Josephine Sacabo: TAGGED

October 4, 2018 - January 12, 2019

Walking the graffiti gauntlet from my house to my studio, I am confronted by a lexicon of rampant misogyny, violence and sexual insults. The messages may be verbal but their effects are visceral. We are being ‘tagged’- as hos, bitches, and worse. But I am not that woman.

Why have women become the targets of the rage and frustration expressed? Why are women bearing the consequences for injustices they have not committed? Where are the graffiti messages by women meant for men?

I do not have the answers to these questions, all I have are these images of what it feels like to be a woman walking these streets. And in this I know I am not alone.   – Josephine Sacabo

Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs

September 8, 2018 - March 3, 2019

This exhibition highlights one of the Addison collection’s great strengths–images of the American landscape, both natural and manmade. Whether historical or contemporary, fact or fiction, abstract or representative, celebratory or critical, private exploration or social document, all of the photographs assembled in this exhibition comment to one degree or another on the overlapping and often contesting powers of culture and nature. The complex dialogue these images foster prods us to consider the contrast between our myths and realities. Featuring works by photographers such as Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Lois Conner, Marcia Resnick, and Katherine Wolkoff, these photographs present more than mere description. As vehicles for artistic, personal, and cultural expression they challenge us to examine and reflect upon who we are.​

Depth of Field: Acquisitions to UMBC’s Photography Collections, 2008-2018

August 29 - December 19

Depth of Field presents approximately one-hundred images acquired over the last ten years by UMBC’s Photography Collections through generous gifts from donors and artists. The photographs on view highlight the breadth and depth of the collection and illustrate the range of forms, technology, and artists that historically shaped the medium and are presently impacting its ongoing evolution. Featuring work by Albert Arthur Allen, Laurie Brown, Kristin Capp, Clarence Carvell, William Eggleston, Donna Ferrato, Robert Fichter, Todd Forsgren, Peggy Fox, Sally Gall, Ralph Gibson, Penny Harris, Sam Holden, Irina Ionesco, Walter Iooss, Lotte Jacobi, N. Jay Jaffee, Brian Jones, Nate Larson, David S. Lavine, Alen MacWeeney, Mary Ellen Mark, Fred McDarrah, Dorothy Norman, David Seltzer, David Seymour, Steve Szabo, Barbara Traub, Peter Turnley, and Robert VonSternberg.

Dmitri Baltermants, Mark Markov-Grinberg: The Soviet Lens

September 9, 2018 - January 6, 2019

Diane Arbus: Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs

April 6, 2018 - January 27, 2019

In late 1969, Diane Arbus began to work on a portfolio. At the time of her death in 1971, she had completed the printing for eight known sets of A box of ten photographs, of a planned edition of fifty, only four of which she sold during her lifetime. Two were purchased by photographer Richard Avedon; another by artist Jasper Johns. A fourth was purchased by Bea Feitler, art director at Harper’s Bazaar, for whom Arbus added an eleventh photograph.

This exhibition traces the history of A box of ten photographs between 1969 and 1973, using the set that Arbus assembled for Feitler, which was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in 1986. The story is a crucial one because it was the portfolio that established the foundation for Arbus’s posthumous career, ushering in photography’s acceptance to the realm of “serious” art. After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, “With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer. . . deny its status as art. . . . What changed everything was the portfolio itself.”

In May 1971, Arbus was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum, which also showcased her work on its cover. In June 1972, the portfolio was sent to Venice, where Arbus was the first photographer included in a Biennale, at that time the premiere international showcase for contemporary artists. SAAM organized the American contribution to the Biennale that year, thereby playing an important early role in Arbus’s legacy.

Trevor Paglen: Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen

June 21, 2018 - January 6, 2019

Trevor Paglen blurs the lines between art, science, and investigative journalism to construct unfamiliar and at times unsettling ways to see and interpret the world around us. Inspired by the landscape tradition, he captures the same horizon seen by American photographers Timothy O’Sullivan in the nineteenth century and Ansel Adams in the twentieth. Only in Paglen’s photographs is the infrastructure of surveillance also apparent—a classified military installation, a spy satellite, a tapped communications cable, a drone, an artificial intelligence (AI).

