Harry Benson: Four Stories

September 1, 2022 - January 30, 2023

Reception: Sat October 22, 6-7:30pm

Scottish-born photojournalist Harry Benson came to America with The Beatles in 1964 and never looked back. The award-winning artist, whose pictures have appeared in numerous magazines including Life, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, among others, has documented some of the most important events and influential people of the past six decades. This presentation showcases four powerful photo stories from the 1960s by Benson: the building of the Berlin Wall, the Meredith March, the Beatles’ arrival to the USA, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside

September 1 - December 31

Rosamond Purcell’s first retrospective exhibition reflects the breadth of the artist’s career from the late 1960s to the current day and includes over 150 of the artist’s photographs, assemblages, collages, and installations. Purcell’s work speaks eloquently to her persistent interrogation of the ways in which humanity attempts to understand the world around it, encouraging viewers to see things, in the words of Minor White, ”not only for what they are but for what else they are.”

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agnès b.: Les Drôlesses

September 8 - November 20

Les Drôlesses
agnès b. interprets CLAIRE TABOURET

September 8 – November 6, 2022
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 8th, 6-8pm

At home in Versailles, France, during the lockdown of 2020, agnès b. began to take photographs of two paintings by French artist Claire Tabouret, dressing them up with clothing from her own wardrobe. The results are 80 color photographs and the new exhibition, les drôlesses, opening Thursday, September 8, at the agnès b. Galerie Boutique in New York.

“In 2016, I purchased these two portraits, overwhelmed by their presence and their famous ‘off-camera’ gaze that makes them quite secret.” – agnès b.

Through these images, les drôlesses (the little girls), tells the story of the young and mischievous agnès and the timeless pieces she has created that have made the brand the iconic label that it is today. The images reflect agnès b.’s own childhood, her relationship with art, and more than 40 years of passion for photography, design, and art that are integral to agnès b.

“My father Ado Troublé, who had three daughters within four years, would sometimes say to us, ‘Come my drôlesses!’ That’s why my two models, my two friends from the lockdown in spring 2020, are called that… They kept me company, inspired me, and made me happy.” – agnès b.

A 120-page catalog, les drôlesses – agnès b. interprets CLAIRE TABOURET, was published for the exhibition in 2021 and will be for sale at agnès b. stores and online at www.agnesb.us for $35. For each catalog sold, four euros will be donated to Secours Populaire, a French non-profit organization founded in 1945 dedicated to fighting poverty and discrimination in public life.

Claire Tabouret was born in 1981 in France and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She works with figurative subject matter, using loose expressive brushstrokes in a broad palette, mimicking both artificial and natural hues and has exhibited artworks worldwide.

Designer, philanthropist and committed patron of the arts, agnès b. has promoted artistic freedom, the environment, and social causes for many years. She opened her art center, La Fab., in Paris in February 2020 to bring all of these causes together under one roof.

Since the beginning, agnès b. developed a style that is simultaneously subtle, chic and casual, helping to turn the Parisian designer into a fashion icon, a “style, a state of mind.” As she once said, “Clothes for me are all about feeling in harmony with yourself to be able to think about something else. They are only a means. If I can help people to feel good, to feel attractive, so much the better. That’s what brings me pleasure.”

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: 144 Powers

June 14 - September 30

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Chuck Kelton: TERRAIN

September 8 - November 5

Press Release

Daniel Cheek: Where We Go

September 20 - November 15

Daniel Cheek uses 8×10 and 4×5 inch cameras to create highly detailed, meticulously crafted, large format gelatin silver prints. The photographs address and contemplate how people experience the natural world. He is interested in authentic experiences and the ways we directly interact with our surroundings. Working in national, state, and local parks, Daniel documents the historic and contemporary ways people travel through and experience the outdoors.

