David Ondrik: Inheritance

January 8 - February 26

Join us, Friday January 8th at 6 pm, on Instagram and Facebook Live for a Virtual Opening with David Ondrik, featuring his work, Inheritance, on display at Pictura Gallery.

David Ondrik’s Inheritance is a large installation of camera-less photographic works. Made at a human-scale, they envelop the viewer, creating an immersive space for contemplation. Ondrik’s dark abstractions are intended to provide room for quiet meditation and reflection.

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Virtual Opening with David Ondrik. Friday January 8th, 6 on Instagram and Facebook Live.

On view January 8th – February 26th

Gallery Hours Wednesday – Friday, 2 pm – 5 pm, or by appointment.

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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.

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. ​​

An Incomplete History of Photography: 1860s to 1960s

October 17, 2020 - February 21, 2021

​​With the purchase of a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White in 1934, the Addison became one of the first museums in the United States to actively collect photography. In the almost 90 years since, the museum has acquired over 9,000 photographs. The selections displayed in this exhibition highlight some key moments in the development of the​ medium and in American history from the 1860s to the 1960s. The imagery includes Civil War battlefields, the American West, turn-of-the-century and Depression-era living conditions, geometric abstractions, and Civil Rights protests. Though photographic technology evolved over the course of the century, photographs served throughout the period as powerful agents of social change and vehicles of self-expression.

Marti Cormand (Brooklyn, NY), Oasa DuVerney (Brooklyn, Judith Eisler (Vienna, Austria and Warren, CT), Andy Mister (Beacon, William Powhida (Brooklyn, Gil Scullion (Middletown, and Diana Shpungin (Brooklyn: Twenty Twenty

October 12, 2020 - February 7, 2021

Audre Lorde, Robert Alexander: Powerful and Dangerous: The Words and Images of Audre Lorde

March 22, 2020 - February 15, 2021

The Alice Austen House presents Audre Lorde in photographs and historic texts.

Powerful and Dangerous explores the intersection between language, activism and photographic messaging. The exhibition holds up a lens to the contemporary women’s, LGBTQ+, and Black Lives Matter movements and considers how Lorde’s words resonate today. Due to COVID-19 the exhibition has been extended with online programs until 2021. A series of public programs, including scholars talks, readings, outdoor film screenings and artist-led photo walks in the Staten Island neighborhood of Stapleton where Lorde’s home, now an LGBTQ Historic landmark, will take place through 2021.

This exhibition is curated by Victoria Munro with contributions by Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jean Weisinger, Dagmar Shultz, Jennifer Abode and JEB. 

Scholars talks will include: Clare Coss, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Jewelle Gomez, Cheryl Clark, Elizabeth Lorde Rollins, M.D. and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Film presentations by Dagmar Schultz and Jennifer Abod with audio interview by Jennifer Abod.

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.

Group exhibition of Atlanta Photography Group members, curated by Executive Director, Judith Pishnery: DIRECTOR’S CUT

December 17, 2020 - January 30, 2021

Christopher Payne: Made in America

December 8, 2020 - February 5, 2021

In this era of service jobs and office work, most of us have never been inside a factory. Several decades of global outsourcing and a flood of cheap imports have decimated American factories and hollowed out once thriving communities. Today we have little idea where, or how, the shirt on our back is made. As we become increasingly immersed in the digital realm, we are losing touch with our analog roots. Yet we still live in a physical world and surround ourselves with material things, and many of these things are still made in America.

For the past ten years Christopher Payne has embarked on a photographic journey to learn more about American manufacturing and the industries that built this country. Payne gained access to a world that continues to thrive, albeit on a much smaller scale and, for the most part, out of public view. Some factories are new and showcase the latest technologies, some have survived by staying exactly the same, catering now to niche markets that value the “genuine article” produced on vintage equipment. Regardless of their differences, they all share the common bonds of craftsmanship and a commitment to quality that can never be outsourced.

