Thomas Sayers Ellis, Blackfish, Fisheye, Blackened, 2024.
PARADISE | PARADISE – Layered
St. Petersburg Month of Photography and the inaugural Photo Laureate Thomas Sayers Ellis
By Clara ten Berge
Thinking about living in Florida, the lyrics “this could be heaven or this could be hell” comes to mind. The white sandy beaches, the refreshing springs with their captivating flora and fauna, and the rich cultural landscape (as evidenced by this very website), along with the agreeably mild winters, make it a paradise you wouldn’t want to leave.
Yet, when mid-May arrives, the heat slaps you in the face and hurricane season begins, a layer is peeled back to reveal one of Florida’s many other sides. Peel back another layer, and you uncover complicated politics, homelessness, a terrible housing market, raging late-stage capitalism, and more. Florida is a many-headed beast; while it can be paradise for some, it could be hell for others.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, the inaugural Photo Laureate of the Saint Petersburg Month of Photography (SPMOP), has spent a year walking the streets and unveiling the many stories of Tampa Bay, capturing everything from the blissful and joyful to the mundane, the painful, and the terrible.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, The Critical And Response of Woke Maintenance, 2024 Thomas Sayers Ellis, The Coke Bomber, 2024.
With his images, he creates narratives that go beyond street photography. They are seductive, they will lure you into paradise. They are confrontational, they will show you the fringes that make up your paradise. His images are layered, both in the literal as in figurative sense. They show a different dimension in paradise, a dimension that is made up of advertising, marketing and image building of what paradise should be. But at the same time, this paradise is a construct that is only available for the happy few. — Marieke van der Krabben, Executive Director, SPMOP (excerpt from “‘In the Hall of Mirrors, Nothing Is as It Seems,” forewordto Paradise ǀ Paradise -Layered)
Saint Petersburg Month of Photography
SPMOP, a non-profit founded by photography historian and curator Marieke van der Krabben and photographer Águeda Sanfiz, celebrates local Tampa Bay photography in every way possible. During the month of May, SPMOP organizes exhibitions and events, collaborating with local artists and venues such as the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, and the Morean Arts Center,Five Deuces Galleria, and the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg.
Every year the organization will choose a Photo Laureate, who will have the honor of documenting life in Tampa Bay for a year. In May of 2023, SPMOP announced its first Photo Laureate: Thomas Sayers Ellis. From over 35 artists, SPMOP selected five nominees whose work was exhibited at the Morean Arts Center in Saint Petersburg in May of that year. The jury was captivated by Thomas’s poignant photos that immediately grabbed the viewer’s attention. Each photograph told a unique story and invited dialogue.The panel was convinced Thomas would be able to highlight the many stories of Tampa Bay in new and exciting ways.
It is inspiring to see an artist like Thomas in action. His dedication and enthusiasm are infectious. He is open, polite and friendly when photographing people on the streets. Since he moved to Saint Petersburg in 2016, he is not yet used to the Florida heat, but his urge to document the streets and the people overcomes this obstacle.
Now, at the end of his tenure, Thomas Sayers Ellis receives a solo exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (FMoPA). Opening on June 18th, the exhibition will showcase this year-long project. Using a mixture of black-and-white and color photography, digital as well as film, and accidental double exposures, Thomas has assembled an eclectic collection of images that constructs a multi-layered account of his year as SPMOP’s first Photo Laureate. An accompanying photo book with an extended collection of Thomas’s photographs and poems is currently in the making by SPMOP Executive Director Marieke van der Krabben.
The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts on 7th Avenue in historic Ybor City, Tampa.
Florida Museum of Photographic Arts
FMoPA’s move to Ybor City has been a game changer. The beloved Photography Museum struggled at its previous downtown Tampa location, surrounded by corporate offices and at an inconveniently high level to attract foot traffic. Since relocating to 7th Avenue, the museum enjoys the warm embrace of the vibrant arts community around it. Residing on the first floor of the historic 1928 Kress Building, the museum is part of Kress Contemporary. Kress Contemporary is the home of many art galleries, art studios and visual and performing arts organizations such as GRATUS, Tempus Projects, Screen Door Microcinema and the Tampa City Ballet.Often on Thursdays, the museum hosts events coinciding with the art initiatives above it, feasting art lovers with double the celebrations.
What sets FMoPA apart is its combination of internationally and nationally renowned artist exhibitions, its celebration of emerging local artists, and its many community programs. This Spring they organized the phenomenal exhibition Joel Meyerowitz: Confluence, 1964-1984 and in July they will open Photo Ybor, about the history of Ybor City. Programs such as Prodigy: Storytelling through Photography and the annual Member’s Show, demonstrate FMoPA’s commitment to their community. Not all museums offer their members and community a venue to exhibit their art, which makes stepping into a place like a gallery or museum more accessible. This layered approach in exhibitions and offerings is evidently working well; they have seen an influx of visitors since they officially reopened at the new location in September 2023. All in all, FMoPA is a worthy exhibition venue for SPMOP’s Photo Laureate.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, Our Lady of Lines and Lanes, 2023
Poetry and Photography
Ellis is not only a photographer but also a published poet and a bandleader. Since the beginning of his Photo Laureate journey, he has treated the community to bi-weekly photographic updates accompanied by his free-flowing poetry. Even more powerful when spoken out loud, they highlight Thomas´ creativity and provide a glimpse into his intriguing musings.
Combining two art forms can make it greater than the sum of its parts. For this reason, poetry and photography are a match made in heaven! This past May, Keep St. Pete Lit! held a Poetry Open Mic at St. Petersburg’s Studio@620, featuring a special photography edition of their poetry open mic to celebrate the month of photography. Local talent from all stages of life brought photographs that are dear to them and shared their poems, prose and spoken word. It was beautiful to see and experience people at their most vulnerable, sharing their most inner thoughts, all cheered on by a very respectful and supportive audience. Keep St. Pete Lit! plans to invite Thomas Sayers Ellis as a featured speaker in the near future.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, The All-Star Cage Jump Wrestler, 2023
Also this past May, SPMOP presented an exhibition titled Photo Laureate 2024: the Nominees at the Morean Arts center which featured the work of the following five local artists: Christa Joyner Moody, David Moreno, Jose Ramirez, Marian Tagliarino and Ric Savid. From this impressive grouping, the torch of Photo Laureate was passed on to Ric Savid, an amazingly skilled artist who shoots mostly in film and specializes in portrait photography.
We can all look forward to next year’s St. Petersburg Month of Photography celebration and a future public exhibition of Photo Laureate Ric Savid’s unique and exciting exploration.
About the author
Originally from the Netherlands, author Clara ten Berge has been living in Tampa for 2.5 years with her husband. In the Netherlands (Amsterdam), she worked at several museums. She has volunteered at FMoPA for a year, and is currently volunteering for SPMOP as Creative Director.
By turns witty, moving, and poignant, the exhibition Tom Jones: Here We Stand at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, makes a clear statement that Indigenous Nations remain connected to their past while ensuring their values are projected into the future. Tom Jones is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.
This is the first major retrospective of Jones’ career and features more than 100 photographic works in more than a dozen series. Tom Jones: Here We Stand originated at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. The exhibition was co-curated by Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, Senior Curator of Photography at the MFA, and Graeme Reid, Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Here We Stand showcases Jones’ photographic vision ranging from intimate shots inside his relatives’ homes, to acerbic wit recording appropriated Native names and iconography in the American landscape, to majestic and monumental portraits with hand-beaded embellishments.
Jones’ early series Dear America pairs enlarged collaged historical vernacular photos with diegetic captions that force viewers to confront their assumptions about the Native history they may have learned.
Tom Jones, Sweet Land of Liberty, 2002, Inkjet print and ink. On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.Tom Jones, Long May Our Land Be Bright, 2002 Inkjet print and ink. On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.
In the image Sweet Land of Liberty, which collages a 19th-century group portrait of Sioux with a jaunty white hunter who has harvested a raccoon, Jones has written a short summary of the largest one-day mass execution in American history–when Abraham Lincoln approved death sentences for 38 Sioux men on December 26, 1862. Jones employs a similar technique with the image Long May Our Land Be Bright, half of a 19th-century stereographic image from Taos Pueblo. In this text inscription, however, Jones celebrates that the Red Willow People of Taos Pueblo have maintained their cultural integrity despite centuries of invasions by colonizers.
The beaded portraits in the Strong Unrelenting Spirits series build on the technique Jones used in Dear America, adding intricate beadwork to the large-scale portraits. Members of the Ho-Chunk nation pose in front of a stark black background, many in traditional ceremonial garb. These portraits are striking in their size as well as in the subjects’ appearance. What, in reproduction, appears to be designs drawn on the black background behind each individual is actually intricate beadwork applied to the surface of the photograph itself.
