Photography – Bay Art Files

Tom Jones: Here We Stand

An exhibition review of Tom Jones: Here We Stand

by Sabrina Hughes

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.

The Woman who Broke Boundaries: Photographer Lee Miller

by Sabrina Hughes

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.

**Self portrait [with headband], Lee Miller Studios Inc., New York, USA,**
**circa 1932 by Lee Miller**
(NYS 12-6-C) © Lee Miller Archives England 2020.
All Rights Reserved

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.

Fire masks, Downshire Hill, London, England 1941 by Lee Miller
(3840-8) © Lee Miller Archives England 2020. All Rights Reserved

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

By Sabrina Hughes

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 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.

Being Seen

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.

Zanele Muholi, Kodwa II, Amsterdam, from the series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), 2017, Gelatin silver print. © Zanele Muholi

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.

Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait with Leica, Paris, 1931; printed later, Gelatin silver print.
The Stanton B. and Nancy W. Kaplan Collection at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, © Ilse Bing

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.

Endia Beal, Martinique, 2015, Pigment inkjet print, Museum purchase. © Endia Beal

Endia Beal, Sabrina and Katrina, 2015, Pigment inkjet print, Museum purchase. © Endia Beal

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, Solar Flare II, 2016, Archival inkjet print on Museo Silver Rag Paper. © Selina Román

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.

Being Seen: Recent Acquisitions from The Ringling Photography Collection is on view at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art through January 3, 2021.

LEAD PHOTO IMAGE: Rania Matar, Anna F., Winchester, Massachusetts, from the series A Girl in Her Room, 2010, printed 2018, Archival digital chromogenic print. © Rania Matar
Courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

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.

Setting the Table with Separate Checks

by James Cartwright

“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, *Muro Falso 1*, 2020, panoramic decal.
Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.

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.

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.

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:

https://www.hccfl.edu/campus-life/arts/galleries-hcc/gallery221

https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/Gallery221HCC@hccfl.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/

To learn more about Separate Checks, visit their official website:

https://www.sepchecks.com/

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.

FloodZone – Much is amiss in this paradoxical paradise

By Selina Román

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.

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.

Related event:

Gallery Talk with Anastasia Samoylova and Ksenia Nouril, Ph.D. Thursday, February 13, 6 pm, USF Contemporary Art Museum (CAM)

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.

Mise-en-Scène: Two Exhibitions of Photography

Two photography exhibitions currently on view, Tableau and Transformation, and Contemporary Performance, at the Tampa Museum of Art and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts respectively, explore themes of artifice and theatricality in photography since the mid-20th century. Viewed together they harmonize visual trends that came after modernism and that have persisted through the first decades of the 21st century.

Both exhibitions feature photographs that explicitly or implicitly reference cinema, a perfect art-world counterpoint to summer blockbuster movie season. The term “directorial mode,” coined by photo critic A. D. Coleman in 1977, is the relevant visual framework for many of the works in both exhibitions. Photographs in the directorial mode disrupt the tendency to read a photo as an unmediated truth or a slice of life, injecting instead theatricality and obvious created-ness.

Photos in the directorial mode are, quite simply, staged (though I cringe at that term because in photography it seems to carry a pejorative note–again because the expectation is that photographs are supposed to be “natural”). In Coleman’s words, “[Photographers] have simply substituted the credence with which photographs are normally approached for the suspension of disbelief which effective theater wins from its audience.”

Tableau and Transformation is a selection of photographs in the Museum’s permanent collection, with several loans from the collection of Tampa’s Trenam Law throughout. The corporate photography collection of Trenam Law is a sister collection of sorts to the TMA thanks to the cross-institutional efforts of William K. Zewadski at Trenam and Julie Saul of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York throughout the 1980s. It reads like a who’s who of photographic and conceptual artists from the 1960s forward, including important artists like Andres Serrano, William Wegman, John Baldessari, and Sandy Skoglund.