This body of work is a celebration of the making of things, of the transformation of raw materials into useful objects, and the human skill and mechanical precision brought to bear on these materials that give them form and purpose. It is a deconstruction of the whole into its unseen constituent parts, revealing hidden moments of beauty in the choreography of production. It is also an homage to the people who do the actual work. They are a cross section of young and old, skilled and unskilled, recent immigrants, and veteran employees whose families have worked for generations in the same industry, sometimes in the same factory. Together, they share a quiet pride and dignity, proof that manual labor and craftsmanship still have value in today’s economy.

Payne carefully selected a handful of factories to communicate a broader view of American manufacturing: what it once was, where it is now, and what its future might hold. Manufacturing has been regarded traditionally as the symbol of the nation’s economic health, and its loss is seen as a threat to our collective soul and identity. Yet not all is so bleak. While there are industries pictured here that are barely hanging on, there are also creative adaptations and altogether new inventions that carve new pathways for American manufacturing. There is, for sure, a certain romance in the making of things, but it is not only nostalgic. These industries are living, breathing expressions of the American journey.

We welcome you to join us online for this exceptional selection that really is a culmination of many years of work by the artist. We will also have highlights from “How to Build a Guitar” at our Woodstock location this winter season! See you there!

Press Release

Glenna Jennings: At Table

December 3, 2020 - January 30, 2021

In her ongoing series At Table, photographer Glenna Jennings focuses her lens on everyday moments shared over meals in dining rooms, kitchens, restaurants, and bars around the world. Her images capture subtle drama and humor, while also functioning as cultural artifacts and personal memories. Since 2005, Jennings has been traveling to locations throughout the United States, Mexico, Canada, China, and Europe, but in 2020 the global pandemic kept her close to home in Dayton, Ohio. Photographing smaller, socially-distanced gatherings provided new imagery to the series “that will serve as a reminder of the year we struggled —separately and together—to survive a global pandemic while putting food (and often drink) on the table.”

Aaron Turner, Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, Nadiya I. Nacorda: Women of the African Diaspora: Identity, Place, Migration, Immigration

December 3, 2020 - January 30, 2021

Blue Sky is pleased to present Women of the African Diaspora: Identity, Place, Migration, and Immigration, an exhibition curated by Aaron Turner and featuring photographic work by Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, and Nadiya I. Nacorda. Through photography, these three artists reflect upon their experiences navigating contemporary life in the United States and beyond as women of the African Diaspora, while also contributing to the larger conversation surrounding inclusion and exclusion within the visual narrative of art history.

Erik Hoffner: Ice Visions

October 24, 2020 - March 6, 2021

I’ve loved snowflakes since the day, as a child, I learned that no two are alike—millions and millions of them in a storm and no twins, every crystalline structure a unique expression of its own making. Erik Hoffner taught me a new lesson in the magic of nature: that thin sheets of freshly formed ice are without peer.

Hoffner is the Snowflake Bentley of our generation. His photographic creations capture patterns in the ice that forms overnight atop the holes bored by ice fishermen on the waterways of New England. Each rondel of new ice possesses its own internal, pictorial logic and materiality. Hoffner’s photographs open a viewing space to consider the dynamics of nature in its unlimited expressive and metaphoric potential.

— Mara Williams, Chief Curator

Ice Visions is an informal collaboration between myself, the ice fishing community, and elemental forces. When fishing holes refreeze overnight, they create fertile ground for nature’s wild artistic side, and these perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile.

The images on display depict ice designs I’ve documented during 20 years of exploring New England lakes and ponds. In the morning light, with tiny bubbles from below fixed in place by several inches of new ice, these scenes come to life as eyes, galaxies, stars, cells, and more when rendered in black and white.

Due to milder than usual temperatures during the past winter, on many mornings I found barely a skin of new ice covering the prior day’s fishing holes. Bubbles pooled up at the surface before freezing, creating striking new kinds of formations I’d never seen before, ones that perhaps reveal the fingerprint of a warming climate.

— Erik Hoffner