Tom Jones, Bryson Funmaker, from Strong Unrelenting Spirits series, 2020, Inkjet print and beadwork. On loan from Mike and Linda Schmudlach. Image credit: Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Even before European colonizers introduced colorful glass beads in trade, for centuries Indigenous artisans created beads from stones, bones, and shells, and used them to create jewelry and embellish clothing.
For Jones, the beadwork on these photographs represent a ritual encounter with ancestors. “Beading is a metaphor for our ancestors watching over us. I am also referencing an experience I had when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My mother took me to see a Sioux medicine man named Robert Stead. He led the call to the spirits, the women began to sing, and the ancestors appeared as orbs of light.” Strong Unrelenting Spirits eschews the formalism of photographic portraits that seek only to show what is before the camera. Combining the realism of photographic portraiture with the spiritual experience of light orbs further cements a Native visual language that can combine the visible and ethereal presences of one’s experience.
Tom Jones, Fire Pit, from I am an Indian First and an Artist Second series, 2008, Inkjet print. On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Museum of Wisconsin Art.
A recurring theme in Jones’ work is the appropriation and commodification of Native culture in America. Two series, The North American Landscape and I am an Indian First and an Artist Second, use plastic figures from Cowboys and Indians playsets to wryly reference the way Native culture has been repackaged and sold as a product. The images in the series “Native” Commodity are deadpan documentary representations of Indigenous culture co-opted by the tourism industry. The series Studies in Cultural Appropriation also presents a witty question: if Native designs are readily appropriated by corporations, why not make use of a variety of Indigenous material designs for high fashion?
Tom Jones, Blake Funmaker, 2020, Inkjet print. On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.
One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is a portrait of Blake Funmaker (2020) in ceremonial regalia that includes an embroidered and beaded face mask. COVID-19 was a particular danger to Native American communities. Noreen Goldman, demographer and social epidemiologist at Princeton University reports, “Elevated COVID-19 death rates among Native Americans serve as a stark reminder of the legacies of historical mistreatment and the continued failure of governments to meet basic needs of this population.” To promote the protection of the community during the pandemic, the Ho-Chunk Nation Department of Health commissioned Jones to photograph members of his community with facemasks as part of their full regalia.
What is consistent across the diverse bodies of work is the existence of a Native photographic language, one that blends traditional Indigenous art forms imbued with ritual, spirituality, and heritage with the detail and historicity lent to a subject by the medium of photography. In contrast to white photographers who have perpetuated the idea that Indigenous nations have vanished or are frozen in a romanticized past, Jones’ visual language instead reinforces that Native peoples are resisting erasure and maintaining their identities despite attempts by colonizers to assimilate them.
Tom Jones: Here We Stand is on view at the Museum of Fine Art, St.Petersburg through August 27, 2023. The exhibition originated at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. A catalogue, including a major essay by Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase in the MFA Store. Installation photography photo credit: Darcy Schuller, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
About the artist
Tom Jones is an artist, curator, writer, and educator. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. Jones is currently a Professor of Photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more information about the artist, visit his website.
About the author
Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and is an adjunct instructor at USF, and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.
Lee Miller is a fascinating figure in the history of photography, and it is refreshing to experience a retrospective of her work of this size and scope, more than 130 images spanning her decades-long career. The Woman who Broke Boundaries was curated by Dr. William Jeffett, chief curator of exhibitions at The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, FL, with all photographs on loan from the Lee Miller Archives in Sussex, England, managed by her son Antony Penrose.
Miller’s career, and her photographic archive, represents her ceaseless drive to see, express, and experience. Her place in the industry and its history seems almost fated. Yet Miller’s insatiable ambition to become an important photographer and writer is sometimes downplayed in favor of telling the stories of her relationships to several key figures who Miller encountered along the way.
The exhibition’s organization is informed by The Lives of Lee Miller a biography that her son Antony Penrose wrote. However, since the first introduction visitors get to the exhibit’s thesis is “This exhibition tells the story of Lee Miller’s extraordinary and unconventional life as seen through her photographic portraits of others” it is within this framework that viewers are meant to situate what they learn of Miller—through her portraits of and relationships with others. The exhibition, however, does not address many of the tragedies of Miller’s early life and simplifies key relationships that were more complex than they seem.
The exhibition begins with a large didactic panel situating Miller as Artist, War Correspondent, Model & Muse. Miller modeled for Vanity Fair and Vogue in her late teens and early 20s and was vaunted as the pinnacle of beauty standards of the 1920s. This was how she met Edward Steichen, an absolute giant in the field of both artistic and commercial photography who would later become a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
Miller was in front of, rather than behind, the camera during this period of her career, therefore this part of her life is not detailed much in the exhibition. Nevertheless, it represents the sum of numerous formative moments since Steichen wrote her a letter of introduction and recommendation to work with Man Ray, the American surrealist artist living in Paris.
Surrealist aims of accessing unconscious creativity, desires, and expression have a natural affinity with the medium of photography. Photography captures fractions of a moment that the eye and the brain experience very differently than what the camera captures. A photo represents a different plane of reality. Additionally, photography’s formal characteristics allow for techniques like cameraless image creation (photograms), double exposures, combination printing, and any other number of manipulations that distort the “reality” that photography represented for many.
Since surrealism as an art movement (including writers, poets, painters, and photographers, and other creators in all sorts of media) was preoccupied with Freudian psychology, women in the group may have had a challenge being taken seriously as creators and were more often treated as Muses—passive inspiration for the creators. Or at least that is how it’s been reported in the photo history books.
Miller’s relationship with Man Ray is well documented and marks the introduction to her photographic work proper in The Woman Who Broke Boundaries. This critical part of her photographic career also has scant representation in the exhibition. Though she was a model for Man Ray, Miller was far more than muse. They were technical and artistic collaborators. One of the surrealist photographic techniques that is synonymous with Man Ray’s legacy is that of solarization.
Solarised Portrait (thought to be Meret Oppenhiem), Paris, France, 1932 by Lee Miller (NC00585) (c) Lee Miller Archives England 2020. All Rights Reserved.
A negative, while in the process of being developed (so while it is still sensitive to light exposure) is exposed to a brief bright light. The result is a sort of otherworldly reversal of some tones in the final photograph—the highlights and shadows create an illusion of lighting that would be impossible to achieve without the manipulation. Sometimes the relationship between figure and background is lost and the model appears to be a relief carved from stone.
History books say Ray invented the technique, but Miller reports that it was something that happened while she was working alone in the darkroom. In The Lives of Lee Miller, she is quoted: “It was all very well my making that one accidental discovery, but then Man had to set about how to control it and make it come out exactly the way he wanted to each time.”
In the biography, Penrose suggests “Few examples of her early photographs survived her subsequent traveling and the strange contempt in which she held her own work.” However, just a few pages later Penrose writes, “A measure of Lee’s and Man Ray’s mutual respect was that neither of them was seriously concerned when their credits were wrongly ascribed” indicating that some of Miller’s work may have been attributed to Ray at the time, and in legacy.
Miller’s photographs in this portion of the exhibition are representative of her avant-garde approach to portraiture—for sitters who were up for it. Solarized portraits of socialites such as Dorothy Hill denote a desire for Miller’s unique combination of techniques developed while working with Ray and her own sense of what makes remarkable portraits.
This segment of the exhibition also showcases photographs of Miller’s friends, surrealist artists, and work she made in Egypt. The former grouping, Miller and friends, is a name-dropper’s paradise. With the pictures as proof of Miller’s intimate association with major artists, her own renown as an artist grew.
Her photographs from the period she lived in Egypt are among the most fascinating of the exhibition. It seems to have taken Miller a while to resuscitate her creativity after marrying and moving to Egypt, but the images she eventually produced defined her mature photographic style. When creatively unfettered and free to pursue her own vision, Miller’s style of surrealist photography creates a playful tension by highlighting odd juxtapositions of subject matter. Portrait of Space (1937), an image made in Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt, demonstrates the way an everyday scene can become a record of a dream in Miller’s hands. A simple torn window screen becomes an aperture to an otherwise shrouded ambiguous landscape—is it desert or beach? An oddly hung mirror seems to reflect the blank wall behind the photographer, but it also looks like it is a portal into the sky. It is hard to look away from the image because it invites and rewards close looking.
Miller’s wartime photographs also demonstrate her style of surrealism-via-juxtaposition. The realities of life in London during the Blitz must have eclipsed the surrealist visions she experienced in the desert.
She remained on staff as a photographer for Vogue and in 1942 Miller became accredited as a war photographer giving her the right to travel with the US Army. When Miller left London for the mainland, she found that she thrived in the bedlam of war. She was present for the Liberation of Paris, for the horrific discoveries at Buchenwald and Dachau, and for the first entry to the Berghof with its secret mountain passages. Her dispatches to Vogue began to slow as the world tried to move on after the war. Eventually, Miller also moved on from photography, leaving it almost completely in her past by 1954.