William Wegman (American, b. 1943), Waiting for Dinner, 1988. Dye Diffusion – Polaroid Polacolor II. 34 x 27 ½ inches. Tampa Museum of Art, Bequest of Edward W. Lowman by Exchange, 1989.040. © William Wegman 2019

A staged photograph can take many varied forms, which accounts for the visual diversity in Tableau and Transformation. It may literally reference the proscenium stage as Eileen Cowin’s Untitled (The Bathers) (1987) does, with its freeze-frame dramatically posed figures and deep green velvet curtains at stage right and left. Still lives, composites, and portraits can all be staged. There are narratives and nudes, altered polaroids (Lucas Samaras), and straightforward photos of Weimaraners (William Wegman). Even landscapes that are simply reporting on the scene before the camera, such as the trio of photos by Joel Sternfeld, feel staged, like scouted locations, sets that are awaiting their actors. The sheer diversity of possibility of staged photos, or unstaged photos that feel constructed, leads to an almost infinitely open theme. The TMA has strong holdings in 20th century photography and this is an opportunity to see some of its most important objects in that part of the collection.

Contemporary Performance at FMoPA features works from world-renowned photographers like Cindy Sherman (also represented in Tableau and Transformation) and Deborah Willis as well as emerging artists who matriculated locally, Becky Flanders and Selina Romàn among them. It is a tactile, sensory exhibition. The photographs within share vibrant color palettes and an insistent focus on the human figure. It, too, is comprised of photographs that are created in the directorial mode, though unlike Tableau and Transformation, it is more narrowly focused on narrative suggested by the actions of the people in the frame.

The title, Contemporary Performance, will clue some viewers in to what they may expect in the exhibition, though it is a reference that may resonate only with art-world insiders. Guest curator Kalup Linzy is himself an internationally significant multidisciplinary artist (most notably performance, music, and video) who took his MFA at USF in 2003.

Performance in art is different than performance of a play or of a role in a film. In art, the term is laden with decades of layered, often self-referential context and criticism. “Performance” can mean any and all of: a scripted video work; an ephemeral action designed to be experienced once with no connection to the art market (i.e., without an artifact to be later sold); or the photographic or video documentation of an ephemeral action that is intended to be sold. One-time performances from the 1960s and 70s are now commonly being reenacted by a new generation of artists, adding more layers of signification to the work in a new context. It is not uncommon to hear the term used in the context of performing gender, or to perform other aspects of one’s identity, often to open a space for critique of established social norms. In other words, it is a big term with many potential (and potentially conflicting) interpretations.

The type of performance that the work in the exhibition seems to relate to is the materiality of the human body as a mode of expression or recognizable structure for other variables. Based on the images alone, it seems that the presence of the figure is the connective thread. Locating the site of performance in each image, however, is challenging.

The exhibition provides no contextualization or didactic text beyond the very broad subtitle or description “explores gender, sexuality, class, race, and social identities, and will feature lens based works that convey, elude [sic] to, or concern itself with ideas encompassing performance and role playing.” This has the potential to leave viewers grasping for interpretive threads and possibly not finding them.

Questions I had as an informed art viewer were: How does each photo relate to the theme? What is the contribution of each artist to the curator’s vision? Maybe most importantly, which images show the artist participating in role play? It is not always obvious, especially if one doesn’t know what the artists look like. The professor in me wanted these terms to be defined as they relate to individual photographs within. Which images were dealing with role-playing and which were dealing with social identities? Or more broadly, which, if any, are tongue-in-cheek and which are meant to provoke serious discussion? It is not always easy to locate these important differences with visual information only. This exhibition, including most of the works at an individual level, would benefit from more contextualization for the viewer.

