Art Out: William Eggleston and John McCracken, Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb, Black Lens, Clifford Ross
William Eggleston, self-portrait, c. 1967-1970, © Eggleston Artistic Trust, Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
William Eggleston and John McCracken True Stories
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by William Eggleston and John McCracken—the first time these two iconic American artists have been featured together. On view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York, True Stories places Eggleston and McCracken into dialogue around their expressive use of color and light, and their distinct versions of American vernacular culture.
Born within five years of one another—McCracken in Berkeley, California, in 1934, and Eggleston in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939—the two artists came of age outside of the dominant centers of the art world, internalizing the spaces and light of the American West and South. Working in sculpture and photography, respectively, each would go on to break with the practices of their contemporaries and challenge the traditional boundaries of their media in search of a new form of expression.
Though both artists occupy singular positions within the recent history of American art, they find common ground in their sharp formal sensibilities and distinctive eye for color. McCracken is known for his work that melds the restrained formal qualities of minimalist sculpture with a unique West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. For McCracken, color was an integral element of his practice, and he considered similar or even identical forms executed in differing hues to be entirely individuated artworks that engage with their surroundings in a distinct way.
John McCracken, 1969, Photo by Joe Goode, © The Estate of John McCracken, Courtesy The Estate of John McCracken and David Zwirner
Considered the father of modern color photography, Eggleston elevated the medium to the art form that it is recognized as today. Eggleston’s novel pictorial style deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. Like McCracken, Eggleston recognized the psychological charge of color and his skilled use of it, along with his democratic and indiscriminate lens, would set him apart from his contemporaries.
Installation view, William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories, David Zwirner, New York, March 9 – April 24, 2021. Courtesy David Zwirner.
Both Eggleston and McCracken privileged a way of making art that championed an open relationship to their viewers. Through their own unique visions, both artists eschew fixed meaning, emphasizing the subjective experience of the viewer and granting us access to a private world in which we might recognize a wider one. While formally reductive in their simplified geometric shapes, McCracken’s luminous surfaces are emblematic of a distinctive West Coast approach to minimalism. Unlike his East Coast contemporaries, who considered their own reductive forms to be entirely nonreferential and self-contained, McCracken thought of his work more expansively and in relation to the subjective experience of each viewer and often referred to them as “structural essences of the man-made world.”1 As art historian and curator Robin Clark notes, “In addition to likening them to humans, McCracken described his slotted sculptures prosaically as ‘two-sided, front and back. Like people, buildings, houses, cabinets, refrigerators, ovens, hi-fi, electrical components, cars & trucks, safes, heaters, display cases etc.,’ and more succinctly as ‘mystery containers.’”
The 69th Street gallery will be open to the public with a limited number of visitors allowed into the exhibition spaces at a time, in accordance with city guidelines.
Tuesday to Friday, advance appointments are recommended but not required.
On Saturdays, the gallery is open by appointment only.
To schedule your visit, please click here.
Alex Webb, Brownsville, Easter Sunday, 2016, Chromogenic development print, Courtesy of the artist
The City Within: Brooklyn Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
NEW YORK, NY (February 25, 2020) – Museum of the City of New York announced details about its new exhibition, The City Within: Brooklyn Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. Featuring more than 30 images, culled from the collaborative eponymous series started in 2014, the show offers a poignant and powerful portrait of the borough that the artists have called home for some 20 years. The City Within will be on view through September 20, 2020.
Over the course of its history, Brooklyn has transformed from farmland to a bedroom community to a buzzy destination. For The City Within, the Webbs have traversed nearly every corner of Brooklyn, showing its dichotomy as a bustling, diverse metropolis and a place full of green spaces and tranquility. While much of the world now associates Brooklyn with film shoots, hipsters, and artists, it is also an archipelago of neighborhoods that is even more multicultural than it was over a century ago. The duo’s photographs of Brooklyn tell a broader American story, one that touches on immigration, community, nature, and home.
“With this exhibition, the Webbs present a multilayered, expressive ode to the wonderful diversity of Brooklyn — a veritable love letter to New York’s most populous and arguably most storied borough,” says Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director and President of the Museum of the City of New York. “We’re so pleased for the work to make its museum debut at the Museum of the City of New York this spring.”