Miller’s life was indeed extraordinary and unconventional, and she is a photographer who should be celebrated for the boundaries she broke. The pictures in the exhibition don’t always stand on their own to demonstrate how exceptional she was, which is why the didactic text in the galleries (essays and label text) is so important for interpretive context. This is where the exhibition’s theme either becomes clear or not.
In my subjective experience, the exhibition doesn’t achieve its goal which I’ll repeat here: “This exhibition tells the story of Lee Miller’s extraordinary and unconventional life as seen through her photographic portraits of others.” As a woman and an artist, I would not like my life simplified to the degree that Miller’s has been to suit this simultaneously too-wide and too-narrow theme.
The unspoken subtext of the exhibition, as I experienced it, seems to focus on Miller almost as connective tissue among the notable men she met along the way. Viewers may be spurred, as I was, to find out more about Miller’s life that’s hinted at between the lines of The Woman Who Broke Boundaries. In the exhibition writing there is a lot about Miller’s extraordinary life and trailblazing career that is glossed over, euphemized, or just plain omitted.
What is evident from the work in this exhibition is that Miller was a master photographer, technician, and storyteller who created meaningful portraits and documents of her age with equal prowess. The opportunity to see such a range of photographs from an artist of Miller’s stature is not to be missed.
The Woman who Broke Boundaries: Photographer Lee Miller is on view exclusively at The Dalí Museum in St. Peterburg, Florida, through Jan. 2, 2022.
Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.
From Margins to Mainstays: Highlights from the Photography Collection is a small but impactful survey exhibition highlighting the work of photographers who may have experienced marginalization in their life because of part of their identity. The photos included are largely from the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s impressive photography collection, with a few important loans from area collectors.
The title From Margins to Mainstays refers to artists (and in many cases, portrait subjects) whose identity existed on the margins of social norms. Making visible the work of photographers who were queer, BIPOC, women, and often multiple intersections of marginalized identities is the exhibition’s theme. I’ve been immersed in the history of photography for more than a decade and I still learned a lot from this exhibition.
Richard Avedon (American, 1923–2004) Marian Anderson (Contralto, New York, June 30, 1955), 1955, Gelatin silver print, NEA photography purchase grant. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
A number of the artists included are queer, and that part of their identity was often hidden—either by themselves, such as Richard Avedon and Minor White who kept their queerness private during their lives, or just typically excluded from the general discourse around certain photographers and their work.
While the exhibition’s focus is on revealing the axis of discrimination faced by photographers or other artists (with the subtext that this did not keep them from finding professional success) in many cases there is a concomitant axis of privilege that helped them become Mainstays.
Julia Margaret Cameron is one example. While it’s true that women photographers were a relative minority in Victorian England, Julia Margaret Cameron was far from an average woman. She had an extremely rarified friend and portrait model group that included Robert Browning, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose portrait as The Dirty Monk, is included in From Margins to Mainstays.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879) The Dirty Monk, 1865, Albumen print. Note: The print on display in the exhibition is on loan to the MFA, St. Peterburg from a private collection. This albumen print, similar to the one on display, was sourced online and is provided courtesy of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford, United Kingdom.
Cameron wasn’t a woman of average means or connections, so it’s hard to think of her for a stand-in for an average woman in the mid-19th century. Cameron had the means and resources to pursue copyrighting, marketing, exhibiting, and publishing her photographs. During her lifetime, she sold eighty prints to the Victoria and Albert Museum and entered a relationship with an established London print seller to publish and sell her photographs. This speaks to Cameron’s social connections and that assisted her career and legacy. Were there barriers to women photographers in the 1860s that couldn’t be overcome by wealth or connections?
Studying art history, one learns quickly that social connections are disproportionately what determined who eventually got included in the history books when they were written. Yet, it has sparked in me curiosity about some of these photographers’ personal lives.
Another example is Berenice Abbott. I studied her tangentially and momentarily because of her friendship with Eugene Atget, who I researched for a prolonged period. Berenice Abbott was studio assistant to Surrealist Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s, which is how she befriended Atget (Man Ray collected Atget’s photographs).
From the exhibition, I learned Abbott was an out lesbian! Personally, I cannot wait to learn more about this part of her life. It’s sparked for me a renewed interest about her time in 1920’s Paris and I’m glad to know that she likely did not spend all of her free social time with the group of Surrealists that she worked with!
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991), New York at Night, 1932, Gelatin silver print, Museum purchase with funds provided by the NEA and FACF. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
Abbott made a name for herself as a photographer in the mid-to-late 1930s for her wide-ranging project Changing New York, funded by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Her photograph in the exhibition, New York at Night (1932), is a dreamlike view from atop a skyscraper, looking down on other buildings and the twinkling lights of the city.
Abbott’s contribution to photography history was likely solidified before Changing New York because she facilitated the acquisition of thousands of Atget’s prints and negatives which eventually became a donation to the Museum of Modern Art and a landmark exhibition and production of scholarship decades later in the 1980s.
From Margins to Mainstays relies on the text to help viewers to make the connections between the exhibition theme and the images. In other words, with a few exceptions, the images themselves don’t communicate marginalization.
Minor White (American, 1908-1976), Ritual Branch, Frost on Window, 1958, Silver gelatin print, Gift of the photographer. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
These very minor critiques of a diverse and thoughtful exhibition come from my closeness to the subject matter. I had to purposely turn the volume down on my internal photography historian’s commentary, only because it’s hard to think of some of the artists included as being on the margins when they have become such giants in the field. However, that, I suppose, is the strength of the exhibition. Simply expanding our knowledge about photographers we think we know because they are in the survey textbooks always generates new understanding in the present.
From Margins to Mainstays: Highlights from the Photography Collection was organized by MFA St. Petersburg Curator of Photography Allison Moore, Ph.D., and will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg through September 26, 2021. For additional information and related programming visit the Museum’s website.
Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Floridawith a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.
Before venturing to Nashville, there was a road trip to Durham, North Carolina, for my first 21c experience. Currently, there are nine 21c Museum Hotels, with plans for more, sprinkled across a few select states in mostly mid-sized cities. Each location exhibits museum-quality 21st-century art (21c) in a restored historic building, converted to a boutique hotel that always includes an inventive lively restaurant and bar. Durham was the closest 21c within driving distance of St. Petersburg and was offering a 2-for-1-night stay, so last August – mid-pandemic – I hit the road.
Upon arrival at the 21c Museum Hotel Durham, I was crushed to learn the restaurant space Counting House was still closed, although not surprised given the pandemic restrictions at that time. I could see through the expansive windows that, like the hotel, the restaurant was teeming with compelling artwork. The skeleton crew eventually allowed me to wander the large multi-room restaurant to view and photograph the art. In the center of the bar area, I was delighted to see Duke Riley’s work, as I had met him during a University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (USF/CAM) artist talk related to a series of woodcut editions he had completed at USF‘s Graphicstudio.
The main exhibit, The Future is Female, was installed throughout the museum portion of the hotel. It was excellent. I loved seeing works by many favorite artists (Carry Mae Weems, Deborah Roberts, Marilyn Minter, Mickalene Thomas) – and again, was delighted to be alone with the work since only hotel guests were granted museum access at the time.
What was an initial grave disappointment – regarding access – turned out to be a private ocean of time and space. During most of my wanderings, I was the only person around which felt illicit and delicious. I couldn’t believe my strange fortune.
21c Museum Hotel Durham’s Counting House bar and restaurant, August 2020. (Center triptych by Brooklyn-based Duke Riley)Details of Duke Riley’s It Will Warm You Twice, 2015, Cigarettes on wood panels.
21c Museum Hotel Nashville Lobby
The wood carved figure of a woman was in mid-air with no obvious support. She was floating just beyond the reception desk, an ethereal greeter.
“She is suspended. Do you know how?” asked Brian, from behind the front desk. He was only too eager to tell me yet I wanted to see for myself.
Her only anchor was a hand-held leash that led to the head of a puma, bearing sharp teeth, whose beautiful fur skin was splayed out on the floor like a rug. As gorgeous as the fur of this animal was, my first instinct was to look away.
I am an easily overwhelmed visual sponge, not able to immediately compartmentalize, so the impact of this piece was, initially, too much to take in. Not until the third day did I examine what the artist Marc Fromm had created. I assumed it to be a complicated piece to produce, yet conveyed complete success in presentation. Seamlessly accomplished. Now I could look at the piece with sincere disbelief, rather than discomfort, although the discomfort remained beneath the surface. (I won’t spoil the technical magic – see image and resource links.)
The placement of Young lady with pet, as impressive and impactful as it was, would seem better served in a spacious, isolated corner rather than in the midst of a busy hotel lobby. Perhaps its arresting presence is precisely why it was chosen for the entry area.