The most striking example of the need for context is in relation to the photograph CREMASTER 3: I Die Daily (2002) by Bjork’s ex-husband, Matthew Barney. When a viewer is confronted with the challenging image, they should have some guidance to help them through the ordeal of looking. Barney is a notorious artist who punishes his body in his performances. He is best known for The Cremaster Cycle, a suite of five big-budget feature-length films (a highly unusual format for video/performance art) in which he performs any number of athletic stunts as metaphors for initiation rites. All students of contemporary art know his name and may recognize some of his iconic imagery, such as the red mouthed Apprentice in his pink kilt and headdress, yet far fewer have ever viewed the Cremaster films because they sell for $100,000 per set, are unreleased individually, and are screened rarely, all by the artist’s decree.

The photograph is disturbing: Barney is in a surgical suite, surrounded by a group of authoritative men wearing aprons that reference those of Freemasons–they all look directly out of the frame at the viewer. His body is partially wrapped in white sheets, his head is covered by a hood with runnels of red coming from the hole cut into the hood, filled by what appears to be a metallic object that must be in his mouth. Barney’s testicles are fitted with an inscrutable white plastic device–is it a surgical tool? The artist’s perineum is at the viewer’s eye-level (possibly referencing the cremaster muscle for which his work is named), and something soft and pink seems to be slithering off the gynecological exam chair and toward the viewer (is it meant to evoke a severed penis, or prolapsed intestines?). I think there are also teeth.

This image is presented without any didactic text to help situate the viewer in relation to what they are seeing. The decision to forego interpretive didactic text is common in commercial art galleries, where viewers are invited to experience the work and bring their own interpretation. Possibly this was a deliberate choice by Linzy to emulate that experience–it is, however, highly unorthodox in museum practice.

Those of us versed in contemporary art are hard to shock, but we would all do well to remember that our familiarity with images like this is rarified and reified, as access to Barney’s videos make clear. To introduce an image like this to an unsuspecting public without any interpretive guidance, in my opinion, has the potential to further alienate viewers who already find contemporary art inscrutable.

Selina Romàn, Drowning in a Desert from the “Please Disturb” series, 2016. Archival Inkjet print. 36 x 24 inches. On loan from the artist.

Barney’s work in the exhibition is exceptional both in its difficulty and its obscurity. The majority of the images, even if the relationship to an aspect of performance is not clearly defined, are engrossing in the narratives they suggest. Selina Romàn’s Drowning in a Desert (2016) feels like a still from a much larger story that leaves the viewer wanting to know more.

Video still from Paula Wilson’s “Salty and Fresh” (2014), Video.

Salty and Fresh (2014) by Paula Wilson is a delightful video that makes the role of artist as performer for her public very clear. In the video Wilson is in a structural dress that elevates her about 10 feet above the sea that she’s standing in. She holds a giant palette and is painting her models’ bodies with a paintbrush several yards long while onlookers picnic on the shore and document the spectacle with their phones. The dress structure renders her unable to move and must continually face the audience and paint her models. If Barney’s Cremaster references the endurance model of being an artist in the public eye, this is a more lighthearted and accessible way to communicate the public persona that artists must perform, tolerate, and embrace.

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 also 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.

Tableau and Transformation: Photography from the Permanent Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through Sunday, October 20, 2019. Julie Saul, of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York, was instrumental in developing the Museum’s interest in collecting contemporary photography and will be speaking at a Tampa Collects evening event at the Museum on Tuesday, October 1st. For information about attending and joining Tampa Collects, please contact Kate Douglass at the Tampa Museum of Art.

Contemporary Performance remains on view at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts through Saturday, August 31, 2019. There will be a special closing reception on Friday, August 23, 2019 starting at 5:00 pm, with a lecture featuring the exhibition’s curator Kalup Linzy following at 6:00 pm. For additional information about attending the public event, please contact the Museum.

Our Country’s Family Pictures: Here and Now

Our Country’s Family Pictures: Here and Now

Tyra Mishell

Untitled (Memories) from the series Family Pictures, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Samsøñ.