Throughout the course of his career, Alex Webb has traveled around the world to photograph different cultures. This series echoes his other work, but instead of a plane, he traveled via
subway. Rebecca Norris Webb — a poet and photographer whose lyrical images underscore moments of silence and reverie — looked to the green heart of her beloved borough. Photographing what she describes as “the green city within the city within the city” Rebecca focuses on the interconnection between people and the natural world within a chaotic urban environment.
Rebecca Norris Webb, Our Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2016, Chromogenic development print, Courtesy of the artist
“Alex’s compositions reverberate with the energy of color, contrasting shadow and light, and movement. Rebecca’s stay true to her poetic roots, presenting dreamlike, quiet and nuanced images that are more like a meditation,” says Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photographs, Museum of the City of New York. “In The City Within, they each create distinctive narratives, but expertly weave their viewpoints together into a harmonious ensemble. And, like the borough itself, their view of Brooklyn is an exquisite union of visual and emotional complexity.”
The show highlights a particularly poignant time for the Webbs to be focusing their lenses on their home versus far-flung locations. Rebecca explains, “Alex and I will be leaving our Park Slope neighborhood sometime in the next few years, so the project is a kind of farewell to Brooklyn – our home for 20-plus years.”
“I’m not sure we could have done this (series) without the impetus of our eventual departure from Brooklyn,” says Alex. “The vantage point of our leaving enabled us to see our home borough with fresh eyes. This allowed each of us to say farewell creatively in our own ways— me by photographing the streets, Rebecca by photographing and writing about the green spaces near where we live.”
The show is now closing on April 18th.
The City Within will be accompanied by public, education, and family programs including:
EDUCATOR EVENING | THE CITY WITHIN: BROOKLYN PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX WEBB AND REBECCA NORRIS WEBB
Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Price: Free. Registration encouraged.
Before it became part of New York City in 1898, Brooklyn was a city of its own—the fourth largest in the nation. Even today, as New York’s most populous borough, Brooklyn remains a “city within the city,” three times the size of Manhattan. It is from this point of inspiration that The City Within: Brooklyn Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb presents more than thirty images by photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.
Explore the exhibition and find curriculum connections on this free guided tour for educators. (1 CTLE Hour)
Please Click here for more infomation about this exhibition
Black Lens: Photographing Black Style
Curated by Daria Harper
Black photographers have contributed endlessly to the genre of fashion photography, often capturing the bountiful self-expression and resistance of Black style. Despite being historically undervalued by the mainstream art world, emerging Black photographers continue to play an integral role in shaping the way that Black people are represented in art and fashion circles.
“Black Lens: Photographing Black Style” brings together emerging Black photographers from across the globe who document Black style in order to explore the multiplicity of Black culture, people, and history. Through their nuanced images of Black life and experiences, these artists remind us of the important role that Black style plays in preserving African diasporic histories and cultures. Equally importantly, their work offers an exciting opportunity to reflect on and reimagine the future of Black style.
Works in the show range from crisp black-and-white portraits shot by artists like Delphine Diallo and Dario Calmese; to dream-like editorial fashion images by Nadine Ijewere, whose work often explores the grace and poise of women of color.
Essential to this group show is the artists’ use of color, pattern, and texture. Prince Gyasi uses his iPhone to create hyper-colorful images of individuals throughout his hometown of Accra, Ghana. Kenyan artist Thandiwe Muriu photographs her subjects in vibrant, intricately patterned fabrics, some of which resemble the traditional textiles of different African countries and cultures. By placing her subjects against backdrops of the same pattern, Muriu creates beautifully captivating illusions. These artists capture the joy and limitless expression of Black style around the world.
Please click here for more infomation about this exhibition.
Clifford Ross | Prints on Wood
RYAN LEE is pleased to present Clifford Ross: Prints on Wood, an exhibition of photo-based images by multimedia artist Clifford Ross. The exhibit will include new works in which Ross pursues his long-standing interest in capturing the sublime in nature by printing on hand selected maple veneer. Stark black & white negative of details taken from his magisterial high-resolution color photographs of Mount Sopris, as well, dramatic crops of his black & white hurricane wave photographs. The altered images, in combination with the varied color and texture of the wood as a substrate, add drama and a distinctly non-photographic quality to Ross’s compositions, pushing his work toward the realms of drawing and painting, his original media.