What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life

August 27, 2022 - January 8, 2023

This exhibition features the AGO’s Fade Resistance Collection. Assembled by Toronto artist Zun Lee, the collection gathers Polaroid instant prints of African-American family life from the 1960s to the early 2000s. This debut presentation of more than 500 instant prints – including portraits, graduations, birthdays and family reunions – is a meditation on the role of family photographs in creating and maintaining a sense of Black identity, on memory and loss, on the ethics of institutional versus communal care, and on the importance of safeguarding visual culture.

What Matters Most is co-curated by Zun Lee and Sophie Hackett, AGO Curator, Photography.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a hardcover publication, co-published by the AGO and Delmonico Books/D.A.P., with texts by Lee and Hackett, as well as by poet and essayist Dawn Lundy Martin, and cultural theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.

Ken Light: Midnight La Frontera — Images by Ken Light

September 10 - October 22

Between 1983 and 1987 along the California/Mexico border, Ken Light took his Hasselblad camera and flash and rode along with US Border Patrol agents in the middle of the night as they combed the Otay Mesa looking for “illegal aliens.” He was there when they were apprehended – captured by authorities as well as the photographer’s flash. The black and white images are stark, impromptu mug shots in the desert, taken at a moment of extreme vulnerability, when hope gave way to despair, migrants caught in a cruel game of hide and seek.

In piercing words and in strobe lit images caught against the dark of night, Midnight La Frontera’s immediacy underscores the struggle and defiance of those who make the perilous hike for days and weeks in search of the American Dream.

Ken Light, a freelance documentary photographer for over fifty years, and a Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the University of California, Berkeley, focuses on social issues facing America. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, his work has been published in twelve books, in magazines, exhibitions and numerous anthologies, exhibition catalogues and a variety of media, digital and motion picture.

Learn more about Ken Light at his website, click here.

Picturing Resistance

September 10 - October 22

Picturing Resistance presents images from marches, protests, rallies, and demonstrations, showing people, in the public view, voicing their passion for change. Our juror, Ken Light, photographer, author, and a Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the University of California, Berkeley, will select from submitted images.

Melanie Light and Ken Light’s book, Picturing Resistance, serves as the inspiration for this juried exhibition, and a must own book for anyone interested in social justice movements in the past seven decades. In Ryan gallery Ken Light’s images from his book Midnight La Frontera will be shown during the Picturing Resistance exhibition.

Image Credit (left to right): Harvey Castro, Elaine Kessler, Bruce Charles

As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic

September 7 - November 19

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Time’s Relentless Melt

August 20 - November 6

Time’s Relentless Melt  presents photographic and time-based works that grapple with time as multifaceted—linear, cyclical, disjointed, or compressed—and explore the tension between transience and permanence, between recording and remembering.

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Joyce Tenneson: Draped and Veiled: 20×24 Polaroid Photographs by Joyce Tenneson

May 25 - October 10

Standing behind the substantial presence of the large format Polaroid 20×24 camera—weighing 200 pounds and the size of a refrigerator—artists peer through the viewfinder towards another world. The process of creating the unique large dye transfer prints imparts framing to a scene and quality to an image that balances subtlety with boldness, softness paired with an undeniable presence. The 20×24 Polaroid adds an additional layer of veiling and diaphanous softness to the imagery in Joyce Tenneson’s Transformations series, which she began in 1985 and engaged with through 2005.

Transformations features partially or fully nude figures poetically presented; Tenneson’s photographs have always been interested in the magic of the human figure, contained within bodies of all ages and emotions in a broad range that are both vulnerable and bold. She interweaves elements that feel vaguely mythological or symbolic, her figures embodying Classical sculptures of gods and goddesses, both mighty and mercurial. Elements such as shells, fruits, or daggers are expressions of inner journeys and self-discovery, and draped fabric and netting echo the shifting flow of time, energy, and identity. The ethereal quality imparted by the Polaroid process resonated with Tenneson, who stated: “I often felt like a channel—the images that had been part of my inner psyche for years emerged from some mysterious source.”

This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and curated by Hilary Schroeder, assistant curator.