Walking into this exhibition, steve locke: the color of remembering, I was first drawn to the photos with the ornate picture frames. Looking at the frames, I was instantly reminded of the sort of objects in my mother’s home and the sticky vinyl inspirational messages written in cursive on the walls of her kitchen. But after looking closer at a pretty light blue frame that read “MEMORIES” [Untitled (Memories)] on a golden plaque, I had to look away. I was not saddened or shocked by the photo of a Black man strung up on a tree, surrounded by observing multigenerational white bodies. I’ve seen photos like this before. I have seen photos like this recently. I looked away as a reflex. As a coping mechanism. These kitschy picture frames, photographed on top of a smooth wooden surface and a vibrant colored backdrop, looked like television screens to me. These domestic, familiar picture frames look just like my newsfeed. Steve Locke’s Family Pictures series are mementos inside of the homes of America’s dominant culture. The work in this series brings into focus America’s continuing tradition of violence and subjugation of Black people. Locke does this in a clever way by bringing us into Somebody’s living room and having us come to accept that this tradition is as American as my own mother’s “ EAT DRINK AND BE MERRY” vinyl quote on the kitchen wall.

I had the privilege of attending Steve Locke’s artist talk at the opening of the show and hearing him talk about the subject of the work was helpful in understanding Family Pictures in today’s political and social climate. After the talk and we spent some time discussing the spectacle nature of “Black Death” in the media. Violence towards Black people often goes viral in a sensationalized way. It feels like the announcement of a new “Black Death” is like the release of the most current iPhone. The hype comes and goes like new technology and returns when replaced with the next one. Media outlets delight in providing the public with new and exciting footage for controversy’s sake. In his exhibition statement, Locke goes on to write: “You can see a video, repeatedly (or even as a background image) as two people discuss a man being strangled or shot. To death. The prohibition of showing the deaths of victims is waived when the victim is black. Their last words are broadcasts. Their bodies left in the street as a warning, or as a provocation. You cannot imagine seeing the victims of Columbine or hearing the tapes of Sandy Hook, but for some reason, you can see a black man killed on your television. You can sit in a pub, a waiting room, your well-appointed home with its flat screen tv and see someone killed. These images are public and private and downright quotidian.” The images that we see every day are not coincidental, but deliberate attacks. It is about power and dominance. Our ability to spread information quickly has resulted in a different kind of cultural consciousness.

Untitled (I Can’t Believe We Did That!) from the series Family Pictures, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Samsøñ.

Two works in particular that have been stuck in my memory for weeks are Untitled (I Can’t Believe We Did That!) and Untitled (Mother). Both photographs involve something so uncomfortable literally reframed into something more pleasing, more palatable to look at. The frames resemble mass-produced picture frames with someones staged memory inside. Looking at Untitled (I can’t believe we did that) in all of its pretty blue glory seriously messed me up. The photo shows the lynching of two Black men (Thomas Shipp and Adam Smith) in Indiana in the year 1930. Below them, is a crowd of white spectators pointing at their bodies and looking at the camera. At the bottom of the frame, it reads “I Can’t Believe We Did That!” This historical picture was originally produced as a postcard, a keepsake, a pleasant memory. It is a funny statement. I’ve heard many variations of “I Can’t Believe We Did That!” From white people apologizing to me about slavery, Jim Crow, and police violence. I imagine the white people in this picture to have thought the same way. I imagine that they too could not believe that they were lucky enough to get such good seats at a hanging and be able to memorialize it.

Untitled (Mother) from the series Family Pictures, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Samsøñ.

I am always drawn to images representing Black womanhood, especially ones that involve racial archetypes. I believe that it is important to remember and notice the roots of these inherently violent stereotypes. In Untitled (Mother) we immediately associate the woman in the picture as a caretaker or the “Mammy” archetype. According to a source, the woman is Mattie Lee Martin and the image is dated between 1950-1960. It is a beautiful portrait, with Mattie Lee Martin smiling while holding up a cheerful looking white baby. The text underneath the photo reads “Because of you, my world is a better place.” The narrative behind the Mammy character would claim that she would have loved the child as she would love her own and that she would have been content in her domestic role. The quote on the frame is a true statement. In this country, Black women have had to survive. As apart of her survival she has had to maintain the lives of white families, and raise them up through her mental, physical, and emotional labor. I think of this now in a contemporary context. I think of myself when navigating white spaces. I think of myself having to coddle white folk’s feelings when they’ve mistreated me. After reflecting on my own interpretations of the work, I thought about how non-black people were responding to the pictures. I ignored the weird, sympathetic, and disbelief that was coming from their mouths. I wanted to know how their insides felt.