Note to readers: Please don’t expect a review or a critique of artwork mentioned in this article. My musings are written more like diary entries, recording impressions of selected pieces and trip experiences. I’ve provided a resource section at the end with links to additional information. Also, 21cMuseumHotels/Nashville.com provides an excellent 3d visual tour of featured artwork complete with recorded content per exhibit area.
Marc Fromm, Young lady with pet, 2010, basswood, puma, oil resin color, steel. This is a screen shot from 21cNashville.com virtual tour.
Young lady with pet set the stage for many other impactful figures I would soon encounter as I processed the powerful Fragile Figures exhibition.
Per the exhibit brochure: “Fragile Figures: Beings and Time…illuminates the range and complexity of human emotions, revealing intersections between vulnerability and power – social, cultural, and political – in contemporary portraiture. Individual and group identity, and the forces that shape how we see self and others, are approached through direct references to noted works from art history, connecting past events to current issues.”
Fragile Figures is beautifully curated by the 21c Museum Director and Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites, and is visually, emotionally and intellectually compelling – and certainly relevant. It is also a heavy and loaded exhibit sharing stunning, controversial, chilling, and sometimes heart-breaking work by artists from the vast contemporary art collection of the 21c founders, Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson,of Louisville, Kentucky, where the original 21c Museum Hotel opened in 2006.
Fragile Figures in Nashville spanned three floors and meandered into several hallways and smaller rooms. It felt huge and daunting so I had to tackle it in smaller doses. Just when I thought I had seen the most impactful piece, there would be another mind-blower around the corner. Many of the pieces and installations resonated strongly with me and I found I needed to pace myself so I decided to focus on a few favorites rather than write about the whole exhibit.
After a full afternoon of digesting the work on a first walk-through, I was spent, and more than ready for a cocktail at Gray & Dudley, the in-house bar and restaurant. To my delight, all the specialty drink titles were Moira Rose (of Schitt’s Creek fame) inspired. I was torn between “The crows have eyes” or “David! Stop acting like a disgruntled pelican!” but instead ordered, “Where is Bebe’s chamber?” – nary a bad choice. To top that off, I ordered seared catfish, with creamy southern grits, to happily devour in my room where Ted Lasso was awaiting (a beloved Jason Sudeikis comedy).
Foreboding Figures
The series of dark and striking figures by Mohau Modisakeng were my favorite pieces in the exhibit. Their stark, large-scale shadowy beauty drew me into the end of a long hallway. Soon I was surrounded by these larger than life foreboding figures holding weapons. The hallway was not wide so I started to feel a bit claustrophobic. Usually, I would want to see pieces of this scale out in the open, with space around each of them, but in the crowded hallway their menacing impact was condensed and eerily palpable.
Below are a few of the images I took. Because of the glass and the lighting proximity, reflections of other warriors loomed in the background. Their multiplying presence was haunting enough – add to that, this strange faint music from down the hall and I decided to call it a day.
Mohau Modisakeng, Large-scale photography, from the Dikubo series.
Intrigued by this artist and his influences, I found an informative write-up by Joe Nolan, in White Hot Magazine (December 2020), who shared the following:
Mohau Modisakeng’s massive self-portraits are formally beautiful works of black-and-white photography. The deep blacks of the South African artist’s skin, garments and accessories are printed on glowing white watercolor paper, creating a dramatic contrast between the images of the artist and their backgrounds.
Modisakeng’s childhood in Soweto was marked by the oppressive violence of the last days of South Africa’s Apartheid-era – a life and death contrast between black and white. The artist’s photos examine violence, the instruments of violence, and the effects they leave on the bodies and psychologies of those affected by them. In a suite of images Modisakeng is armed with machete-like blades and cattle prods, and draped in a long black robe – the garment recalls traditional robes of African tribes as well as the garb of the Western legal and religious classes. Most striking is his donning of fedora hats over the kind of leather blinders you’d normally strap to a horse’s head. The blinders nod to the willful ignorance required to sustain a violent racist regime. The hat speaks to the gullibility and complicity of the educated, professional class which is most vulnerable to propaganda, and who benefit from maintaining an oppressive status quo.
Jane’s Hideaway
My sister Jane joined me for one night and we stumbled on a charming low-key little place a block from 21c – ironically called Jane’s Hideaway. We wandered in for a drink and headed toward a long bar in the back. As it turned out, the bartender (James) did indeed make a good Old Fashioned so we got comfortable and enjoyed the rotation of performers, especially Sierra Ferrell, who was completely outstanding (look her up).
We ordered another round, along with braised pork belly (I mean, please) and THE best Brussel spouts I’ve ever had, fried, with some sort of slightly sweet glaze. For a non-vegetable fan, this is high praise. It was great fun hanging with my awesome sister and happening upon this gem of a place.
Looking south on Broadway, which is a major entertainment district renowned for dive bars and live country music. Nashville-based singer and songwriter Sierra Ferrell (as shared on the site WallpaperFlare.com).
Head Hunter
Two photographs stayed with me as I meandered through the exhibit. I kept thinking about connections to the work of Tampa Bay photographer Selina Roman, who often photographs figures without showing faces. Sometimes her subjects are in masks or costumes, or maybe they are turned away from the camera or wrapped in fabric or material.
The first connection occurred when I came upon a Nan Goldin image of a figure, back to camera, wrapped in sheer material, standing in front of a drape-drawn window. Simon Silhouetted in the Window, Suite 22, NYC was installed in an upper floor hallway, among a few other stand-alone photographs. The wall text excerpt reads: “Nan Goldin began taking snapshot-like photographs of her lovers and friends in New York City in the mid-1970’s, which evolved into a groundbreaking project called “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency…”
The second connection was a day later, when I discovered a relatively hidden image, Head Hunter, by Denise Grunstein, installed high up on the other side of the reception area. It was a head and shoulders profile of a red-haired figure with hair wrapping around so the face wasn’t visible. The background was a solid vivid blue and the only other feature in the photo was an antiquated-looking metal contraption, making light contact, appearing like it could clamp or hold a head.
The above snapshots were taken in the exhibit space but because of their particular location and glare, they were difficult to capture clearly. Denise Grunstein, left; Nan Goldin, right.
I was glad that Head Hunter was in the vicinity of Marc Fromm’s Young lady with pet, given their shared metal elements – a steel leash leading to the toothy head of a puma and the metal head holder – each attached to an isolated figure. What could be a vulnerable, or even dangerous situation for either figure, given the strong-looking hardware that could cause pain or could lead to pain (puma) – doesn’t read that way. Neither the wood figure, nor the hair-covered head conveys fear – at least not to me.
The Head Hunter wall text read: “…Set against an expansive azure sky, the profile, whose features are obscured by gleaming red tresses, suggests a fetishistic fascination with hair, which has long been associated with feminine beauty and fecundity. The saturated sky surrounding the bodiless head, held stable by a centuries-old hairdressing tool, emphasizes the cinematic and the surreal in this at once seductive and unsettling vision.”
A screen shot from the Fragile Figures virtual museum tour; circles mark the online audio options. In the foreground, Marc Fromm’s Young lady with pet on the left; on the right, Denise Gundstein’s Head Hunter.
Matador Lady Killer
A show-stopping piece by Anastasia Schipani, Matador Lady Killer – is a rich, multi-layered, hand-sewn tapestry, twenty-six feet wide, created over a seven-year period as Schipani was processing the murder of her beloved.
Anastasia Schipani, Matador Lady Killer, 2014, Tapestry cloth, thread.
On her website, Schipani shares: “While living in Bangkok, my Thai lover was killed by a hit man. This personal tragedy created a before and after in my life and work. While recovering, back in the States, I worked in a Spanish nightclub whose walls were decorated with vintage bullfight posters. My consciousness forged a link between the brutal public spectacle of the bullfight and the cruel loss of my lover’s life…”
The piece is full of beautiful little story scenarios and connections. Many details when examined closely share some kind of tension or contradiction – lovely little fish surrounded by pointy sharks; plump birds too near a coiled snake; a smiling pin-up-style beauty under a jewel-laden tree, in proximity to a headless strong male body. The entire presentation is overwhelming in its vivid, technicolor hues toggling a tightrope between danger and bliss, good and evil, gleeful happiness and horrific tragedy.
It seemed inappropriate that the view of this expansive and stunning tapestry was visually interrupted by one of the life-sized 21c signature penguins (deep turquoise is Nashville’s assigned color). Sometimes blocked sightlines are unavoidable due to space constraints but this was not the case here, the tapestry was in the largest gallery, and the penguin could have easily served its branding role in a number of other places.
There are huddles of same-colored penguins for each 21c location and they are known to be on the move, sharing hospitality, showing up in unexpected places throughout the properties.
Site Specific
I’ve only been to two of the nine 21c Museum Hotels but in both of these locations, there was use of existing building traits in unique ways. In Durham, the building is a former bank with a large walk-in vault in the basement that was cleverly incorporated into an installation.