“I’ve been missing the materiality of paint and canvas and found this mix of imagery and materials propelled my photography into an unexplored place,” Ross explains. “I was constantly surprised by what I was seeing in the studio. Who doesn’t want to see and experience something new? The new awakes us from our normal state… Nature was appearing before me in an oblique way – like a dream, by suggestion not by declaration. The wood surface foils the transformed imagery, engaging us to decipher anew what we think we know. These are not photographs that allow for passive viewing.”
An interest that began as a vision for large-scale wooden frescos at a public building in Texas, Ross found himself pushing hard at the existing boundaries of photography to establish his process with wood—so much so that he has trouble even referring to these works as photographs. Instead, for him they have become “wood prints or prints on wood.”
On view at the gallery are ten unique single wood panel prints made during the last several years. These new works explore isolated details of earlier, monumentally scaled works that range up to an astounding 26 x 114’. Each of these new works is unique, a singular exploration of image and veneer, utilizing an innovative technique of digital printing.
In pursuit of nature’s beauty and the sublime, whether through realism or abstraction, Ross is perpetually at the forefront of the various media with which he has worked. In 2003, he invented one of the highest resolution film cameras in the world, following that with breakthrough techniques in the use of Photoshop and then computer generated animation. His recent Digital Waves combined advanced computer animation with a new use of LED panels to capture the dramatic movement of ocean waves.
Please click here for more infomation about this exhibition
Book Event—Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning
Join ICP and Aperture online for a conversation between photographers Richard Misrach, Meghann Riepenhoff, and Lucas Folgia on the occasion of the sixth installation of Aperture’s Photography Workshop Series, Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning. Led by ICP Managing Director of Programs David Campany, the photographers will discuss their creative process and approach with landscape photography, while sharing insights into the making of the book.
This program is free with a suggested donation of $5. Reserve your copy of Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning (Aperture) through ICP’s shop.
About the Program Format
This program will take place on Zoom. Those who register to attend will receive a confirmation email with a link located at the bottom of the email under ‘Important Information’ to join the lecture through a computer or mobile device.
We recommend participants download the Zoom app on their device prior to the program. Learn how to download the latest version of Zoom to your computer or mobile device.
If you have not received the Zoom link by 2 PM on the day of the lecture or if you have questions about the virtual lecture, please contact: programs@icp.org.
About Richard Misrach on Landscape and Meaning
In the sixth installment of the Photography Workshop Series, Richard Misrach—well known for sublime and expansive landscapes that focus on the relationship between humans and their environment—offers his insight into creating photographs that are visually beautiful and contain cultural implications.
Aperture Foundation works with the world’s top photographers to distill their creative approaches to, teachings on, and insights into photography—offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers at all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Through images and words, in this volume Misrach shares his own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from the language of color photography and the play of light and atmosphere, to transcending place and time through metaphor, myth, and abstraction.
Speakers
Richard Misrach is one of the most influential color photographers of his generation. His work is held in the collections of over fifty major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His previous Aperture titles include Destroy This Memory (2010), Golden Gate (2012), Petrochemical America (with Kate Orff, 2012), The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings (2015), and Border Cantos (with Guillermo Galindo, 2016).
Meghann Riepenhoff’s work has been exhibited and is held in the collections at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), and the Worcester Art Museum. Additional collections include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which holds Riepenhoff’s 12’x18’ unique cyanotype. Additional exhibitions include Yossi Milo Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Galerie du Monde, Euqinom Projects, the Aperture Foundation, San Francisco Camerawork, the Denver Art Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston).
Publications include ArtForum, Aperture PhotoBook Review, the New York Times, Time magazine’s Lightbox, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Oprah Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Wired, and Photograph. Her first monograph Littoral Drift + Ecotone was published by Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery.
Riepenhoff is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation grant, residencies at the Banff Centre, Rayko, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and an affiliate studio award at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is a 2018–2019 Guggenheim Fellow.
Riepenhoff is based in Bainbridge Island, WA and San Francisco, CA. She received a BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She is from Atlanta, GA.
Lucas Foglia is a fine-art photographer who examines the intersections between humans and wild spaces. His recent book and traveling exhibition, Human Nature, focuses on people in diverse ecosystems who care for nature in the context of climate change. Foglia exhibits his work internationally, and his prints are in notable collections including International Center of Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. His images have appeared in magazines including National Geographic magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Foglia also collaborates with non-profit organizations including the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. Foglia grew up on a small family farm in New York and currently lives in San Francisco.
