Harry Benson: Four Stories

September 1, 2022 - January 30, 2023

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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Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography

October 30, 2022 - January 22, 2023

Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography highlights the dynamic ways that Indigenous artists have leveraged their lenses over the past three decades to reclaim representation and affirm their existence, perspectives, and trauma. The exhibition, organized by the Carter, is the first major museum survey to explore this important transition, featuring works by more than 30 Indigenous artists. Through approximately 100 photographs, videos, three-dimensional works, and digital activations, the exhibition forges a mosaic investigation into identity, resistance, and belonging.

Artists featured in Speaking with Lightinclude Jeremy Dennis, Nicholas Galanin, Sky Hopinka, Zig Jackson, Kapulani Landgraf, Dylan McLaughlin, Shelley Niro, Jolene Rickard, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and a new commission by Sarah Sense.

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Thomas Kellner: Thomas Kellner – Chapel Schools, In the footsteps of the Nassau Counts Wilhelm and Johann VI.

November 13, 2022 - February 11, 2023

We cordially invite you to the exhibition

Thomas Kellner
Chapel schools
In the footsteps of the Nassau counts Wilhelm and Johann VI.
November 13, 2022 – February 10, 2023
Photography

Vernissage: Sunday November 13, 2022, at 12 p.m. The District Administrator of the Siegen-Wittgenstein District Andreas Müller, the Mayor of the University City of Siegen Steffen Mues welcome to the opening.
Prof. Dr. Rolf Sachsse, Bonn, will speak.

In 49 pictures, the artist Thomas Kellner, oscillating between art and documentation, thematizes a part of our regional history. The chapel schools form a solitary architectural type for the Siegerland and adjacent regions. As individual buildings, conspicuous in their surroundings, they reveal the connection between church and state, starting from the domain of Count Wilhelm von Nassau-Dillenburg (* April 10, 1487 in Dillenburg; †October 6, 1559 ibid.).

After Kellner has already dealt with the Siegen industrial culture in the form of industrial architecture in his series of works Genius Loci and dealt with the half-timbered houses of the Siegen industrial area in the footsteps of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the chapel schools complement his artistic processing of the regional architectural landscape. The chapel schools were realized in Kellner’s typical cubist-deconstructed style, which was described by Prof. Dr. Irina Chmyreva as ‘Visual Analytical Synthesis’, or by Prof. Dr. Rolf Sachsse as ‘Modern Mannerism ‘, and which sets the motif visually in motion.

Chapel schools are buildings in which both church services and school lessons were held and therefore reflect the close connection between church and state. The initiator was Count Wilhelm von Nassau-Dillenburg, who in 1532 instructed the parish priests to teach seven- to fourteen-year-old children at a central location on holiday afternoons. This concept was expanded so that eventually a chapel school was established in almost every village. School and worship space were thus combined in one building, but the rooms could also be used for other purposes. Thus, the chapel school was a multifunctional building, which was used until the end of the 19th century and in parts even until the 20th century. Typical is its appearance, a half-timbered building, often slated and often provided with a small turret for the bell.

The project was supported during the research and implementation by grants from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and Neustart Kultur of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media by the Stiftung Kulturwerk of VG Bild-Kunst.

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.

Little by Little — Exhibition of Small Artworks

November 5 - December 30

Little by Little, a juried exhibition of small artworks, presents a wide variety of art expressed in a size no more than twelve-inches in any dimension. Amazing, beautiful, and impactful small works of art presented in a more intimate viewpoint that begs for a closer look!
These incredible artworks make wonderful gifts for family, friends, or for you too. If you purchase a piece, we will take it off the wall to take it home with you that day.

