Josephine Sacabo: Music Was The Room She Lived In

September 30, 2021 - January 7, 2022

Music Was The Room She Lived In is a collection from four different bodies of work: Those Who Dance, Le Diable Au Corps (Devil in the Flesh), Music Was The Room She Lived In, and Photism.

Shannon Taggart: Séance: Photographs by Shannon Taggart

August 31 - December 17

For the past twenty years American artist Shannon Taggart (born 1975) has documented Spiritualist practices and communities in the United States, England, and Europe. The resulting body of work, Séance, examines the relationship of Spiritualism to human celebrity, its connections to art, science, and technology, and its intrinsic bond with the medium of photography. This exhibition presents forty-seven haunting images from the series, revealing the emotional, psychological, and physical dimensions of Spiritualism in the 21st century.

Shannon Taggart is an artist and author based in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. Her photographs have been exhibited and featured internationally, including within the publications TIME, New York Times Magazine, Discover, and Newsweek. Her work has been recognized by Nikon, Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, American Photography and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace. Taggart’s monograph, SÉANCE (Fulgur Press, 2019) was listed as one of TIME magazine’s ‘Best Photobooks of 2019.’

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Pensacola Museum of Art.

Sam Abell, Alice Austen, Mack Cohen, Stephen Gill, Lonnie Graham, Justine Kurland, Lori Nix, Bill Owens, Sheron Rupp, Collier Schorr, Mike Slack: The Photographer in the Garden

September 11 - December 30

Since the invention of the medium, photographers have been drawn by the allure of flowers. This group exhibition excerpted from Aperture’s book The Photographer in the Garden celebrates the rich history of artists working in the garden as a site of inspiration and reinvention.

Jerry Spearman: 9/11 Commemoration

September 11 - December 30

At the beginning of 2021, cultural and preservation leaders met at the 9/11 Memorial Museum to discuss cultural institutions’ response to the 20th anniversary and plan performances to provide our community with spaces to gather and reflect on the power of the arts in NYC to heal. The Alice Austen House will join many other cultural institutions to light our building in blue on Saturday, September 11 and be exhibiting vintage Landmarks Commission photographs of Staten Island firehouses from September 11 through December 30 in our contemporary sunroom gallery.

Focus: Power, Agency, and Objectivity in Early Photography

August 26 - December 23

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) once asked: “what is focus, and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?” Cameron’s question lies at the heart of this exhibition, which traces the early history of photography while probing how myths surrounding the perceived objectivity of this new medium conceal the power dynamics inherent in who photographs, what is photographed, and how photographs are viewed and understood.

A woman who came to photography in her late 40s, Cameron was disparaged by male art critics for the soft focus of her images, an intentional artistic choice often dismissed as a sign of technical ineptitude. This critique speaks to a fundamental tension that dominated discourses on photography in the 1800s: was it primarily a scientific tool best used for precise documentation, or a form of artistic expression on par with well-established genres such as painting? In other words, are photographs, by their very nature, truthful? Or can they manipulate and distort reality?

After an introductory section on early photographic technologies, this exhibition explores these questions through three themes: portraiture, European photographs of faraway lands recently—or soon to be—colonized, and images of the American West. In each case, the photographs on view push us to consider the visible and invisible systems of power that led to their creation, and how photographers’ decisions support or subvert dominant historical narratives.

Organized by Alexandra Letvin, assistant curator of European and American art

Jeanine Michna-Bales: Standing Together: Inez Milholland’s Final Campaign for Women’s Suffrage

October 8 - December 3

In 1916, Inez Milholland Boissevain (1886–1916) embarked on a grueling campaign across the Western US on behalf of the National Women’s Party appealing for women’s suffrage ahead of the 1916 presidential election. Standing Together, by artist Jeanine Michna-Bales (born 1971), retraces Milholland’s journey. The 30-year-old suffragist delivered some 50 speeches to standing-room-only crowds in eight states in 21 days: Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and California. She battled chronic illness and lack of sleep during her travels and died a month after her last speech in Los Angeles, where her final public words were, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?”

Through her photographs, combining dramatic landscapes and historical reenactments of important vignettes of Milholland on her journey with archival materials, Michna-Bales captures a glimpse of the monumental effort required to pass the 19th Amendment.

