Richard Sexton: Enigmatic Stream

August 26, 2019 - January 4, 2020

Joe Vitone: Joe Vitone: Family Records

April 27 - October 27

Joe Vitone: Family Records is an ongoing series of portraits of photographer Joe Vitone’s relatives living in and around Akron, Ohio. Begun in 1998, this body of work documents evolving interpersonal connections between parents and children, siblings, spouses, cousins and other relations within working class communities of the Rust Belt region. Shot each summer when the artist—now based in Austin, Texas—travels back to Ohio, this series features scenes from festivities such as birthday parties and weddings as well as intimate portraits set outside homes and workplaces. Touched by celebrations and struggles including marriage, divorce, addiction, new homes, unemployment, new jobs and babies, the lives of Vitone’s relatives reflect experiences common to families across the United States.

Vitone prints his images, which he captures using 8 x 10-inch and 4 x 5-inch view cameras, in both black and white and color. Featuring 55 works photographed in Akron proper, as well as in surrounding communities including Barberton, Stow and Marshallville, Family Records marks the first time a selection from this series has been exhibited in Northeast Ohio.

Joe Vitone: Family Records is organized by the Akron Art Museum with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Ohio Arts Council and the Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation.

Robert W. Fichter: Experimentalist: The Art of Robert W. Fichter

August 28 - December 18

Reception: Tue September 24, 5-8pm

Experimentalist: The Art of Robert W. Fichter presents the first retrospective of the artist’s career in over thirty years. Drawn from his archive at UMBC, 55 works created between 1962 and 2006 highlight Fichter’s exploration of the human condition across photography, printmaking, and painting. Fichter employs shifting moods and mediums as well as wit, humor, and satire to deliver trenchant critiques of war, nuclear proliferation, and environmental disaster. Firmly rooting his expressive compositions in a strong sense of place—the surreal landscapes of his native Florida—Fichter presents a singular vision of humanity on the brink.

Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age

June 9 - November 10

The Aldrich presents the first East Coast exhibition of artist Sara Cwynar (b. 1985), whose practice spans photography, video, installation and bookmaking and surveys the transitory object-life of visual matter in our time of image infatuation. The exhibition features new and recent work by the artist. Using an accumulative archive of images and objects, culled from libraries, public archives, dollar stores, and eBay, Cwynar combines archival imagery and out-of-date objects with new digital technologies and archaic analogue processes to expose how images are produced, trafficked and mimed over time. Cwynar’s first museum publication, with an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart, the exhibition’s curator, accompanies the show.

Press Release

Collier Schorr: Collier Schorr: Stonewall at 50

May 19 - September 30

The Alice Austen House presents ‘Stonewall at 50’, an exhibition by artist Collier Schorr. 15 intergenerational portraits of LGBTQ+ activists and artists, celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. This project, generated by partnerships made in the Stonewall 50 Consortium, an organization committed to producing programming, exhibitions, and educational materials related to the Stonewall uprising and/or the history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, brings together participants of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising with activists who have followed in their footsteps.

Produced by Paul Moakley and Victoria Munro

Funded by the  Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Humanities NY, New York Community Trust, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts

Cornell Capa, Richard Avedon, Philip Trager, and others: Shutter Speed

July 30 - December 15

Comprising more than 60 works on paper from the AMAM collection, Shutter Speed explores the ability of photography to capture movement, particularly of the human body. The exhibition spans the history of photography, from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th, stretching from Eadweard Muybridge’s attempts to arrest motion with the camera shutter to Harold Edgerton’s experiments with the stroboscope, and on to Sarah Charlesworth’s appropriated images of falling subjects.

Not coincidentally, Shutter Speed also features many photographs of dancers and athletes, including recently acquired vernacular photographs from the Peter J. Cohen Collection. Conveying the elegance, physicality, fluidity, and velocity of the human body traversing space requires technical expertise and a deep sensitivity, both of which are in evidence in photographs by Cornell Capa, Richard Avedon, Philip Trager, and others. Together these images of movement attest to our fascination with the camera’s ability to catch “the moment,” in the words of André Kertész, “when something changes into something else.”

Organized by Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Andrea Gyorody, with assistance from Amy Baylis ’20.

Richard Mosse

September 12 - November 2

David Levinthal: American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs

June 7 - October 14

Populated with toy cowboys and cavalry, Barbie dolls and baseball players, David Levinthal’s photographs reference iconic images and events that shaped postwar American society. Despite their playful veneer, Levinthal’s images provide a lens through which to examine the myths and stereotypes lurking within our most beloved pastimes and enduring heroes. In doing so, Levinthal encourages us to consider the stories we tell about ourselves—what it means to be strong, beautiful, masculine, feminine, and ultimately, American.

