Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Color

December 20, 2020 - April 2, 2021

His ‘visual diary’, is how Jacques Henri Lartigue called his photographic albums which he revised throughout 1970 – 1980.
This exhibition shows his photographs next to the original album pages.

The images of Jacques Henri Lartigue from the beginning of the 20th century were first exhibited by John Szarkowski in 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York. At the time, the curator presented Lartigue as a mere amateur. This was the starting point for the artist to rethink his life, his way of working and his oeuvre.
Starting from the traditional practice associated with the amateur photographer – gathering his images in photo albums – Lartigue made an impressive body of work, laying out his life in an ensemble of 126 large sized folios.
When he was over 70 years old, Lartigue used these albums to revisit his life and mixed his own history with that of the century he lived in, while symbolically erasing painful episodes.

Sacha Goldberger: The 770: Lubavitchs of Brooklyn

January 21 - March 15

John Van Oers: Por La Noche

January 28 - April 30

The anecdotal method is viewed sceptically in both art and science, because it leads to fallacies and easy generalizations. Single isolated evidence is at odds with the scientific method, which examines its subjects broadly; it is not because your bird is a parakeet that all birds are parakeets. In art, the anecdotal stands for navel-gazing, for the glorification of one’s personal experience. It is the opposite of universality or the possibility of making abstraction of things, which allows one thing to mean another or makes the pure form sufficient to transcend the primary. Poetry, music and abstract art appeal to our deeply rooted and eroded emotions that no longer refer to specific, but to general feelings. It is the language that we feel but do not understand.

No other artists uses the anecdotal method more than John van Oers. Autobiographical events small and large are a recurrent cause for visual processing in his work. Drawn diary excerpts become a storyboard for sculptures that seem unpretentious and light as a feather. But what we see are not narrative stories or family chronicles; the motivations behind these works are cryptically hidden in extremely reduced forms that are executed in pure materials such as wood, metal, plaster or bronze. John Van Oers does not narrate, he suggests. Herein lies the magical transition from the strictly anecdotal to forms that we all feel but do not understand.

Robert Frank: Robert Frank: The Americans

October 17, 2020 - April 11, 2021

First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959—in the midst of the Cold War—Robert Frank’s The Americans is among the most influential photography books of the 20th century. The Addison is one of only four museums in the world to own a complete set of the images from the book.

In 1955–56, a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed the Swiss-born photographer to travel throughout the United States with the goal of creating a book that he described as a “visual study of a civilization.” Frank’s dark and grainy images are the work of an outsider looking in and reveal his ambivalence toward his adopted country. The eighty-three carefully sequenced photographs, edited down from more than twenty-seven thousand, are raw documentation of a country in transition. They celebrate its strengths as an emerging superpower while exposing the cracks in the veneer of optimism and opportunity that defined its postwar culture. As Jack Kerouac wrote in the introduction to the book, “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand, he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film.”

Frank’s unsentimental vision of a modern America that looked surprisingly lonely and dislocated was initially censured by the critics. However, the honest and poignant beauty captured in these images and his distinctively expressive and visceral style were soon embraced by younger photographers. More than a revelation of a specific moment in American history or a manifesto for a new photographic style, The Americans is a work of resonance that probes the defining and enduring dualities of American life and culture—hope and despair, affluence and want, freedom and limitation, community and isolation. Exploring the gulf between appearance and actuality, national ideals and regional specificity, American myth and street-level reality, these provocative and nuanced images ask what America is. ​​

PHOTO | BRUT: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie

January 24 - June 6

The exhibition PHOTO | BRUT is a continuation of the American Folk Art Museum’s commitment to champion the works of self-taught artists—this time with a focus on the ever-changing field of photography, the frontiers and accessibility of which expanded proportionally with the invention of portable and affordable cameras.

Mitch Epstein: Mitch Epstein: Property Rights

December 22, 2020 - February 28, 2021

In a series never shown before in a museum, pioneering color photographer Mitch Epstein (b. 1952) faces urgent, contemporary issues through his compelling photographs in Mitch Epstein: Property Rights. From Standing Rock protests to the Arizona and Texas borderlands, Epstein travels the country capturing images where public and private rights are often in conflict. Politics and citizenship, or environmental degradation and land rights, Epstein focuses on tough topics, helping us see overlapping, and often competing, histories and perspectives.

Epstein’s signature large-format photographs offer viewers a new way to consider the attention-grabbing headlines. His compositions celebrate beauty, light, and space, even as they raise questions about societal attitudes and priorities. Get lost in these 22 large-scale photographs as you challenge your perceptions and see modern history through the lens of an internationally renowned artist.

Balarama Heller: Sacred Place, an online exhibition presented in Apertureʼs viewing room on Artsy

January 27 - March 10

Aperture is pleased to present Sacred Place, a show of works by artist Balarama Heller, on the occasion of the publication of Aperture magazine, issue 241, “Utopia” (Winter 2020), in which this series is featured.