Image credit: Tim Schilens, Robert Flores

Rodrigo Valenzuela: Creatures of the Grind

November 18, 2022 - January 6, 2023

Assembly is pleased to present Creatures of the Grind, an exhibition of new works by Rodrigo Valenzuela, organized by art historian, writer, and curator Paula Kupfer. About the exhibition, Kupfer writes:

“Once knives and screws and drill bits, rope and chains—the tools of many trades—they appear here reconfigured as phoenixes, ramshackle sculptures, animistic creatures of dreams that are both latent objects for political struggle and formidable, animal-like apparitions. These works from Rodrigo Valenzuela’s most recent Weapons series are part of the artist’s ongoing investigation into issues of labor. Through a patina of nostalgic fantasy, they offer views of the imaginative performance that might take place on the job site once laborers depart.

Works from the artist’s previous series, Afterwork, present somber, silvery rooms filled with peculiar machines and smoke, possibly the sweat left hanging in the air after a long day’s work. In Weapons, Valenzuela proposes a more surrealist and metaphysical dimension. Here, the implements of daily toil reassemble, seemingly of their own devising, into zoomorphic creatures that are more than the sum of their parts. With haunting presence, they occupy the center stage of large-scale photographs with mural-like composition.”

The artist and curator will be present at the opening reception. Checklists available upon request to Marjorie Rawle: marjorie @assembly.art

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. 1982) is a Chilean-born, Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, video, painting, and installation. Using autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience, his work constructs narratives, scenes, and stories that point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. Much of his work deals with the experience of undocumented immigrants and laborers. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in recent solo exhibitions at BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC; Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, TN; Klowdenmann Gallery, Los Angeles; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago, Chile. He has held several artist residencies across the US and Canada including a fellowship at the Drawing Center, New York; the Core Fellowship at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME and the MacDowell Colony, NH. In 2021, Valenzuela was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography.

Paula Kupfer is a Panamanian art historian, writer, and curator specializing in the history of photography in the Americas. She recently contributed to the exhibition catalogue Gertrudes Altschul: Filigrana (Museum of Art of São Paulo, 2021) and to the award-winning anthology What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999 (10×10 Photobooks, 2021). In 2018, she was part of the curatorial team for Dig Where You Stand, an exhibition reflecting on decoloniality that was part of the 57th Carnegie International. Paula is a former editor of Aperture magazine and currently a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where her research addresses the intersection of photography, environmental history, and enslavement in Brazil.

Elle Pérez: Elle Pérez: Devotions

April 24, 2022 - March 19, 2023

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Darrel Ellis: Regeneration

November 20, 2022 - April 23, 2023

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Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection

November 20, 2022 - April 16, 2023

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Christina Fernandez: Under the Sun

August 24 - December 18

Christina Fernandez, an artist born and based in Los Angeles, creates photographic works that address the Southern California border region by examining labor, gender, migration, and her Mexican-American identity. Her urban and landscape photography uses a documentary aesthetic to combine the personal with the historical; Untitled Farmworkers (1989), for example, features wall-mounted photographs, index cards, and rows of soil, and  addresses farm labor deaths and injuries due to pesticides, labor organizing, and picket line participation. The work is periodically updated to include a list of farmworker deaths and illness from heatstroke, which illustrates how the mostly migrant labor force is impacted by global warming.

The exhibition Christina Fernandez: Under the Sun presents several such photography-based installations dealing with labor, land, and light, and places them in dialogue with objects the artist selected from the Benton’s collection. The subjects Fernandez explores in her work echo in her interventions in the collection, including borders, boycotts, climate justice, landscape, Mexican/Mexico, protest, ruins, travel, and work, among others. In addition, the process of selecting art from the Benton’s collection mirrors Fernandez’s extensive research for her own work in which she gathers oral histories, explores objects and artifacts, and pores over maps, photographs, and rare books.

The result is an exhibition that not only amplifies Fernandez’s work but allows viewers to experience the reverberation of themes, topics, and forms across what might initially be considered disparate objects and artworks. This exhibition is the newest presentation in a series that invites contemporary artists to engage with and contextualize the Benton’s collection. The museum is committed to the concept of art as an evolving conversation, with artists as guides who not only frame challenging issues of the present but also reflect the relevance of art of the past. By integrating artists and their creative vision with the collection, the Benton encourages insightful discussions about how we learn, how we evaluate ideas, and how we connect the visual to other forms of information.