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen is a mid-career survey, the first exhibition to present Paglen’s early photographic series alongside his recent sculptural objects and new work with AI. It carries on the long history of programs by the Smithsonian American Art Museum examining America’s changing relationship to the landscape. With this presentation, SAAM is contributing to the important and ongoing conversation about privacy and surveillance in contemporary society.

Paglen’s photographs show something we are not meant to see, whose concealment he regards as symptomatic of the historical moment we inhabit. His objects act in opposition to what his images have exposed, imagining another and potentially different world. Paglen is a conceptual artist with activist intentions. Helping to better see the particular moment we live in and producing spaces in which to envision alternative futures are among his chief concerns.

Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen is organized by John Jacob, SAAM’s McEvoy Family Curator for Photography, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements

October 26 - November 30

In 2010, the artist Chloe Dewe Mathews traveled overland from China to the U.K., where she currently lives and works. When she arrived on the shores of the Caspian Sea, she began documenting scenes that intrigued her: stonemasons with their faces covered, building elaborate mausoleums in Kazakhstan for the oil-rich middle class, or health tourists in Azerbaijan, bathing in crude oil for its therapeutic benefits. As she returned to the region repeatedly over the following five years, she sought out stories that raised questions about the human relationship with natural resources in a much-coveted territory.

Positioned between the two great continents of Asia and Europe, the Caspian is described as both an inland sea and the world’s largest saltwater lake. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has remained outside the territorial boundary of any country, although Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Russia have all laid claim to it, each vying for the maximum share of its mineral-rich seabed and the strategic access it provides to international waters. Twenty-seven years later, in August 2018, a deal between the five countries was reached, but its consequences remain to be seen.

Away from the wranglings of geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that materials like oil, fire, uranium, and water are integral to the mystical, economic, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. Caspian: The Elements offers a series of powerful visual narratives, a portrait of this beguiling and elusive land.

This exhibition coincides with the publication of the book Caspian: The Elements, by Chloe Dewe Mathews, which is co-published by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press. A larger exhibition of work from Caspian: The Elements will open at the Peabody Museum in April 2019.

City as Ecosystem: NYC Urban Field Station Artists Residency

September 13 - November 23

Japan Modern: Photography from the Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck Collection

September 29, 2018 - January 21, 2019

Celebrating the Freer|Sackler’s recent acquisition of a major Japanese photography collection, this exhibition features a selection of works by groundbreaking twentieth-century photographers. Whether capturing evocative landscapes or the gritty realities of postwar Japan, this presentation focuses on Japanese artists’ search for a sense of place in a rapidly changing country. The images highlight destinations both rural and urban, in styles ranging from powerful social documentary to intensely personal. A selection of photobooks and experimental films adds to this multifaceted exploration. Complemented by Japan Modern: Prints in the Age of Photography

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Letters from Saigon to Saigon

September 7, 2018 - January 6, 2019

Ana Mendieta, Sophie Calle, Francis Alÿs, David Hammons, Alison Knowles, Kate Newby: Ritual

July 17 - November 25

What do you do every day that you most look forward to? What are your daily practices and do they make you feel connected to something greater, or to yourself? The AAM’s exhibition considers the ways in which rituals impact culture, community, and how we are known, both as individuals and collectively. Generally defined as a series of established actions carried out for spiritual, social, political, and personal significance, rituals are embedded into everyday life. This exhibition presents a diverse collection of works by over fifteen artists exploring the act of ritual through three distinct rites: rites of passage, communal rites, and rites of personal devotion. The show reaffirms the ability of rituals to constantly transform our perceptions, our perspectives, and ultimately our experiences.

La Raza

March 30, 2018 - February 10, 2019