Deana Lawson

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AUGUST 31, 2015 MEDIA CONTACTS: Amanda Hicks Nina Litoff (312) 443-7297 (312) 443-3363 [email protected] [email protected] DEANA LAWSON TO FEATURE IN THE INAUGURAL EXHIBITION OF THE RUTTENBERG CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO In Deana Lawson, the First Installment of the Ruttenberg Series Will Explore the Artist’s Investigation of Black Culture and How Individuals Claim Their Identities Within It CHICAGO – The Art Institute announces that the first installment of the biennial Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series will showcase the powerful work of New York–based photographer Deana Lawson. Opening September 5, 2015, and on view through January 10, 2016 in Galleries 188-189, the exhibition Deana Lawson will feature work that investigates the visual expression of global black culture and how individuals claim their identities within it. Through their look and presence, the subjects of Lawson’s posed photographs channel broader ideas about personal and social histories, sexuality, status, and spiritual beliefs. Lawson began her work in and around her Brooklyn neighborhood, but has recently branched out nationally and internationally to include communities in Louisiana, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While her themes remain consistent, her landscapes continue to shift and broaden—the global scope of the pictures, in her words, “concern and affirm the sacred black body” and speak to a collective psychic memory of shared experiences. Lawson begins her process by researching the communities she chooses for their cultural histories. Once on site, strangers she meets through chance encounters become her subjects, often following lengthy conversations and repeated visits. In recent years she has turned to a documentary style and has begun presenting found imagery as well, both moves that complicate how identity is projected and understood. While Lawson’s images have a strong sense of the present, they also engage in a dialogue with various cultural histories and carry implications for the future of black culture. RELATED EVENTS Artist Talk: Deana Lawson October 15, 2015 6:00pm–7:00pm Price Auditorium Free with museum admission; registration not required. Images: Deana Lawson. Nikki’s Kitchen, Detroit, Michigan, 2015. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Deana Lawson. Kingdom Come, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2014. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. Sponsors: The Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series is generously supported by the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation. # # # www.artic.edu MUSEUM HOURS Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's days Twitter Daily: 10:30–5:00 Children under 14 always free Facebook Thursdays until 8:00 Members always free The Art Institute of Chicago gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chicago Park District on behalf of the citizens of Chicago. .

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Deana Lawson Inkjet Print Mounted on Sintra, 40 X 50 Inches
Gallery Guide Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis January 27– April 16, 2017 Deana Lawson Inkjet print mounted on Sintra, 40 x 50 inches. print mounted on Sintra, Inkjet 2013. Oath, Deana Lawson, Lawson, Deana Chicago. Gallery, Hoffman the artist and Rhona Courtesy Deana Lawson explores and challenges conventional Lawson’s eye and her overall relationship to photography, and stereotypical representations of the black body. with these portraits inviting careful attention to such She engages a range of photographic strategies to visual cues as pose and setting. craft a multifaceted vision reflecting what she has described as a “knowledge of selfhood through a For the last several years, Lawson has chosen to corporeal dimension.” photograph in sites specific to the African diaspora by shooting in locations as varied as Haiti, Jamaica, Lawson’s large-format photographs are highly staged Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Brooklyn, and often made in collaboration with her subjects. and the American Deep South. This exhibition includes These individuals are frequently strangers she meets works from her recent time spent in Alabama, as well in such everyday places as grocery stores, the New York as other photographs made on location around the world. City subway, and on the street. The resulting images, Lawson’s meticulously composed images from these in both domestic and public settings, depict the sitters travels blur boundaries of time and place, and fact and alone, in couples, and as families. The environments fiction, imbuing her subjects and settings with a near- and the belongings they contain portray a diverse array mythical power. of people living very different lives, and present multiple ideas of kinship, ritual, identity, and desire.