I love how Locke’s work forces us to acknowledge the disconnect between the dominant culture and everybody else. I believe that the disconnect is both subconscious and conscious. The circulating of the past photos used in Family Pictures resemble the 24/7 unproductive and dehumanizing distribution of Black Trauma in the present. We want to remember these atrocities as atypical and that only the most evil people were complacent. We want to remember it all as a rarity. We want to believe in the “good ones.” As we refuse to recognize this as tradition and common practice, we continue to silence the oppressed and commit ourselves to misunderstand.

Tyra Mishell was born and raised in Bradenton, Florida in 1994. She is currently residing in Tampa where she will receive her BA in studio art from the University of South Florida in Spring 2019. She is a New Genres artist specializing in video, new media, sound, and performance. With a combined interest in media studies and the make believe, she produces IN SPACE TV, an experimental net-based television show.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery 221@HCC on the Dale Mabry campus through March 7, 2019. In addition to the photographs from the 2016 Family Pictures series, there is an installation of Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray). Locke is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

Tampa-based artist Omar Richardson exhibits large black and white woodblock prints and unique mono prints in Omar Richardson: My Story, My Truth on display in Gallery 3@HCC on the third floor. There is a public closing reception on Thursday, February 28 from 5 to 8 pm, with Richardson speaking at 6 pm.

steven locke: the color of remembering

On view through March 7th at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery 221 as part of an annual exhibition celebrating African American heritage and presented in conjunction with the Tampa Bay Black Heritage Festival.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at HHC’s Gallery 221 though March 7th.

This exhibition examines how African Americans have been depicted in ways which betrays explicit and implicit cultural prejudices depending, in this case, the age of the memory. From schematic diagrams of slave ships, historical photographs of lynchings, to modern day video, brutality and racism – institutional or otherwise – images have been made and disseminated which tacitly imply values which we should, indeed, must find deplorable.

Not only by subject matter but, significantly, it is through the means of presentation that Locke employs in the photography series Family Pictures, 2016, that he addresses how different standards apply, in particular, that there isn’t an universal sense of respect and dignity when it comes to the memorialization of the atrocious. Locke himself memorializes images of the barbaric, setting them in unexceptional frames, engraved with the platitudinous and set against strong colored backdrops – notions of remembering and color are brought to the fore – the colors are strong but it is an overall sense of banality which is most provocative and the taint on remembering which Locke communicates most powerfully.

steve locke: the color of remembering is on view at HHC’s Gallery 221 though March 7th.

In Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie (A Memorial for Freddie Gray), Locke further confronts how there remains to this day a biased filter as to presentation of the African-American experience in the media. In this case, the tragic death of Freddie Gray on April 12th, 2015 whilst in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department. The intrusive and the demeaning combined with sensationalized reporting to ignore the dignity and suffering of this man. Validly, it might be asked had this not been a young African-American man whether the coverage would have taken on a different tone. By distilling the color palette of three commonly circulated photographs of Freddie Gray down to three hues of gray, Locke speaks to the debasement of this individual, his suffering and brutal death. Freddie Gray became a media-currency. His life and death had determined a value, that of a commodity. One that was exchanged between us and the news outlets. Locke shows us how we are complicit in this process, that the communication of outrage embraces complexities which have at their foundation the self same prejudices which they seek to make clear, here it is literally gray.

