 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Events and Exhibits
Emory Visual Arts Gallery
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12-4 pm, and by appointment.
JOIN THE FRIENDS OF EMORY VISUAL ARTS
OPENING FEBRUARY 4TH -
DAWOUD BEY: CLASS PICTURES
ON VIEW NOW -
OUR CITY: EMORY PHOTOGRAPHS CITY OF REFUGE
THE LUCID EYE:
A YEAR OF PHOTOGRAPHY AT EMORY, 2009-2010
Mario Giacomelli, Pretini #72, 1962-63
The Emory Visual Arts Gallery is pleased to announce The Lucid Eye: A Year of Photography at Emory, 2009-2010, a year-long series of exhibitions that will consider key issues in contemporary photography. The series will include solo exhibitions of new work by Joel Leivick, Dawoud Bey and Ruth Dusseault, as well as an inaugural show of twentieth century masterworks from the collection of the Atlanta, Georgia law firm of Arnall Golden Gregory. In addition, the gallery will exhibit a juried exhibition of photographic images that explore the theme of “home.”
“My hope is to mark out key positions in the field of contemporary photography through a suite of superb exhibitions,” says Jason Francisco, Associate Professor of photography at Emory University, and co-curator with Mary Catherine Johnson of the series. “Whether they are working with the natural or social landscape, portraiture or narrative forms, these photographers wrestle in fresh ways with photography’s core propositions—that a picture stems from and sustains an encounter between the world and the creative mind, that this encounter is both enduring and perpetually unresolved, and that it acts as a hinge between memory and imagination, critical awareness and dreams.”
All events are FREE, open to the public, and held at the Visual Arts Building, 700 Peavine Creek Drive, on Emory's main campus, unless specified otherwise. Please check back often for additional listings as they become available. DIRECTIONS/PARKING
The Lucid Eye:
Photographs from the Collection of Arnall Golden Gregory
Exhibition Dates: August 27-September 25, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, August 27, 5-7 pm
Paul Strand, Man, Five Points Square, New York, 1916
This exhibition of 20th century masterworks inaugurates a yearlong series of exhibitions reflecting on the state of the photographic image as art. Featuring works by Zeke Berman, Margaret Bourke-White, Harry Callahan, William Christenberry, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Mario Giacomelli, André Kertész, David Levinthal, Helen Levitt, Danny Lyon, Irving Penn, Toshio Shibata, Paul Strand and others, this show presents key examples of the range and vitality of photographic art as it has evolved over the last century.
All photographs courtesy of Arnall Golden Gregory LLP.
Exhibition highlights with curator's comments.
Exhibition Dates: October 1-November 20, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, October 1, 5-7 pm;
artist’s talk at 7 pm
Joel Leivick, Greenhouse near Volterra, Italy, 2006
Intimate, sensual and complex, celebrated California-based photographer Joel Leivick’s new work looks into the enticements that gardens hold out—that in cultivating nature we might desist from conquering it, and in ordering it we might grasp its true wildness, even make its creativity our own. Leivick’s photographs are at once precise descriptions, luminous observations, and sharp acts of contemplation. To really see a garden, Leivick suggests, is to find a more remarkable garden within—a garden always on the verge of its own conception, continuously in full bloom, and already remembered.
Exhibition Text by Jason Francisco, Curator
Images from the Exhibition
Panoramas
Joel Leivick: In the Garden is presented as part of ACP 11, Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s annual city-wide festival in October.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joel Leivick, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art, has taught photography and history of photography in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford since 1981. In addition to his teaching, he has served as Curator of Photography at the Stanford University Museum of Art, now the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, from 1986 to 2000. In that capacity he has presented a series of photographic exhibitions, including The Enduring Illusion in 1996, an exhibition and catalogue highlighting Center's holdings in photography. He has been instrumental in bringing many important acquisitions, both contemporary and historical, to the Center, and he organized the reinstallation of the photography collection for the reopening of the Center in January 1999. He served as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History from 2001-2005, and again 2006-2007. His photographs of the marble quarries near Carrara on Italy's Tuscan coast, made over a ten year period beginning in 1987, have been exhibited widely in the US and abroad, and his book Carrara: The Marble
Quarries of Tuscany was published by the Stanford University Press in May 1999. He has also, since 1997, been making very large digital color prints of Mexican retablos; small paintings on metal that depict salvation from catastrophic events. These prints, originally produced in the Stanford University Digital Art Center, which Joel co-founded in 1997, were made by selecting specific portions of the pictorial narrative, then manipulating them digitally to change or emphasize certain characteristics, eventually producing an extreme distortion in terms of scale. The original paintings are used as raw material in a remote collaboration and make reference to the human toll imposed by industry. More recently, Joel’s work has centered on complex forms in nature. His exhibition, In the Garden was shown at Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco last October, and will be shown at Emory University’s Visual Arts Gallery this fall. His most recent work involves dense large-scale panoramic photographs of deep forest scenes. His work at Stanford does leave time for a few other pursuits. Joel has been a jazz and blues guitar player since childhood, is an avid collector of wild mushrooms, and has frequently traveled abroad with his wife and son.