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28 Art Shows You Need to See This Fall
10/5/2015 28 Art Shows You Need To See This Fall Edition: US Search The Huffington Post Like 5.3m Follow FRONT PAGE POLITICS BUSINESS MEDIA WORLDPOST SCIENCE TECH HEALTHY LIVING HUFFPOST LIVE 28 Art Shows You Need To See This Fall From Boston to San Francisco and everything in between here are the art exhibitions you'll be talking about this fall. Priscilla Frank Arts Writer, The Huffington Post Katherine Brooks Senior Arts & Culture Editor, The Huffington Post. Posted: 09/01/2015 10:38 AM EDT | Edited: 09/28/2015 12:25 PM EDT As we approach Labor Day and the unofficial end to summer, the only thing motivating us to open our laptops and begin another day anew is the thought of a new season of art exhibitions. Well, maybe that and the promise of cooler temperatures. But the slate of fall art shows is considerably high on our list of autumnal things to look forward to. In anticipation of fall, we scoured the calendars one editor on the East coast, one writer on the West and came up with 20 exhibitions (and eight honorable mentions) we're excited to ogle over the next few months. Whether you're in New York or Los Angeles, New Orleans or Detroit, St. Louis or Fort Worth, here's your guide to getting down with art in September and beyond. 1. "Spirit and Matter: Islamic Art" (Dallas, Texas) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fallartexhibitions2015_55ddff6be4b04ae497056ddf?utm_hp_ref=arts 1/23 10/5/2015 28 Art Shows You Need To See This Fall Manuscript, The Shahnama of Firdawsi Iran: Shiraz, 1539 Work on paper 15.2 x 10 inches (38.5 x 25.5 cm) The Keir Collection of Islamic Art on loan to the Dallas Museum of Art.
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Towards a Poetics of Bafflement
Towards a Poetics of Bafflement: The Politics of Elsewhere in Contemporary Black Diaspora Visual Practice (1990–Present) by Sarah Stefana Smith A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Sarah Stefana Smith (2016) Towards a Poetics of Bafflement: the Politics of Elsewhere in Contemporary Black Diaspora Visual Practice (1990–Present) Sarah Stefana Smith Doctoral of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto 2016 Abstract Towards a Poetics of Bafflement asserts that blackness baffles—confuses and frustrates—the order of knowledge that deems black subjectivities as pathological. This dissertation argues for the importance of the psychic and affective spaces that emerge in the work of contemporary black women and queer artists. A poetics of bafflement is foregrounded by racial slavery and diaspora formations that inform contemporary racial antagonisms. The visual work of Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, and Mickalene Thomas, if read through a poetics of bafflement, engages blackness differently and conceptualizes new possibilities for world making. Black artists have long since occupied spaces of creative and critical thinking about aesthetics, race, and the politics of vision, which inform contemporary social, historical, and cultural climates. Multiculturalism and subsequent post-race concepts are inadequate in thinking about alternative possibilities of world making as they suggest racism and anti-black sentiment are somehow no longer prevalent. Multiculturalism’s claim of diversity negates the continued logics of anti-black sentiment, whereas post-racial suggests a time and place in history where race no longer informs political, economic, and socio-cultural experiences.
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Deana Lawson, Who Has Been Named for Inclusion in the 2017 Whitney
Deana Lawson, who has been named for inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, explores and challenges the conventional representations of the black body seen throughout the history of photography. Her large format photographs are highly staged and often made in collaboration with her subjects. They depict individuals, couples, and families in both domestic and public settings, visualizing ideas of kinship, ritual, identity, and desire. Lawson’s tableaux are not only intimate— her subjects depicted nude, embracing, and directly confronting the camera—but they also destabilize the notion of a passively voyeuristic relationship to photography itself. In Otisha, Kingston, Jamaica, for example, the honesty and vulnerability of the subject is laid bare. Indeed, the phrase “laid bare,” becomes an important aspect of Lawson’s portraiture. How does one truly lay oneself bare? The images become representations not only of the individuals—photographed within their home environments to lend multiple perspectives of their intimate selves—but they also document the trust built between artist and subject. Travel is central to Lawson’s practice and for the last several years, she has been tracing the trajectory of the African diaspora by creating her images in locations as varied as Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Brooklyn, and the southern United States. Often appearing snapshot-like and seemingly documentary in nature, Lawson’s meticulously composed work blurs boundaries of time and place, and fact and fiction, thereby imbuing her subjects and settings with a near-mythical power. Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn) has been selected for the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
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Deana Lawson B
FLOOR 2 GRIEF AND GRIEVANCE Floor 2 Floor 2 LaToya Ruby Frazier County clustered Black residents in public housing into certain b. 1982, Braddock, PA communities. In 1994 the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s admission that it was party to a decades- (The following artist’s texts are excerpts from the book long system of discriminatory housing resulted in the Fair The Notion of Family, selected and edited by the exhibition Housing Service Center. The Sanders Consent Decree gave curators.) Allegheny Country an opportunity to desegregate. This wall, left to right: BOC Gases is the industrial gases business of the British Oxygen Company Group, the worldwide industrial gases, 1980s Welcome to Historic Braddock Signage and a Lightbulb, vacuum technologies, and distribution services company for from the series The Notion of Family, 2009 the steel industry. It produces more than fifty thousand tons of gas worldwide. Located at Eleventh Street and Washington Along the ancient path of the Monongahela River, Braddock, Avenue, BOC Gases encroaches on remaining residents’ Pennsylvania, sits in the eastern region of Allegheny County, property. Day and night, BOC Gases emits an industrial hissing approximately nine miles outside of Pittsburgh. sound that reverberates throughout the borough. A historic industrial suburb, Braddock is home to Andrew The haze that forms the sky is from millions of tiny particles. Carnegie’s first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works, which has They pass through my lungs and into my bloodstream. Like operated since 1875 and is the last functioning steel mill in carbon monoxide, they are odorless and have the potential the region.