Proceeds from the sale of these works directly benefit the artist, as well as support Aperture’s publishing, educational, and public programs.

Visit the show here.

Keris Salmon: To Have and To Hold

January 28 - March 12

In her evolving exploration of the architecture of slavery, Keris Salmon has followed up with To Have and To Hold, a suite of eleven photographic prints with letterpress which peer into the lives of the American and Caribbean enslaved and their enslavers through the buildings and landscapes they inhabited and the words they once spoke.
A multi-media storyteller, Salmon presents historical truths framed in contemporary contexts to offer deeper understandings of our place in this confounding nation. As enslaved men and women and the wealth they generated built the nation we inhabit, her series exposes – through visual poetry – the architectural foundations of the caste system we call home.

In this series, Salmon transports us to, among other less-lofty plantations, some of the dwellings and outbuildings of former American slave-holding presidents and antebellum legislators. Most notable is the ruined Thomas Jefferson-designed mansion of Virginia Governor William Barbour, called “Barboursville.”

John G. Zimmerman: Americanicity — Photographs by John G. Zimmerman

February 20 - April 17

The images from John G. Zimmerman, a photographer, innovator, and journalist, brings into view the lives and lifestyles of American families, politics, sports, and society roughly from 1950 through 1975. This golden era of the Fourth Estate, before the internet and cable news, when photojournalism projected influence through print media, newspapers, magazines, and billboards into our homes and businesses, informed social behavior, personal knowledge, and political policy.

Visitors to this exhibition will experience Mr. Zimmerman’s photojournalism transformed from the covers and pages of Time, Life, Ebony, and Sports Illustrated magazines to framed prints in the Art Intersection North and South Galleries. Heartfelt gratitude to Linda and Darryl Zimmerman of the John G. Zimmerman Archive for their collaboration to create this special exhibition bringing a perspective of American life through the breadth, innovation, and impact of Mr. Zimmerman’s photography.

Image Credit: John G. Zimmerman

Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Andy Warhol, and more: Vantage Points: Contemporary Photography from the Whitney Museum of American Art

December 18, 2020 - March 15, 2021

Vantage Points: Contemporary Photography from the Whitney Museum of American Art is on view in the Asheville Art Museum’s Explore Asheville Exhibition Hall December 18, 2020 through March 15, 2021. Vantage Points features a selection of photographic works from the 1970s to the mid-2000s that highlights how photography has been used to represent individuals, places, and narratives. Drawn exclusively from the Whitney’s permanent collection, this presentation includes approximately 20 artists, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, and Andy Warhol.

These artists began working at a time when photography was becoming increasingly integrated into the art world. Technological developments permitted them to use many different photographic processes and to print their works in various sizes, including ones that would create an immersive impact. The photographs included in this exhibition range from seemingly straightforward representations to those with an imaginative or conceptual perspective that challenge traditional notions of photography as revealing a singular reality. 

This selection of works from the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum reveals the strength of the photographic image in the late 20th and early 21st century in the United States. In surprising and inventive ways, the artists included in this presentation have pushed the boundaries of the medium and expanded the role of photography within the history of art.

This exhibition was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and curated by Carrie Springer, assistant curator, Whitney Museum. Additionally, Vantage Points was organized around transformative gifts and promised gifts to the Whitney Museum from Emily Fisher Landau.

Generous support for this project provided by Art Bridges.

Image: Sally Mann, Sorry Game (detail), 1989, gelatin silver print, image: 19 5/8 × 23 5/16 inches, sheet: 19 15/16 × 23 13/16 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of The Bohen Foundation, 2002.349. © Sally Mann, image courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

Jon Henry: Stranger Fruit

February 4 - March 27

Jon Henry’s Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation by police violence.  About this project, Henry says, “Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits and protests is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child. I set out to photograph mothers with their sons in their environment, reenacting what it must feel like to endure this pain. The mothers in the photographs have not lost their sons, but understand the reality that this could happen to their family. The mother is also photographed in isolation, reflecting on the absence. When the trials are over, the protesters have gone home and the news cameras gone, it is the mother left. Left to mourn, to survive. The title of the project is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit.” Instead of black bodies hanging from the Poplar Tree, these fruits of our families, our communities, are being killed in the street.”

Wendel White: Manifest

February 4 - March 27

In this photographic project, entitled Manifest, photographer Wendel White is interested in the relationship between history and objects. “The portfolio consists of photographic representations of objects, documents, photographs, and books held in various public collections throughout the U.S. These repositories include various elements of material culture such as diaries, slave collars, human hair, a drum, souvenirs, and other objects, some with great significance and others simply quotidian representations of daily life in the history of the African American community. I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit these material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia, suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration.”