steven locke’s: the color of remembering at is a powerful exhibition. By bringing together the history of slavery, racism and subjugation through to the contemporaneous he threads a course of prejudices towards African Americans from the overt to the more hidden. It is instructive, in particular, how this exhibition focuses us on the modern day and practices which covertly but evidently seek to assuage the sensibilities of the mainstream at the expense of Black experience. The works themselves, are compelling and visually strong. The replication of composition in Family Pictures is one which has an unerring sense of imbalance. The images contained, framed with frames and repetitively composed powerfully suggest a diluting of content whilst, in fact, communicating the exact opposite. Steven Locke shows a consistent mastery of practice and sheer intellectual energy in working with the complexities of this difficult but very important subject matter. To be asked to re-think, indeed, re-remember and to give life and color to the challenging is the significant and worthy success of this exhibition.

At Bay Art Files, we have asked Tyra Mishell, who is pursuing a BA in Studio Art at the University of South Florida, to write about this powerful and timely exhibition. Her impressions of viewing the exhibition and meeting with the artist will post soon.

Faces in the Crowd

By Sabrina Hughes

Miki Kratsman’s exhibition People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) is a challenging exhibition, but maybe not for the reasons you would think. Though it deals with the emotionally and politically charged subject matter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the subject matter itself is blunt and direct, a presentation of visual facts. Miki Kratsman: People I Met doesn’t ask viewers to do much more than to look, and continue to look, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

Kratsman is an Argentinian-born Israeli photographer who began his career as a photojournalist before he began to exhibit in an artistic context. The photographs in the exhibition borrow the aesthetics and content of journalism but subtly transcend the strict ethics of non-interference that is the photojournalist’s code. One senses the presence of Kratsman’s own compassion to create work inviting viewers to take a prolonged look at faces and places that may be otherwise easily passed over with a glance.

Installation view of *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

The dominant work in the USFCAM galleries is the project that gives the exhibition its name. The installation People I Met in the Lee and Victor Leavengood Gallery is an ongoing (2010-2018) collaboration between Kratsman and the Palestinian individuals who have borne witness to and participated in the decades-long conflict. Two-thousand grainy portraits fill three gallery walls, a scale that is challenging to describe and overwhelming to experience. Some people are looking straight at the camera and some gaze elsewhere. Kratsman’s source images are his own photographs from his career as a photojournalist, from 1993 to 2012. He delves into his archives to look behind the central subject matter and to create new images that isolate the faces of the countless bystanders.

Installation view of the exhibition *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

Detail of the installation of the exhibition *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

The photos, and especially some of the expressions on the people’s faces, make me wonder what was happening in the foreground of the photos these were excerpted from. What are they witnessing–what is making them smile or shout? And to speak more broadly to their original context, what or who are we overlooking in the background of the billions of images that have already been made? Whose daily routines brought them into the path of some newsworthy event, and therefore into the frame of the photojournalist present to document it? What photos are you in, unknowingly? Who were you then and are you different now? Most importantly, who is interested in what happened to you after the shutter clicked?

The photos are not only intended to be seen on gallery walls, in fact, they were first disseminated digitally. Kratsman posts the excerpted portraits to a Facebook Page dedicated to the project. More than twenty-thousand followers of the page see the images and comment on the photos of people they know, people they knew, or sometimes photos they recognize as themselves. Kratsman is literally picking faces from the crowds dispersed years ago and crowdsourcing the reply to the question “Do you know who this person is and what is his condition right now?” In the exhibition, some of these responses from the Page’s followers have been engraved on brass plaques. “My teacher, he was in prison but now he is out.” “He was the best man in Jordan Valley. Now he is dead.”

The plaques are in conversation with the photographs but exist at a physical and interpretive remove from the anonymous portraits. We don’t know to whom the plaques refer. If any of the 2,000 individuals pictured in this iteration of People I Met have been identified, are dead or alive, or of unknown status, we viewers do not know. We are invited to consider the text and the image separately and perhaps to imagine more about the relationship between the sea of faces and the comparatively few who have been recognized and whose status is known.