In Nashville, there was a one-off lower street-level window near the corner that had an interior shelf-like sill with an odd collection of random things (i.e. yellow cone, small plastic unicorn toy, orange ball). Since I passed it coming and going often, it fascinated me every time. I found it hard to photograph between the dirty outside window and the dusty inside surface, as though Boo Radley emptied his pockets and left his collected treasures undisturbed.
21c Museum Hotel Nashville’s window of curiosity. The basement vault at the 21c Museum Hotel Durham.
I was continuously curious about this quirky little find and enjoyed making up stories about who would put together a collection like that. Wait. I know who – Tampa Bay area artist Ry McCullough! Coincidentally, McCullough has a current exhibit of objects showing in Gallery114 on the Ybor City campus of Hillsborough Community College. [Read the recent BAF article by Tony Palms]
Top: 21c Nashville’s window of curiosity; Bottom, detail from Tampa-based Ry McCullough’s Themes for the American Kestrel currently on display at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery114 in Tampa.
Elevate
The hotel’s website reveals: “Elevate at 21c” presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists living and working in the communities surrounding each 21c Museum Hotel property. Those I observed were installed in the immediate elevator area per floor, and my favorite was by Nashville-based Duncan McDaniel seen below.
Duncan McDaniel, Across the Clouds, 2018, Various metals, acrylic and LED lighting. Screen shot from 21cNashville.com website.
As I was watching the color tones slowly move into different shades, I thought of the recent Lights On Tampa public art installation by Erwin Redl, Circles Unity, a series of synchronized LED color-changing circles lining the darkened underpass of the Tampa Convention Center along Channelside Drive.
Erwin Redl, Circles Unity, 2021. Light installation with 31 ring-shaped programable RGBW LED-fixtures and circular white reflective disks. Commissioned for Lights on Tampa by the City of Tampa. Partial installation view courtesy of the LightsOnTampa.org website.
I greatly appreciate the 21c Museum Hotel’s long-standingcommitment to supporting artists at all levels of their careers. Through purchasing and collecting works, to exhibiting and promoting works, these effective philanthropists provide artists multiple ways to gain experience and exposure – not to mention being included in an important collection of contemporary art.
The 21c Museum Hotel concept integrates threeimportant elements that will always get my attention – historic building preservation, high-quality contemporary art, and delicious hospitality. What an intoxicating trifecta!
About the author
Katherine Gibson, creator of ArtHouse3, is an independent curator and regional art consultant living in St. Petersburg, Florida. Gibson received a 2018 Individual Artist Award from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance for her Drive-by Window Project and was selected for an ArtsUp Grant by Creative Pinellas as creator and curator of the 2019 summer exhibition Tongue & Groove.
Ry McCullough’s Themes for the American Kestrel is on view at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery114 in Tampa, Florida, through June 24, 2021. By appointment. Tampa-based artist and writer Tony Wong Palms provides observations about his visit to the gallery for Bay Art Files
– Give yourself over to floating, even a little bit.
“Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery…”
In late February 2020, a colleague from the college where I teach asked me how I felt about the virus as it raged in China but had yet to get a foothold stateside. I shrugged my shoulders in response and indifferently said, “Hopefully it won’t come our way.” It seemed like something far off and abstract. “This is not our problem,” I thought.
Fast forward to now and a lot of us are fully vaccinated. We can go out, see family and friends, hug them, sit at a bar, or get on an airplane. It is hard to fathom that a year ago, we were in lockdown and unsure of what the future would bring in a pandemic. For many, our homes became our offices, movie theaters, coffee shops, and gyms. As we emerge from our collective Covid-19 fog, one photographer, Rania Matar, gives us the chance to look back and see lockdown through her lens.
A mélange of faces fills a gallery at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, located in Winter Park, Florida. Framed by windows and doors, the people in Rania Matar: On Either Side of the Window, Portraits During Covid-19, defiantly take up space and confront viewers.
Photographs are by the author unless otherwise stated.
Like Diane Arbus and Alec Soth, Rania Matar’s portraits create a strong sense of intimacy not only between the artist and subject, but with the viewer as well. At the entrance to the show is an arresting image of a couple, Mia and Jun, Allston, Massachusetts. The couple greets visitors as soon as they enter the gallery. They stand behind a green door, Mia wearing bright red lipstick and red halter dress, and Jun wearing a red shirt. They are framed by the door of their forest green home, their hands pressed against the glass as if they are trapped. In a recent artist talk at the museum, Matar said the couple are dancers. This detail adds meaning to the expressions on the couples’ faces – a desire to move, to perform. On the flip side, however, a universal yearning to resume the lives we once knew.
Matar began the project last year shortly after lockdown. When residents of the northeast were emerging from winter and then just as the flowers were coming into bloom, they were ordered to stay home. She asked people on social media if they wanted their portraits made. As word got around, interest swelled and she crisscrossed the Boston area, landing in people’s yards and pointing her camera into their homes. Matar’s lockdown photo sessions came as a welcome respite from the barrage of new infections and deaths. Matar gave subjects the chance to perform, play dress up and connect with someone who was not part of their household. Taking in each image, it’s difficult not to reflect on one’s own lockdown experience.
Matar is known for her beautifully staged portraits. This body of work is no different. Every image in the show is loaded with beauty; however, the true excitement is the exhibition’s varying and undulating levels of intensity. Some images are serene and calming, while others are unsettling and tinged with anxiety.
Wendy and Timmy, Newton, Massachusetts, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
In the image Wendy and Timmy, Newton, Massachusetts, 2020, an older woman in a red shirt slightly leans outside the window of her red-brick home. She looks off-camera. In the shadows of her room stands what appears to be a masculine figure, his silhouette framed by a window opposite hers. Is the man her husband? Her son? A handyman? The shadows conceal any details. The composition reads like a scene from a thriller. According to Gisela Carbonell, Curator, the man’s appearance was not planned. However, his appearance adds the right amount of mysterious narrative to the image. Lockdown came in so many shapes and sizes – families, couples, people on their own. In Wendy and Timmy, the idea of being locked inside and how our limits might be tested, for better or for worse, comes into view.
Matar, as in her other bodies of work, possesses a keen sense of combining setting and figure and creating new layers of meaning, with each informing the other. In the Her series, she photographs young women around the world in not only picturesque places, but in heartbreaking ones, such as the rubble from last year’s devastating blast at the port in Beirut, Lebanon. In the pandemic series, the settings aren’t as dramatic but are still nonetheless captivating and compelling.
In a striking pair of photographs, proximity and the color red unite the subjects who look like they could be neighbors in the same building. In the first image, Cyrus, Brookline Massachusetts, 2020, a figure with closed eyes leans back, a smile on painted lips, the sunlight bathing their face and a sliver of the red blouse. The reflections of the trees and red flowers outside this window seem to exuberantly explode from the subject, framing them sublimely. In the second image, Marina, Brookline Massachusetts, 2020, a woman also in red, reclines in an open window, shadows dancing on the screen. She dons sunglasses, a short haircut and red lips, a la Liza Minelli. Her look screams Diva in the best way. The corners of each of the two images touch, seemingly connecting the subjects. Their proximity creates a dialogue, a human connection – of which so many of us needed at this time last year.
The color red permeates the exhibition, and I cannot help but think of all of the symbolic meanings this color has – love, passion, life, blood – and gives the exhibition its pulse.
A year later, we navigate the world in masks and face shields and seeing a stranger’s face seems like a novelty. None of Matar’s subjects don a mask, and nearly each subject’s face is visible. In many of the images the glass or the screen becomes the barrier between photographer and subject. The duality of the windows and their reflections become one of the most compelling devices in the series. The reflections serve different purposes such as abstraction or a sense of place. In one photograph, Diana and Chris, Watertown Massachusetts, 2020, two women stand together. They look related, sisters perhaps, similar age, short haircuts, and silver hair. Reflections on the window frames create a rhythmic and infinite labyrinth of lines, intersections, and corners – a reminder of how our own human relationships and networks ground to a halt.
In Matar’s images life and time march on in the face of a pandemic and isolation. Nowhere is that more evident than in the two portraits of Susan. In the first photograph, Susan, Salem Massachusetts, 2020, a woman brushes her long brown hair alone as she looks off-camera. What looks like late afternoon light falls on the woman revealing a swollen belly peeking out from her dress. We immediately realize she isn’t alone after all. In the next photograph, Susan, Raffy and baby Violette, Salem, Massachusetts, 2020, the woman holds a small breastfeeding infant while a man brushes the mother’s hair. As before, beautiful light falls on the woman creating an almost sublimely religious tableau. The pandemic was, and might still be, at our doorsteps – it felt like time was at a standstill, yet it is photographs like these that offer hope of a better day.
Matar reminds us that there is life and it’s worth the wait. The photographs are life-affirming and so is the exhibition. Rania Matar: On Either Side of the Window, Portraits During Covid-19 is on view until May 9, 2021 and a virtual walkthrough of the entire exhibition can be found here.
