JOHN LOENGARD: CELEBRATING THE NEGATIVE

Celebrating the Negative is a study of the original film on which famous images have been captured by some of the most important photographers of our time. Loengard’s pictures are of the photographers’ famous images as negatives—not prints. Though the loving observation of the original matrixes of some of the most iconic 19th and 20th century images, Loengard demonstrates to us that the photographic negative is an object of great beauty . . . see more

DUSK TO DUSK: UNSETTLED, UNRAVELED, UNREAL

Welcome to a beautiful world, unsettling in its vision of personal isolation, but collectively bound by the small comfort of knowing that we are all alone. Through painting, photography, sculpture, and video this convincing treatise of anxious beauty shows us a strange contemporary familiarity in our collective darkness. . . see more

Restoring the Spirit: Celebrating Haitian Art

Restoring the Spirit: Celebrating Haitian Art is a broad survey of Haiti’s complex visual traditions from 1940 to the present and a portrait of its artists’ devotion to creative endeavors in the face of national adversity. Beginning in the 1940s, a new generation of self-taught Haitian artists emerged. Encouraged to explore their own techniques and subject matter, these artists invented a distinct style of art that revealed much of the native values and belief systems. . . see more

Where Children Sleep: Photographs by James Mollison

One can learn a lot about a child by looking at their face, dress, or body language, but to really understand what matters most to a child, one must enter that private sanctuary: their bedroom. In his remarkable series of photographs Where Children Sleep, Mollison invites us to study the extreme diversity of children's sleeping places in many different countries. Each detailed study of a child's "bedroom" is accompanied by a studio-styled portrait of the child. . . see more

Book of Lies

Eugenia P. Butler (1947-2008) was a Los Angeles-based artist who played a formative but often overlooked role in Conceptual art where she regularly challenged people to explore how they perceive their “reality.” Butler’s "Book of Lies" project began in 1991 and examined how other artists use “the lie to explore our relationship with the truth.”. . . see more

posing beauty in african american culture

Posing Beauty in African American Culture explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty have been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the Internet . . . see more

hoppÉ Portraits: Society, Studio and Street

In the 1920s and 30s Emil Otto Hoppé (British, German born, 1878-1972) was one of the most sought-after photographers in the world. He spent the first decade of his long photographic career pioneering the art of celebrity portraiture. Breaking with the formal stiffness of the Victorian studio . . . see more

sight unseen: international photography
by blind artists

Sight Unseen, the first major exhibition of work by the world’s most accomplished blind photographers, explores the idea that blind photographers can see in ways that sighted people cannot. Many of us, with sight leading as our dominant sense, use images to build our world . . . see more

civil war drawings from the becker collection

The Becker Archive contains approximately 650 hitherto unexhibited and undocumented drawings by Joseph Becker and his colleagues, nineteenth-century artists who worked as artist-reporters for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper observing, drawing, and sending back for publication images of the Civil War, the construction of the railroads, the laying of the transatlantic cable in Ireland, the Chinese in the West, the Indian wars, the Chicago fire . . . see more

Ray Turner: Population

Ray Turner’s Population is an evolving, community-engaged traveling exhibition comprised of a series of painted portraits that invite the viewer to contemplate notions of both collective and individual identity. At each venue Turner produces several new portraits of individuals living within that local community. These new faces are intermixed with the original series to alter the whole, continually updating the exhibition as it travels. In this way the exhibition evolves and the body of work increasingly reflects our nation’s diversity . . . see more

a complex weave:
women and identity in contemporary art

In the twenty-first century, issues of identity seem increasingly complex and problematic, but also of fundamental and growing importance. In this way, the contemporary art world is a microcosm reflecting significant aspects of the larger world in which we live . . . see more

American Qur'an: Works by Sandow Birk

In response to a decade of travel to various Islamic regions of the world and his own research into Islamic religion, American artist Sandow Birk created a large series of codex–like paintings adapting the techniques and stylistic devices of Arabic and Persian painting and albums, blending the past with the present, the East with the West, creating his “American Qur’an”. . . . see more

the great picture

In the summer of 2006, six artists embarked on a unique and challenging collaboration. Using an abandoned jet hanger in Southern California, they repurposed it into a giant camera obscura. Then they used their hanger-sized camera to produce the largest single photograph ever made. . . . see more

paul outerbridge: NEW color photographs
from mexico and california 1948–1955

Paul Outerbridge's new color photographs from California and Mexico circa 1950 mark the discovery of a powerful and previously unknown body of work by one of America’s earliest masters of color photography. Outerbridge built his extraordinary reputation by making virtuoso carbro-color prints of nudes and still lifes . . . see more

martin schoeller: close up

A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite.
— Martin Schoeller

Informed by his early exposure to both the celebrity portrait work of Annie Leibovitz and the formal austerity of German artists . . . see more