Kratsman’s People I Met runs counter to the emotional distance photojournalists must cultivate in order to do their job. Photojournalists often face criticism for taking a picture of a heinous scene rather than trying to help the people they photograph. Kratsman’s project of attempting to follow the thread of each individual’s life forward from when their paths crossed, always asking if they are in good health when a Facebook follower recognizes a friend or family member is a heartening gesture.

If the installation People I Met magnifies the sense of scale by isolating so many individual faces each affected by the conflict, the video 70 Meters… White T-Shirt (2017) does the opposite and compresses the impact. The video is a montage of every weapon discharge in the small village of Nabi Salih over the course of one year. After the sound of every gunshot, a rapid cut to the sound of another gunshot. We don’t always see where the shot is coming from and thankfully we never see anyone hit by a bullet. Watching the video, it all seems too brief. The shots come quickly and without reprieve (literally rapid-fire) but the acceleration of all of these incidents into the span of fewer than nine minutes seems to reduce the impact that these violent engagements have on the residents of the town. A shot that may change a life irrevocably is decontextualized and shortened to the length of time that the sound reverberates on the video.

Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016), the other two projects in the exhibition document Bedouin life in the Negev desert and towns that are targeted for demolition. In Bedouin Archive, photographs of individuals and buildings in various states of demolition are identified only with the latitude, longitude, altitude, image direction, and time stamp. A document in the truest sense to record where Kratsman was and when, and what was in front of his camera at that moment. If the villages are demolished and people scattered, these photographs serve as a map of sorts to locate the inhabitants in a time and place that may be lost.

One of photography’s unique qualities in relation to other art media is its indexicality. Most photography operates on the principle that what the viewer sees on the print was at one time in front of the camera. Indexicality is photography’s mirror-like characteristic that most of us now take for granted; that which makes it possible to see photography as a presentation of facts, of truth. The person we see in the photo stood in front of the camera if only for a fraction of a second. These people were here. Some still are. I know that person, she is well. This building stood here at this time. This is what the village looked like. These are the sounds residents experienced regularly.

Once an artwork is released from the protected insularity of the artist’s studio into the world, the artist can no longer control its interpretation. Every individual who looks at a work brings her own subjective viewpoint and beliefs to bear. Remarkable in Kratsman’s work is his retention of a documentary viewpoint while treating such highly emotional and potentially polarizing subject matter. One does not engage in light discourse about Israeli-Palestinian relations. By its very nature, this body of work, in particular, has the potential to be highly polarizing. Yet, when in the gallery space, the exhibition seems instead to function as a document of life in this historical moment.

Kratsman’s photographs and videos open a space for questioning the monolithic perception of both Israeli and Palestinian identities and instead to think about the subjectivity of each person, photographer and photographed, as a sum of their experiences extending forward and backward in time from the split second recorded in the photograph.

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 also 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.

Miki Kratsman: People I Met is the first solo exhibition of this award-winning Israeli conceptual photographer to be presented in the United States and is on view at USFCAM through Saturday, December 8. It is the first exhibition organized by USFCAM’s newly appointed Curator-at-Large Christian Viveros-Fauné. A highly regarded international art critic and curator, Viveros-Fauné has also been named the 2018-2019 Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and Art History.

RELATED EVENT: Film on the Lawn

Friday, November 16, 2018
6 PM
Free and open to the public.

USFCAM presents the award-winning documentary 5 Broken Cameras as part of their outdoor Film on the Lawn series. A first-hand account of non-violent resistance in the West Bank village of Bil’in, documented over a span of many years by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat and then edited and co-directed by Israeli Guy Davidi, the documentary has been hailed as an important work of both cinematic and political activism. For more information about this free event, visit the Museum’s Facebook Event Page.

Related event:

Faces in the Crowd

By Sabrina Hughes

RELATED EVENT: Film on the Lawn

Friday, November 16, 2018 6 PM Free and open to the public.

Friday, November 16, 2018
6 PM
Free and open to the public.