The Cornell Fine Arts Museum, on the Winter Park campus of Rollins College, is the only teaching museum in the greater Orlando area. The collection ranges from antiquity through contemporary eras, including rare old master paintings and an in-depth collection of prints, drawings, and photographs. The museum displays temporary exhibitions on a rotating basis along with the permanent collection, and a satellite exhibition space for the Museum’s Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art is located at The Alfond Inn, which is within walking distance of the campus.
Tampa-based Selina Román received her Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Florida in 2013. She has participated in residencies with the Visual Artists Network and Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator. Her work is in the collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota; the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs; Hillsborough Community College, as well as numerous private collections. She teaches visual art and photography courses at the University of Tampa and Hillsborough Community College in Tampa.
Recent Acquisitions from The Ringling Photography Collection
by Robin O’Dell
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” ― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures
The above quote was written in the 1970s by the noted film theorist Laura Mulvey (British, b. 1941). This idea of the “male gaze” was expanded to include all visual theories and spurred a re-evaluation of how and by whom images have been and are being made of women. Chris Jones, Curator of Photography and New Media, has culled eighteen photographs recently brought into the collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and placed them sparingly on the walls, inviting visitors into this continuing dialogue. Small in number but large in visual delight, these photographs celebrate artists taking control of their own artistic identities.
Artists using self-portraiture include Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972). A transgender artist, Muholi uses their own image to project strength and directness, challenging the very idea of how people of color have been depicted throughout history. Muholi considers themselves a visual activist and is specifically concerned with presenting gay and LBGTQ as part of the photographic canon. In these self-portraits, Muholi’s skin is darkened to an almost pure black and the prints are large, offering a visually dramatic and physically compelling visage. Muholi’s work is immediately recognizable and wholly unforgettable.
Bea Nettles (American, born 1946) is respected for her use of experimental processes. For The Ringling, she created an image that incorporates photographs of the Museum’s environment with one of her own body to make a unique portrait. These fragments combine to layer time and place with her own distinct sense of self. The photograph is part of the series Return Trips including images of Spain and Morocco, so recognizing something so specific to this Museum offers an unexpected delight. The Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is currently presenting a virtual retrospective of Nettles’ fifty-year career. You can access it here: https://www.eastman.org/bea-nettles-harvest-memory. It provides a good overview of this very creative and inventive artist.
In the photograph Self-Portrait with Leica twentieth-century photographer Ilse Bing (American, born Germany, 1899-1998) captures herself in the act of photographing. Using multiple mirrors, she plays with the idea of self and identity. The image shows both a frontal and side view of the artist while incorporating the Leica camera she became closely associated with. This small camera was revolutionary at the time, as most professional photographers still used box or cameras with bellows. This iconic photograph is part of a large gift of over a thousand photographs given to The Ringling by Stanton and Nancy Kaplan in 2019. Other gifts by the Kaplans in the exhibition include works by Ruth Bernhard (American, born Germany, 1905-2006) and Lotte Jacobi (American, born Prussia, 1896-1990). All three of these twentieth-century artists included in the exhibition were able to carve out noted careers, despite facing limited opportunities due to their gender. Women have actively participated in photography since its inception, yet when the history of photography was first written it was primarily male artists who filled the pages. Like in so much of Western society, women have had to steadily chip away at these constructs, often having to make their own opportunities. The bold images here testify to these artists’ skills. Bernhard, specifically, presents the female body in her own distinctive style, and Jones has selected some lesser-known, while still visually compelling, images.
The exhibition also offers some fascinating portraiture, which the Museum has purchased in the last couple of years, having made an effort to acquire photography by a variety of contemporary women artists. In her series Am I What You’re Looking For? Endia Beal (American, born 1985) takes young black women who are transitioning from college to the workplace and poses them in their own home, but in front of a generic workplace backdrop. These young women stand dressed in their workplace finest, staring into the camera with aplomb. The very act of presenting young black women within the construct of a traditionally male-dominated workplace environment heightens the understanding of how the societal norms we take for granted can be culturally biased. Likewise, Deanna Lawson (American, born 1979) carefully poses a tableau of young lovers fully clothed and embracing within a bedroom. This representation particularly elicits comparisons to the “male gaze,” as Lawson empowers the young black woman to control her own sexuality. You would think that the photograph is a spontaneous snapshot, but Lawson carefully constructs her images to intensify the overall effect. Knowing this invites the viewer to look at every detail for clues to the visual story.
Three photographs are presented from Rania Matar’s (Lebanese, born 1964) series A Girl and Her Room. Matar photographs young women in their bedrooms surrounded by the trappings of adolescence. The locations vary from Beirut, Lebanon to Winchester, Massachusetts. Seeing how each girl has dressed and decorated her room gives an almost voyeuristic glimpse into how she is materially shaping her identity. It brings to mind Sally Mann’s series At Twelve, Portraits of Young Women, not because of any visual similarity (Matar’s pictures are color and large scale), but because they also illuminate the awkward transition from child to adult, teetering on the edge of full womanhood. Matar captures the importance of the outer world to inform the inner.
Selina Román (American, b. 1978) is a Florida artist. In her series Please Disturb, she invites friends and colleagues to visit her in traditional roadside motels and participate in the creative process through the use of props and costume. In the photograph chosen for this exhibition, Solar Flare II, the glare of sunlight obscures the face of the subject. Román uses this anonymity as a force of power. “I can see you, but you can’t see me–so you don’t know what I am thinking or feeling,” she is quoted as saying in the label. As a faceless woman, you are no longer being judged by traditional standards of beauty. That, alone, is empowering.
A trip to The Ringling Museum is always a delight. And where else in the Tampa Bay area are you going to see wall-sized sensual Baroque paintings by Peter Paul Rubens (Dutch 1577-1640) in one gallery and then experience the penetrating stare of Zanele Muholi in another? And if you have enjoyed looking at women claiming their power, the exhibition Circus and Suffragists is also currently showing at The Ringling Circus Museum through February 14, 2021, and Reframed is currently on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through the end of the year.
Robin O’Dell is the former Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is currently the Curator of Collections at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa. In addition to curating dozens of photography exhibitions, she has written for Image Magazine, George Eastman Museum, and the Arts Coast Journal for Creative Pinellas.
“The main appeal of the name is that it speaks to how an artist collective functions on exhibition night: one shared space with many distinct voices.” – Katelyn Montagna and Adam Mathieu
Separate Checks is an artist collective founded in the summer of 2018 by Katelyn Montagna and Adam Mathieu, who created the group to reconnect with friends and encourage each other to produce new work. Additional members include McKinna Anderson, Aaron Castillo, Krista Darling, Jonathon Dorofy, Anna Dunwody, Nabil Harb, Andres Ramirez, Erika Schnur, Kristy Summerson, and Jessica Thornton. Many members are University of South Florida alumni who came through the School of Art and Art History’s photography program or the School of Advertising and Mass Communications. It is easy to imagine that assembling the group’s roster had a definite “getting the band back together” feeling.
While the USF connection forms the backbone of Separate Checks, other artists have joined by contacting Adam and Katelyn on social media. Adam amusingly recalls how member Aaron Castillo slid into his DMs on Instagram before meeting with him and Katelyn in person. They describe the encounter as feeling like they were on a blind date with a photographer, but thankfully everyone clicked and the date did not end in awkwardness and disappointment.
Installation view of Narrative Nowhere exhibition at Gallery221. Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.
The many distinct voices of Separate Checks will be in conversation with each other in Narrative Nowhere, showing at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery221@HCC Dale Mabry from November 2 – December 10. Visitors are encouraged to view the show in person, by making an appointment on the Gallery221 website and following guidelines on social distancing. Originally slated to debut this spring, it is yet another exhibition that was postponed because of the coronavirus. The show’s change in schedule also led to a change in content, as the extended timing allowed artists to respond to their experiences over the past eight months of this turbulent year.
The initial concept of Narrative Nowhere was to invite other artists to collaborate and reflect on personal histories and the geographic spread of the group, but some members have refocused on addressing Covid-19, racial tension in the United States, and the U.S. Presidential Election. The collective has worked in concert with Gallery221 director Amanda Poss to adjust to these atypical conditions and deliver a show well-suited for this cultural moment.
Andres Ramirez is one member whose work confronts the political, with the artist reacting to the Trump administration’s brutal border policies. His images in Narrative Nowhere are “about facades and what hides behind them; whether they’re digitally invented or not, these images are constructions much like the norms of our society.” This year he has been grappling with the concept of borders and their violently divisive nature, as he questions whether they should even exist.
Anna Dunwody, Sempiternity I and Dioscorea bulbifera 1-5, 2020, cyanotypes. Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.