Picturing Home:
Friends of Emory Visual Arts Juried Photography Exhibition
Exhibition Dates: December 3, 2009-January 29, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday, December 3, 5-7 pm;
jurors’ talk at 7 pm
1st Prize:
Michael Marfione, Staten Island, NY
2nd Prize:
Paul Mueller, Oakland, CA
PDF of Surgery by Paul Mueller
3rd Prize:
Don Chambers, Atlanta, GA
Honorable Mention:
Joshua Dudley Greer, Athens, GA
Also featuring:
Justyna Badach, Philadelphia, PA
George Bedell, LaPlata, MD
Magda Biernat, New York, NY
William Boling, Atlanta, GA
Christa Kreeger Bowden, Lexington, VA
Gwen Darby, Atlanta, GA
Daniel Farnum, Columbia, MO
Elizabeth Fleming, Maplewood, NJ
Christopher Gauthier, Logan, UT
Richard Gordon, Berkeley, CA
Joelle Jensen, Brooklyn, NY
Ray Klimek, Athens, OH
Sandra-Lee Phipps, Decatur, GA
Mike Pichette, West Warwick, RI
Cameron Schmitz, Vergennes, VT
Mark Slankard, Rocky River, OH
Rafael Soldi, New York, NY
Rylan Steele, Columbus, GA
Karen Tauches, Atlanta, GA
Constance Thalken, Decatur, GA
Samantha VanDeman, Villa Park, IL
Eric White, New York, NY
Jason Francisco, Strawberry Mansion, Philadelphia, 2009
JURORS' STATEMENT
Home is a name, a word, and a strong one: stronger than a magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration. —Charles Dickens
Responding to an open-ended question—“What is home and where is it?”—the photographic works in this gallery explore the plurality and the contrariety of a potent word. Selected from more than 700 submitted images representing the work of over 130 photographers, the pictures here examine what it means to look for home, to find home, to lose home, to be at home, and to test home against challenges that are by turns personal, familial, national, and global. Some of the works rely on the power of a single image, as if held against a surrounding silence, while others use combinations of photographs, or photographs together with texts, toward narratives that are discretely summoned, if not fully disclosed. “Home” emerges from these works as a site of affection and reckoning in equal measures, as fragile as it is secure, and as elusive as it is longed for.
Julian Cox
Curator of Photography
High Museum of Art
Jason Francisco
Associate Professor, Photography
Chair, Department of Visual Arts
Emory University
Exhibition Dates: February 4-March 4, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday, February 4, 5-8 pm
Featuring...
Food and Libations
At 5:30 pm, a special presentation by the Transforming Community Project introducing Dawoud Bey's Spring 2010 Artist Residency at Emory University*
At 7:00 pm, an artist's talk by Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey, Kevin
In images made in public and private high schools across the United States, renowned portraitist Dawoud Bey offers a cross section of a generation, which is also a microcosm of the American experience as it finds expression in and as adolescent preoccupations, dreams and intensities. Accompanying each photograph is a statement by its subject, interrogating, challenging and elaborating the image—effectively performing the first in a chain of readings (including our own) that catalyze the portrait’s meanings. The subjects’ receptivity to themselves—following Bey’s own sympathetic receptivity to them—solicits, directs and finally compels our own humanistic response.
*Class Pictures is presented in conjunction with a month-long residency by Dawoud Bey, during which he will work with the Transforming Community Project (TCP) to photograph students, faculty and staff, gather their written and oral testimonies, and conduct workshops that explore the racial history and diversity of Emory University. This residency celebrates TCP's extraordinary five-year service to the Emory community (2005-2010) and seeks to contibute to their enduring legacy on campus.
Class Pictures and Dawoud Bey's residency are sponsored by Emory University's Transforming Community Project, the Hightower Fund, and the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts.
Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, has organized this traveling exhibition and produced the accompanying publication.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as The Art 
Institute of Chicago, The Barbican Centre in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, the Walker Art Center, the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, CT, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his works were also included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial . The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work in 1995 that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both here in America and in Europe, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, National Portrait Gallery in London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale Art Gallery and many others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships over the course of his career including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at colleges, universities, and other institutions for the past thirty years, and is currently professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art, and is presently represented in the United States by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.
Photo of Dawoud Bey by Bart Harris
Exhibition Dates: March 18-April 23, 2010
Opening reception: Thursday, March 18, 5-7 pm; artist’s talk at 7 pm
Ruth Dusseault, Indoor Ref, 2008
Ruth Dusseault’s compelling new work looks at the recreational war games that occur within depleted suburban spaces. As a visual geographer—an explorer and sometime ethnographer of an exuberant and slightly dystopic American frontier—Dusseault brings to legibility what might be called the aftercity, post-urban social forms that are both new and strangely primal. What defines this world, she submits, is a variety of war consciousness that otherwise abides mostly in virtual space—conflict suffused with fantasy and color, combat without death or triumph, depredation without loss or reproach.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ruth Dusseault is Artist-in-Residence at Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture. Her work is exhibited and collected internationally. She has received over a dozen 
artist grants and awards, including a 2009 Artist Award from New York’s Artadia Foundation, a 2006 Design award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 2003 Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Her various projects examine utopian expressions in architecture. Her Atlantic Steel Redevelopment Project was part of a suite of solo exhibitions at the High Museum in 2006. She has written several features for Art Papers magazine. And she has curated touring exhibitions that combine ideas from art and architecture, including Terrain Vague: Photography and Architecture in the Post-Industrial Landscape at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work is in several collections including the High Museum of Art, the Greenville Museum, the Southeast Museum of Art, Tulane University Museum, the Beijing European Contemporary Art Center, Alston & Bird, Carson & Guest and the Images Photography Collection in Cincinnati.
For more details on exhibitions and lectures, please contact:
Mary Catherine Johnson, mcjohn7@emory.edu or 404-712-4397.
Contact | Faculty | Study | Careers | Arts in Atlanta | Events and Exhibits | Spaces + Gallery
Visual Arts Home | Art History | Emory College | Arts at Emory | Emory University
Copyright © 2005 Emory University
Last updated: February 1, 2010