Marion Art Gallery exhibition to feature iconic photographs
Visitors will have the opportunity to travel through time with the opening exhibition of the 2018-19 season at the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery, “Exploring Photography.”
The exhibition, organized by the Louisiana State University Museum of Art from its permanent art collection, will open Aug. 28 and run through Oct. 7.
Curated by LSU Museum of Art Executive Director Daniel E. Stetson, “Exploring Photography” reflects the photographic holdings of the museum and highlights the range of photography’s possibilities in terms of medium and chronology, as well as genre and theme.
There are 58 photographs, both black and white and color that date from 1930 to 2016. Traditional gelatin silver prints, gum pigment prints, and cyanotypes are presented alongside more recent archival digital prints, xeroradiography and scanograms, ultrachrome color images and solvent transfer photo-based works to represent a wide variety of photographic mediums.
Photographic portraits in this exhibition range from iconic studio portraits by Yousuf Karsh, to Diane Arbus’ informal images of marginalized subjects, to constructed double images by Nancy Webber that together span past and present. The exhibition’s landscapes are as varied in style and tone as a monumental megalith by Paul Caponigro, the digitally constructed color views by Robert Fichter and the abstracted images of land by Barry Anderson or Henry Gilpin.
The oldest photograph in the exhibition is “Artichoke Halved” by Edward Weston. Weston is widely recognized as one of the greatest photographic artists of the 20th century for his photographs of “lowly things that yield strange, stark beauty.”
Perhaps the most famous photograph in the exhibition is Karsh’s 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill as an indomitable wartime leader. Karsh was a master of the formally posed, carefully lighted studio portrait.
Among the exhibition’s digital photographs is Melanie Walker’s “Mis-Allegiance” from her “Mis-Nomer Pageant” series. Walker, an associate professor of photography in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Colorado Boulder, will speak about her photographs and installations as part of the Visiting Artist Program on Sept. 27 at 8:30 p.m. in McEwen Hall Room 209.
Other artists featured in the exhibition include Berenice Abbott, Morley Baer, Bruce Barnbaum, Ruth Bernhard, Brice Bischoff, Howard Bond, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Darryl Curran, Judy Dater, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Suda House, Victor Landweber, Clarence John Laughlin, A.J. Meek, Lisette Model, Thomas Neff, Kenda North, Sheila Pinkel, Alan Ross, Bonnie Schiffman, Richard Sexton, Michael Stone, Robert von Sternberg, Todd Walker, Henry Wessel Jr. and Brett Weston.
A reception in the Marion Art Gallery lobby is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 7, from 7 to 9 p.m. All programs are free and open to the public.
The Marion Art Gallery is located on the main level of Rockefeller Arts Center on the Fredonia campus. It is most easily accessed from the Symphony Circle side of the building. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 4 p.m., Friday and Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
Funding for the exhibition is provided by the Fredonia College Foundation’s Cathy and Jesse Marion Endowment Fund and Friends of Rockefeller Arts Center. Contact Marion Art Gallery Director Barbara Räcker at barbara.racker@fredonia.edu or at 716-673-4897 for more information about the exhibition or to schedule a group tour.
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“Winston Churchill,” by Yousuf Karsh, is among the iconic images featured in “Exploring Photography,”