Anna Dunwody’s recent works tangle with themes of loss, discovery, and regrowth. Here she displays a series of cyanotypes that she created while in quarantine. She draws connections between the unpredictability of this year and her chosen media, musing that with cyanotypes “you can do everything with such care and intention and each one always comes out a little different and maybe not how you wanted or expected, much like life.” She says that in her work she seeks to find the constantly surprising and occasionally beautiful.
Installation view of Narrative Nowhere exhibition at Gallery221. Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.
The current exhibition at HCC represents a major sign of growth for the young collective, who previously held one-night-only showings in venues like the Creative Loafing Space and Dojo Sounds recording studio in Ybor. Those events emitted a special “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” energy, where it was exciting to see a show in an unfamiliar space and not already know everyone there. However, Adam is thankful for the opportunity to display work in a fixed space like Gallery221, where the group can reach a wider audience and their works are given ample time and room to breathe.
The Main Course one-night-only show held at the Creative Loafing Space in 2018. Image taken by Anna Dunwody.
The members of Separate Checks meeting during simpler times. Image taken by an unnamed family member of the group. Sorry, fam!
Why join an artist collective in the first place? For McKinna Anderson, the group offers her friendship and a sense of accountability, without being restrictive or stifling her voice. Living in Nashville in 2018, she knew Adam and Katelyn from her time as an undergrad at USF and she found herself wandering through a similar post-graduate fog until she joined Separate Checks. She explains that the group has a tethering effect, acting as a lighthouse that always leads her back to the art community.
Separate Checks logo designed by Jonathon Dorofy
The group’s identity is still in flux, but it adopts several traits from its founders. Adam’s Fine Art background blends with Katelyn’s graphic and advertising skillset to produce something with an art school sensibility and savvy self-promotion. The mixing of elements is persistent among the membership, with both Aaron Castillo and Kristy Summerson moving between the Fine Art and advertising worlds. Member Jonathon Dorofy is also heavily involved with the group’s branding, where he imbues quintessential Florida motifs with a sleek veneer and graceful simplicity.
In a subtle way, the collective also has a quiet confidence that reflects Adam’s and Katelyn’s personalities, wherein his calm demeanor and her animated enthusiasm form a perfect partnership.
Separate Checks is currently finding its place in the Tampa Bay art community alongside established collectives like QUAID and the photography-centered Fountain of Pythons. USF photography professor Wendy Babcox is a member of FOP, and Katelyn remembers being intrigued by the group when Babcox mentioned it in class. Babcox’s guidance has had a lasting impact on Adam and Katelyn, and they single her out as an important mentor from their undergraduate days. Additionally, FOP member Selina Roman also serves as a member of Gallery221’s Advisory Council, and she proposed the Narrative Nowhere show to HCC. She was one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of Separate Checks, and she continues to offer her encouragement on its ventures.
What is next on the menu for the young collective? The group plans to eventually host a juried show, and they have kicked around the idea of having their own permanent exhibition space. They are becoming friendly with other artists collectives such as Portland’s Small Talk Collective and are discussing a show exchange and curating each other’s work. For now, they seem content with taking things as they come and not looking too far ahead.
When it comes to Separate Checks, part of the excitement is in not knowing what comes next. For many viewers, the Narrative Nowhere exhibition is likely their first exposure to the group. This show provides a rare chance to see numerous artists creating work together in the early stages of their careers. These separate voices are coalescing into something new right before our eyes. Don’t blink and miss the moment.
Narrative Nowhere runs from November 2 to December 10 at Gallery221@HCC Dale Mabry campus. To learn more about the gallery and make an appointment to view the exhibition, follow these links:
James Cartwright earned his M.A. in Art History from USF in 2017. He focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in art production, while occasionally wandering into the realm of contemporary art criticism. He is an adjunct Art History instructor at USF and the University of Tampa, where he uses his liberal arts background to joyfully corrupt the impressionable youth of America.
Over the past 15 years Catherine Bergmann has served as the Curatorial Director at the Dunedin Fine Art Center where she has organized over 300 thoughtful and thematic exhibitions for the Center’s seven galleries. Last year she was recognized by Creative Loafing magazine as “Best of the Bay” Visual Art Curator. Her innovative and engaging exhibitions have drawn on connections with artists from Florida, the southeastern United States, and invitational exhibitions open to artists from around the country and internationally. In 2017 Nathan Beard joined the curatorial team and became the Assistant Curator in 2019. Together the critical eye of Bergmann and Beard, both also well-established visual artists, have put together some of the most creative and original contemporary art exhibitions being presented in the Tampa Bay area.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Spring exhibitions had to be altered and experienced virtually as the Center was forced to close for three months. Summer exhibitions opened to the public under the banner of the “Art of Social Distancing” with limited access to the galleries. Re-envisioned shows used the mantra, “The Distance Brings Us Closer,” and included the engaging show, I’ve Come to Look for America, with thirteen diverse artists “representing the complex cultural fabric of our county, and beyond that – our humanity.”
Catherine Bergmann and Nathan Beard in front of paintings by Carol Dameron and Herb Snitzer included in the exhibition Between | Us which is on view through October 18, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
The Fall 2020 DFAC exhibitions have opened despite the logistics of organizing shows during a pandemic. Three new exhibitions expand our appreciation of the creative talents in our community while challenging us to open our minds to new artistic expression. Between | Us, co-curated by Bergmann and Beard, is on view through Oct. 18 and documents six “It” art couples working in the Tampa Bay area. The show provides a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the work of these highly regarded artists. The well-written wall text and artist statements afford a personal look into the media, processes, and “creative partnering” of these couples, and the mutual respect, collaborative support, and years of encouragement for aesthetic, community, and even social issues as hallmarks of their artistic successes.
Between | Us: A collaborative print by artists Mickett and Robert Stackhouse. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.Between | Us: CarrieJadus, Walking with Scissors I + II, 2020, oil on panel and Mark Aeling, Lip Series 2 of 10: A Cutting Remark, 2017, stainless steel scissors. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The artists include painters and retired art educators, Dolores Coe and Bruce Marsh; painter Carol Dameron and photographer Herb Snitzer (Herb even includes an endearing painting of his wife); painter Carrie Jadus and sculptor Mark Aeling; painter/emeritus art educator Mernet Larsen and multi-media artist Roger Palmer; joint collaborators and multi-media artists Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse; and, photographer Janelle Young and multi-media artist /art educator Ryan McCullough. This is a celebratory exhibition and gallery viewers will greatly appreciate and learn from its engaging theme.
The exhibition Heroes + Sheroes is an intriguing look at “shining a light on those who’ve shown us the light” was co-curated by Bergmann and Beard. Each curator selected a “Hero” and a “Shero,” including musician (Ronny Elliott), artist (Joan Duff-Bohrer); humanitarian/entrepreneur (Andre Heller), and poet (Hilary DePolo), respectively. The “four celebrants” were then asked to invite their Heroes or Sheroes to participate in the exhibition, thus making for a highly original and insightful exhibition to inspire “the many faces and forms greatness takes in our midst.”
Heroes + Sheroes: Gallery installation. On view through December 24, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
Vespertine is an impressively poetic and cerebral multi-media exhibition curated by Nathan Beard. The word “vespertine” is defined as “of, relating to, or flourishing in the evening.” The reference, as defined by Beard is “the daylit logic of scientific and technological concepts or processes, … while probing the shadowed and paradoxical possibilities of the unknown …”. In organizing the show, Beard thoughtfully examined the work of artists who represent a scientific or technological searching for a liminal space of becoming. The nine invited artists include three from the Tampa Bay area: Elizabeth A. Baker, McArthur Freeman, II, and Luke Myers. Myers, an MFA student at USF, is fascinated with bugs, specifically the Florida Deep-digger scarab beetle (Peltotrupes profundus). Through video he documents the transformative “poetry” of the inch-long scarab moving “more than a pound of sand, one mouthful at a time” up from depths of as much as ten feet below. Massachusetts artist Lisa Nilsson, with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, explores the topography of human anatomy through scientific reproduction of lateral cross-sections intricately created through the collage of Japanese mulberry paper and the gilt edges of old books. She represents one of the six artists Beard selected from around the country, including Julia Buntaine Hoel, Kysa Johnson, Anne Mondro, Elsa Muñoz, and Michael Reedy. Each of the artists in Verspertine incorporates fascinating approaches, utilizing either traditional media to explore macro- or micro-cosmic worlds or newer media, like video, transposed scientific data, and 3-D printing, to convey their artistic and scientific discoveries. If you spend time studying the bios and statements of these artists, you may realize we are on the cusp of artistic evolution.
Vespertine: Gallery installation. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.Vespertine: Lisa Nilsson, Male Pelvis, 2012, Mulberry paper collage. Courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, NY.