In-Person: Opening Reception: Oct 09 11:00AM – 3:00PM

Fragments of Epic Memory

September 1, 2021 - February 21, 2022

Fragments of Epic Memory will invite visitors to experience the multiple ways of encountering the Caribbean and its diaspora, from the period following emancipation through today.

The first exhibition organized by the AGO’s new Department of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, it will blend historical and contemporary narratives, presenting more than 200 photographs from the AGO’s Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs alongside paintings, sculpture, and video works by modern and contemporary Caribbean artists that show how the region’s histories are constantly revisited and reimagined through artistic production over time.

Fragments of Epic Memory is curated by Julie Crooks, Curator of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora and will feature a new commission by Sandra Brewster and art works by Ebony G. Patterson, Frank Bowling, and Manuel Mathieu to name just a few.

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André Kertész: André Kertész: Postcards from Paris

October 2, 2021 - January 17, 2022

Joseph Lawton: Being and There

September 23 - October 24

Aurelia Gallery, is pleased to present Being and There, a photography exhibit by New York-based Photographer Joseph Lawton, September 23rd– October 24th.  Opening Night Reception: Friday, September 24th, from 5 pm to 7 pm.  Artist will be in attendance.

Being and There features early black and white photographs from India, China, Indonesia, Russia, France, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico.

The photographs have a transparent formal ease that makes his subjects appear accessible to anyone willing to get up and go for a long walk. The work shows the world colored with a sense of romance that stirs a yearning to get out of the country. It is a travel resume that has provided a string of adventures and anecdotes that should certainly satisfy the curiosity of a boy from Upstate.

Joe’s pictures address something more personal than their foreign settings.  His images of distant locations blend easily with pictures from the streets of New York, or his beloved New York State Fair.  The heart of the work is that no matter how far afield Joe travels, he always brings back little pieces of himself.  The pictures reveal much more about Joe and his travels than the stamps in his passport, or the stories he may tell later over drinks.”

-Carl Gunhouse in the afterword of Lawton’s book Plain Sight.

About Joseph Lawton

Joseph Lawton has taught photography at Fordham University for over thirty-five years, and served as the Director of the Visual Arts Department at Fordham.  He has also taught at Hunter College, Pratt Institute, and the School of Visual Arts. The recipient of the Light Works and the Southeast Center for Photography grants, his work has been published in the New York Times, and in Life and Time magazines, and is included in public and private collections, including Bibliothèque Nationale.  Exhibitions include PS1, Canton Museum, and OK Harris Gallery. A catalogue of his photographs from the New York State Fair is available through Light Works, Syracuse University, and his recent book, Plain Sight, was published by waal-boght press.

Noelle Mason: X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility

October 7 - October 30

Noelle Mason is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is about the subtle seductiveness of power facilitated by systems of visual and institutional control. X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility is a body of work about the phenomenological effects of vision technologies on the perception of undocumented immigrants. The images used in this series were collected from the Border Patrol and border-watching vigilante websites. This project remediates images made by machine vision technologies that are used to patrol international borders into the 19th century processes of cyanotype and wet-plate collodion, as well as hand woven tapestries and embroideries.

Noelle Mason (American, b. 1977) has shown nationally and internationally including the National Museum of Mexican Art, Orlando Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  They are the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, Jerome fellowship, Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant, the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art and the Southern Prize. They hold a BA in both theatre and fine arts from the University of California, Irvine and received their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Noelle currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida and is the Founding Director and Curator of Parallelogram Gallery in Tampa, FL.

Manal Abu-Shaheen: Mapping Utopia

October 7 - October 30

Mapping Utopia is a selection of landscape and street photographs from Manal Abu-Shaheen’s ongoing series based in Beirut, where she was born. Shot on location, this series began with exploring advertising and urban construction, two of the driving forces of Beirut’s economy. A decade-long construction boom, aided by foreign investments and neoliberal interest, reshaped the city, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Alongside the development, Abu-Shaheen examines the monumental scale and congestion of western advertising in relationship to the post-war developing urban setting, bringing idealized images of one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual records of the landscape in Lebanon, Abu-Shaheen seeks to build her own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards purporting a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (Lebanese-American, b. 1982) was born in Beirut and currently lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Her solo exhibitions include 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, NY; Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ; and Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY Old Westbury, NY; The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea; Queens Museum, NY; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY. She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and AIM Residency at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and M.F.A in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.

M.C. Escher: M.C. Escher: Prints, Drawings, Watercolors and Textiles

September 18 - November 20