American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs brings together six of the artist’s best-known bodies of work to explore some myths found in American popular culture and their place in our collective memory. Created between 1984 and 2018, the series Modern Romance, American Beauties, Wild West, Barbie, Baseball, and History all explore quintessentially American themes and imagery. The exhibition includes more than 70 color photographs drawn from two recent gifts to SAAM. The exhibition is organized by Joanna Marsh, SAAM’s Deputy Education Chair, Head of Interpretation and Audience Research.

Gordon Parks: Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950

September 14 - December 29

Gordon Parks was part of what author Richard Wright called “the new tide” of African Americans who were pushing for respect and racial equality in the 1940s. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 explores the early years of Parks’s career as an influential photographer who captured the essence of the civil rights movement in addition to breaking barriers for African Americans.

From his fashion photographs to his thoughtful depictions of American life, Parks used the camera as his tool for proclaiming the value of an American community built on freedom and equality. Through some 150 photographs, as well as rare magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and books, Gordon Parks offers an expansive and intimate look at how this pioneering artist became one of the most influential photographers of his day.

Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation. Bank of America is proud to be the national sponsor of the exhibition. Generous support is also provided by the Kleinheinz Family Foundation for the Arts and Education and the Ann L. & Carol Green Rhodes Charitable Trust, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee.

Justin Mott: No Man’s Land

June 6 - September 15

Press Release

Roe Ethrdige: Sanctuary 2

September 6 - November 2

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Roe Ethridge’s exhibition Sanctuary 2, the first exhibition at the gallery’s new 22 Cortlandt Alley location.

In Ethridge’s new photograph Oslo Grace at Willets Point, the subject gives a knowing smile, their gaze falling just left of the camera. Sitting on a reflective pink mat, with a vanitas-style bounty of fruits, they appear to be almost copied and pasted into the muddy, tow lot that they turn their back towards. This gesture is seemingly reciprocated by both Citi Field Stadium towering above, with its billboards and LED screens enacting a similar disconnect to their surroundings, and the image itself, which despite its cues, refuses to fit squarely as a meditation on gentrification nor as an uncanny celebration of artifice. This tension is at the core of Ethridge’s practice, and the exhibition, as he assumes the medium’s traditional role as society’s mirror, while simultaneously upending this through an ongoing questioning of the relationship between contemporary images and truth.

Through this framework, Ethridge focuses on the concept of sanctuary and its myriad definitions, the word’s political and personal dimensions – including the supposed insular refuge of artistic practice. Moving from private to public life, and between vernaculars of commercial studio photography, composed still life, and candid cell phone images, his initially divergent subjects work in tandem to create a visual understanding or tenor throughout the exhibition, reflecting our own impulse to build meaning through the aggregation of images. Despite pointed insertions, such as a Penn brand tennis ball in a still life that references the photographer of the same name, Ethridge’s works refuse to assimilate to a prescribed narrative and instead forms an open-ended reflection on nostalgia, sincerity, and desire.

Sanctuary 2 is Roe Ethridge’s ninth exhibition with Andrew Kreps Gallery. From 2016 to 2017, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, hosted the first comprehensive survey of Ethridge’s work in the United States. Other solo exhibitions include: Shelter Island, FOAM, Amsterdam, 2016, Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2012, traveled to Museum Leuven, Belgium, 2012. His work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York,
 SFMoMA, San Francisco, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Tate Modern, London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

22 Cortlandt Alley is situated between Walker and White Streets in Tribeca. The space is comprised of approximately 9,000 square feet over two levels, designed by Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA. The gallery’s move to Cortlandt Alley coincides with the opening of 55 Walker Street, an exhibition space jointly operated by Andrew Kreps Gallery, Bortolami, and kaufmann repetto.

The Criminal Type

September 7 - October 26

Rogues’ galleries—19th century photographic exhibitions showcasing the earliest incarnations of modern-day mug shots—offer a point of departure for this exhibition examining the entwined history of photographic portraiture and criminality. Selected works will interrogate the common tools and formats of artistic, bureaucratic, and juridical portraiture, and expose those aesthetic codes that homogenize otherness and enforce a pervasive principle of “guilty until proven innocent.”

Curated by Elizabeth Breiner

Press Release