Käsebier to a 2013 pigment print by local artist Anthony O’Brien. 

“Ways of Seeing is an interesting study of taste and the profound reasons why collectors select objects for their personal collections,” said the museum’s Executive Director Mark A. White. “In addition, the exhibition is an important reminder of how collectors have shaped and grown the photography collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.” 

Photographer and photo dealer Donald B. Moritz began collecting photographs in the mid-1980s, working directly with the artists he admired to amass a holding of primarily black-and-white prints. He met one of them, longtime New Mexico photographer David Michael Kennedy, when taking a class at the Santa Fe Workshops. Struck by the beauty of Kennedy’s work, Moritz quickly became one of the El Rito artist’s major collectors. In 2022, Moritz donated Kennedy’s portfolio of cloud studies and four additional photographs, all on view. 

New Yorker W.M. Hunt chose a thematic approach to acquiring photographs. “Photography changed my life; it gave me one,” Hunt says in The Unseen Eye. The 2011 publication documents Hunt’s extensive collection of images from across the history of photography in which the eyes of the subject are hidden or obscured. Eight photographs from Hunt’s donation are on view, by artists Adam Fuss, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Inge Morath and Saul Steinberg, Ruth Thorne Thomsen, Arthur Tress, Gerald Slota, Minor White, and Joel-Peter Witkin. 

Painter Jamie Brunson donated seven photographs to the museum from a collection she assembled with her former husband, the late art historian and teacher Mark Levy, while living in Berkeley, California. The two were drawn to large-scale, contemporary photographs of the 1980s and 1990s, particularly those alluding to human interactions with the environment and those that reflected their interests in meditation and the concept of the void. The group is comprised of work by Tom Baril, Jeff Brouws, Kevin Bubriski, Edward Burtynsky, William Claxton, Richard Misrach, and John Pfahl.  

Another couple, Caroline Burnett and her late husband William, also shared the adventure of collecting photographs. In 1992, Bill gave Caroline a print of an Arnold Newman’s photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch, as a reminder of their hike to the summit of Pedernal. The two moved to Santa Fe in 2001, and continued collecting photographs that touched their hearts and often feature a sense of serenity. After Bill’s death, Caroline continued to shape the collection and established it as a promised gift to the museum. On loan for this exhibition are gems by Ruth Bernhard, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Kenro Izu, Gertrude Käsebier, local photographer Anthony O’Brien, Sebastião Salgado, Alfred Stieglitz, and Todd Webb. 

NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART

Santa Fe, New Mexico

nmartmuseum.org

Heroines of the Abstract Expressionist Era @ Southampton Arts Center - SAC

Heroines of the Abstract Expressionist Era 

Southampton Arts Center 

Opening October 6, 2023 

Southampton Arts Center (SAC)  presents Women of the Abstract Expressionist Era, curated Christina Strassfield. The Abstract Expressionist movement is best known for its male superstars, but women were also pioneers of the genre. This exhibition showcases the work of artists such as Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Alice Baber, Lynne Drexler, and others—women whose artwork finds long overdue acclaim and new appreciation with a contemporary audience. We are also celebrating women whose work, while not abstract, is associated with the Abstract Expressionist era and are individuals who were part of the New York art scene, such as Mercedes Matter, Hedda Sterne, Jane Freilicher, and Jane Wilson. These works by First and Second-generation Ab Ex Women artists are exclusively from the collection of Rick Friedman and Cindy Lou Wakefield.

This exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that are visually mesmerizing and technically complex. It offers the widest breadth of any private assemblage of this genre, featuring over 100 works by 32 women artists. The artwork demonstrates how these artists pushed themselves in new directions as leaders and total participants in the Abstract Expressionist movement. The artists and their work were undervalued and overlooked for many years but have recently been revisited and re-evaluated, giving these artists their due.

Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically American style to achieve international influence, and, as a result, 1940s New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. The style was characterized by experimental, gestural, and nonrepresentational painting, and for some artists associated with the movement, abstract art and blurring the lines between representational and abstraction expressed ideas concerning nature, the spiritual, and the mind. For others, it was a way to explore formal and technical concerns. This exhibition differs from other exhibitions by focusing on the 1950 New York School and the migration of many of these artists to the Hamptons.

From 1947 to 1951, several Abstract Expressionists developed their signature painting styles, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Mark Rothko. During the following years, these artists, informally called the First Generation of the New York School, received growing recognition nationally and globally. Several groundbreaking women artists from this same period are featured in this exhibition, including Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Hedda Sterne, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.

For more than sixty years, these women's contributions to the movement were forgotten, while works by men such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning have been canonized in the history of American art. It has taken the dedication of scholars and curators—and the commitment of a handful of visionary collectors like Rick Friedman and Cindy Lou Wakefield—to restore these women artists to their rightful place in the history of American art.

The exhibition includes works by the following artists: Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Nell Blaine, Janice Biala, Dusti Bonge, Louise Bourgeois, Elaine de Kooning, Dorothy Dehner, Lynne Drexler, Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Perle Fine, Audrey Flack, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Carol Hunt, Buffie Johnson, Lee Krasner, Fay Lansner, Emily Mason, Mercedes Matter, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Irene Rice Pereira, Hilla Rebay, Ethel Schwacher, Hedda Sterne, Yvonne Thomas, Michal Corinne West, Jane Wilson.

About the Collectors Cindy Lou and Rick Friedman

For the last 17 years, Cindy Lou and Rick Friedman have enjoyed the never-ending journey of researching and assembling a collection of “talented but underappreciated “women artists who helped pioneer the 1950s era AbEx movement, the so-called New York School, and their subsequent migration to the East End. The art world has embraced their contributions recently, resulting in several museum shows, books, and insatiable demand for their works. This is perhaps the most comprehensive survey produced in this genre, featuring 30 acclaimed women artists of that NYC-based movement, with close to 100 pieces. 

Rick Friedman notes, “Although our collection was displayed prior at the Fenimore Art Museum and the Nassau County Museum of Art, SAC is the most appropriate venue for this newly expanded survey. Over the past half-century, many of the artists in this show, pioneers of the AbEx movement, proudly exhibited their work in this historic SAC building during their illustrious careers. So this is sort of a ‘homecoming’ show for them. This Fall 2023 show provides guests with a ‘rediscovery’ of the breakthrough and innovative mid-century art movement, considered by many as America’s most significant art movement of the 20th century. It also provides a new generation of viewers an opportunity to discover these influential artists, many of whom lived and worked locally. We have enthusiastically worked closely with Christina Strassfield over the years. We value her deep understanding, respect, and appreciation for these artists’ oeuvre and their significant contributions to art in America. Her long experience helped guide this curation and display. We are very enthusiastic to team up again with SAC, having produced the Hamptons Fine Art Fair on their grounds two years ago. We are pleased to offer select pieces available for public acquisition, some of which benefit SAC.”

SOUTHAMPTON ARTS CENTER

25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, New York 11968

southamptonartscenter.org