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Renate Aller: The Space Between Memory and Expectation

October 22, 2022 - February 12, 2023

Renate Aller uses large-format photographic installations to create “picture windows” that invite the viewer to enter into an immersive visual environment. Aller offers us images of breathtaking landscapes, and we unquestioningly follow her as she directs our gaze straight on and in. The photographs take us from pale sand dunes to the vastness of the Atlantic ocean—from the majesty of the Alps to the intimacy of a forest floor in Florida. Throughout, we are absorbed by the textures of the landscapes and all that they imply: movement, change, time, and human influence.

Aller’s photographs portray a stillness that belies a state of constant flux and movement of these natural environments—melting and eroding, changing with the seasons and the wind, never the same as they were seconds ago. Aller does not use drone technology for her photos. She is physically present in each location, looking through her camera’s viewfinder, bearing witness—and we see through her eyes. In these photographs, Aller asks us to immerse ourselves in our surroundings, to notice every fissure, stipple, vein, and crag, with the understanding that this moment she has frozen in time has passed, and we will never experience the same landscape again.

The textures that draw us into the large photographs are made even more palpable in an image of a juniper tree printed on ash wood veneer. The grain of the ash invites the viewer to consider the surface of the piece, its material, and its relationship to the juniper in the photo. Aller celebrates the many gifts juniper trees have given us: Their sap has antibacterial and antifungal properties, it has been used for its healing potential for centuries, and in some cultures its wood is burned as incense. Junipers can easily grow in places where other plants cannot survive, its presence symbolizing hope.

Aller honors the ash tree by using its wood as the surface on which the photograph is printed. Ash is a tree that is dying out throughout the forests of North America. Aller says, “The juniper trees are presented with pigment ink on ash wood veneer in the spirit of reciprocity… By bringing both trees together into one sculptural piece, I am wrapping the ash tree with the resilience of the juniper tree’s spirit.”

Ideas of reciprocity and interconnectedness also inhabit the site-specific installation Aller has created on the stage space of the exhibit, using rocks borrowed from the West Brattleboro home of artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason. The moss and lichen covering the rocks play an important role in keeping forests alive as they filter water, maintain moisture, and offer protection from erosion. The stones serve the same purpose as the landscapes Aller has captured from around the globe. But instead of being frozen in time, this ephemeral installation will change before our eyes, further encouraging us to be awake to the present and to the changes taking place in our natural environments.

In the introduction to his book of essays Art Can Help, photographer Robert Adams writes, “It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.” Aller’s work calls attention to the details and the often indescribable forces that connect us to our surroundings—and to each other. Aller’s work whispers in our ears, telling us to look, take a breath, and look again.

— Sarah Freeman, Curator

The Interval—the space in between—is about the moments during which apparently nothing happens; but without these moments, change is impossible. The Space Between Memory and Expectation is another way to describe this stillness and transition.

The gradual disappearance of the Earth’s permafrost is a major cause of landslides. Entire glaciers, essential sources of drinking water and crop irrigation, disappear and never return. The images in this exhibit create an immersive experience for the viewer and show the interconnectedness of distant environments, presenting the familiar and the known in an intimate way, and connecting them to parallel realities in far-off locations.

From the top of Himalayan mountains, a silent and continuous erosion trickles from glaciers through tropical forests, sand dunes, Patagonian icefields, and European glaciers into the ocean. Tracing an unbroken line, the eye is guided from one sweeping landscape to the next without doubting their separateness in location and origin.

Intentionally paired images form an immersive panorama, opening up conversations among the different political, emotional, and actual landscapes in which we live.

— Renate Aller

RELATED EVENTS

October 22, Saturday, 11 a.m. — Opening of Five New Exhibits
December 3, Saturday, 5 p.m. — Artist Conversation: Renate Aller and Arezoo Moseni
January 13, Thursday, 7 p.m. — Artist & Curator Conversation: Renate Aller & Makeda Djata Best

More info at brattleboromuseum.org