Additional exhibitions on view through the end of the year are Hold Me, an invitational exhibit by contemporary ceramic artists from around the nation and PHANTOMS and Bandits, a tribute to the Center’s past Wearable Art Runway events. Lastly, if the above exhibitions have not convinced you to visit to the Dunedin Fine Art Center soon, the show lining one of the hallway galleries is Velvet Elvis. Artists were invited to create their own kitschy versions of the nostalgic art form on supplied velvet canvases. Velvet Elvis is a fundraiser, so purchase tickets before October 18th for a chance to win your favorite piece – and as Elvis would say, “Thank you, thank you very-much!”
R. Lynn Whitelaw was the founding director and chief curator of the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, located on the Tarpon Springs Campus of St. Petersburg College. In 2015, Mr. Whitelaw was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Association of Museums. An active independent curator and writer, he has served on numerous statewide and local boards and art committees and has been a judge for over 18 outdoor art shows and juried exhibitions throughout the state of Florida.
I have a couple versions of a recurring dream. In one, a car I am driving careens off the road into some unknown body of water – sometimes clear, sometimes murky. Sitting in the driver’s seat I become a spectator as water seeps into the car and it slowly sinks away from the world above. In the other version, I’m driving down an old Florida backroad surrounded by swamp. As I turn a corner, the road disappears beneath water that has breached its banks. I recall in this dream that I felt scared but mostly hopeless. In all of my drowning/sinking dreams, I wake up never knowing if I made it or not.
That sinking feeling rushed back as I took in the large-scale photographs in the exhibition FloodZone, by Miami-based artist Anastasia Samoylova on view in the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. The lush images, full of color and water, are akin to walking through a waking dream where the surroundings are familiar but something always feels amiss. Her photographs, just like the intrusive water she depicts, seep into the psyche and linger.
As Samoylova pointed out in a recent artist talk, nowhere in the images will the viewer see the catastrophic. Those fraught scenes are relegated to the news. In her photographs, it’s flooded streets after a typical rainstorm, swollen waterways, construction sites, and mysterious figures navigating a landscape in limbo. However, the most telling images are the ones of details – ones that most people overlook. In these, nature fights back and it just may be winning.
Courtesy USF Contemporary Art Museum; photo by Don Fuller.
I lived in Miami for nearly six years in the late 2000s. Cranes punctuated the skyline for projects with names like Quantum, Paramount, Epic and Infinity – names that embodied the human need to go higher, achieve more, get more. I see this quest again in Samoylova’s images of architectural renderings – computer-generated images showing happy couples sharing a romantic moment poolside or the luxe interior of a living room. But look a little longer, past the promise to the reality and see the abandoned construction site, detritus spilling over the sign like weeds. In what seems to be a nod to the developers’ slick signage, these stand-alone images occupy the gallery floor confronting viewers in their own space. It’s here in the intersection of reality and façade, of man versus nature, that Samoylova’s photographs become a poignant harbinger.
Just like the signs for the construction projects, Miami puts on a good face for tourists, especially those that don’t have to leave the beach save for going to and from the airport. I learned this when I was living in Little Haiti in 2005. I had just moved to Miami and was welcomed that year by hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Wilma. That year, the Atlantic was the hottest on record and spawned more than a dozen named storms. While Dennis and Katrina caused damage and power outages in South Florida, Wilma delivered a staggering blow to an already storm-fatigued area. My roommate and I rode out the storm as winds howled. From my apartment window, I watched an electrical transformer explode, in awe of the green flashes of light.
Little Haiti was without power for four weeks, while just across the railroad tracks that line Dixie Highway, lights flickered back on and air conditioners were humming in a matter of days. A coworker bemoaned that she was without power for about 45 minutes – she lived in an area of the beach, near hotels, where the power lines were buried. That year of storms awakened me to the social implications of climate change.
Installation view; photo by Selina Roman.
As a Miami Beach resident, Samoylova sees beyond that touristy façade. Some of her most successful images are those of the details that only someone living there would notice. On the side of a concrete overpass pylon, a green plant fights its way out of a crevice while brilliant violet mold flourishes beneath it. Severe lines and geometry dominate the visual plane but the plant and mold triumphantly stand out from the stark environment. It’s repulsive and beautiful in the same breath. In one of her few black and white photographs, a small, proud plant grows near the roof of a building, its roots clinging to the surface like veins and capillaries. Air plants are common in Miami, but there’s something different about this one: the plant’s roots have been painted the same white as the building. In these moments, I find myself hopeful and terrified as nature asserts herself.
Samoylova does not shake her finger at you. She’s not passing judgment. If anything, she collectively takes our heads and turns them, telling us to look closely at these pieces of a puzzle she’s assembled. As singles, they are strong images but together, they become this dull pang in the pit of my stomach – the knowledge of what’s at stake.
In one particular photograph, fourteen eggs occupy a nest tucked between concrete and steel adjacent to an unidentifiable body of water. The carefully composed image of the nest and water is a perfect inverse of each. But this ying-yang, however perfectly arranged in the frame, belies the precarious balance of the natural world against the man-made. The eggs appear protected, but from above they are not. Will they hatch? Or maybe the larger question is will they survive once they hatch? Will we make it? It’s this false sense of security that plagues South Florida.
When looking at her work, I am struck and reminded of Robert Frank’s The Americans. In the 1950s the Swiss-born Frank traversed the country making documentary photos of post-war America. With a keen outsider’s perspective, Frank’s images revealed not a prosperous super power, but a country marred by racism, poverty and injustice. Samoylova, born and raised in Russia and living in Miami since 2016, also has that eye for detail and incongruity. Just like Frank’s, her images show us that there is more to learn if we just look a little longer and a little harder.
In an homage to Miami’s color, Samoylova designed the eye-catching presentation of the exhibition that underscores the thin line we Floridians tread. Angled swathes of bright colors on the wall – sky blue, canary yellow, magenta – serve as a backdrop for the works. The colors are painted on a diagonal and border a deep gray. Standing in the gallery, the sloped lines create a sense of uneasiness and symbolically represent the downhill direction in which we find ourselves. Yet look again and those same lines could be the uptick of hope.
Courtesy USF Contemporary Art Museum; photo by Don Fuller.
From the Everglades to South Beach, humans have invaded this place, not only altering the landscape but upsetting its delicate ecological balance. Her compositions show the constant battle between man and nature. The brilliance of so many of the images is they’re composed in a way in which it’s difficult to determine who is dominating who. In an image of Miami’s famed Vizcaya mansion, water covers the intricate inlaid marble floor of its elaborate latticed gazebo with Biscayne Bay ominously visible through its arches. The horizon all but disappears under the overcast day, and the bay and the floor are one in the same. The breach is not catastrophic in the moment the photograph was made, but the potential for disaster is made clear.
Several years ago, I sat in Miami’s Legion Park which overlooks Biscayne Bay. The breeze rustled the palms, which stood majestically and stoically against the sparkling blue water. It was nothing special in particular – just Miami on a good day. I snapped a photo, but it’s what I wrote under the image later that still haunts me: “I belong here.” But now I’m not so sure any of us do.
Just the other night that recurring water dream came rushing back. This time I was visiting friends in their beachside condo. As I walked to the balcony, I could see the waves of the rising ocean swirling outside. When I looked down, however, I realized there was no beach below and that the ocean was lapping at the building not far from where I stood. That hopeless feeling also resurfaced. I woke up and my thoughts volleyed to Samoylova who offers us a slice of hope wrapped up in a wake-up call – a black and white photograph of her son, standing in ankle-deep water, surveying flooding in a parking garage. Will we let him and his generation inherit this flooded world?
This quiet, yet powerful and important show reminds us that Florida’s future is at stake as climate change and continued unchecked development wreck havoc. I am also reminded of what sadly could become Miami’s unofficial theme song, “Dear Miami” by Irish singer Róisín Murphy: “With a little style fool ‘em for a while, but you can’t turn back time,” she sings. “Dear Miami, You’re the first to go, disappearing under melting snow…”
Selina Román is a Tampa-based artist and photography professor. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Florida.
FloodZone is on view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum on the campus of the University of South Florida in Tampa through March 7th. The exhibit was curated by Sarah Howard, organized by USFCAM, and supported in part by an Oolite Arts grant, a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Dr. Allen Root.
Sponge Exchange, in the adjacent Lee and Victor Leavengood Gallery presents artist Hope Ginsburg’s new collaboratively-produced video and sculpture installations reflecting on historic sponge diving and contemporary coral restoration and inspired by explorations of climate crisis impact on coastal ecosystems. The exhibition, also on view through March 7th, was curated by Sarah Howard, organized by USFCAM, and supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Art Works grant, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Dr. Allen Root, and the USFCAM ACE Fund.
Art Thursday’s gallery talk and reception with artist Anastasia Samoylova and Ksenia Nouril, Ph.D., Jensen Bryan Curator, The Print Center, will contextualize Samoylova’s work within the historical and contemporary role of photography in society. Light refreshments will be served.Free and open to the public.