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Lawson, Deana CV
DEANA LAWSON Born 1979, Rochester, NY EDUCATION 2004 MFA, Photography, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 2001 BFA, Photography, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2021 Deana Lawson, ICA/Boston, Boston, MA, October 27, 2021 – February 27, 2022; travels to MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, April 14 – September 5, 2022; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, October 7, 2022 – February 19, 2023 The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy, Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, May 7 – October 11, 2021 Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, May 8 – June 12, 2021 2020 Centropy, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland, June 9 – October 11, 2020 2019 Deana Lawson, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 8 – September 1, 2019 2018 Deana Lawson: Planes, The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA, October 13, 2018 – February 17, 2019 Deana Lawson, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, March 1 – April 7, 2018 Deana Lawson, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, March 15 – July 15, 2018, curated by Dan Leers 2017 Deana Lawson, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, January 27 – April 16, 2017, curated by Kelly Schindler Deana Lawson: New Photographs, Rhonna Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL, April 21 – May 26, 2017 2015 Deana Lawson, Art Institute Chicago Museum, Chicago, IL, September 5, 2015 – January 10, 2016, curated by Michal Razzo-Russo 2014 Mother Tongue, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL, February 28 – April 5, 2014 2011 Deana Lawson, Baer Ridgway, San Francisco, CA, April 23 – May 28, 2011 2009 Corporeal, Light Work, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, November 2 – December 23, 2009 SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2021 34th Bienal de São Paulo: Though It's Dark, Still I Sing.
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THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES 2018 FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS Photographer Deana Lawson & Multidisciplinary Artist Derrick Adams
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Julia Engelbrecht & Tonya Bell [email protected] 212.691.2800 THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES 2018 FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS Photographer Deana Lawson & Multidisciplinary Artist Derrick Adams March 8, 2018 - Pleasantville, New York – The Gordon Parks Foundation announced today that photographer Deana Lawson of Rochester, NY and multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams of Baltimore, MD have been selected as the 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellows. Now in its second year, The Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship Program supports artists working across a range of artistic disciplines – from photography and music to film and beyond - by providing short-term grants of $10,000, and an exhibition at the Foundation’s exhibition space in Pleasantville, New York. Fellowships are awarded to artists working within themes of social justice. “Deana Lawson and Derrick Adams are continuing in the footsteps of Gordon Parks,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of The Gordon Parks Foundation. “The fellowship program comes at such a critical time for their continued development as artists. Deana and Derrick have such bold approaches to exploring connection – whether across generations or between man and monument, and we couldn’t be more pleased to have named them both our fellows.” Photographer Deana Lawson notes that like Gordon, her motivation is to create photographs that give meaningful texture and complexity to images of global black culture. She states, “Photography is essential because it allows me to use the language of formal portraiture, social documentary, and imagined fictions to explore critical issues within communal relationships, identity, and beauty.” Of the fellowship, she notes, "One of my earliest inspirations in photography was the work of Gordon Parks.
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TINA MARIE CAMPT Department of Modern Culture and Media Brown
TINA MARIE CAMPT Department of Modern Culture and Media Brown University 155 George Street, Box 1957 Providence, RI 02912 [email protected] EDUCATION 1996 Ph.D. in History, Cornell University 1990 M.A. in History, Cornell University 1986 B.A. in History, Vassar College ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2019-present Owen F. Walker ’33 Professor of Humanities and Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University 2014-2019 Claire Tow and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana Studies and Women’s Studies, Barnard College-Columbia University 2010-2011 Professor of Women’s Studies, Duke University 2002-2010 Associate Professor of Women’s Studies, Duke University 2002-03 Associate Professor of Women's Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz 1996-2002 Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz 1993-96 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, Institute for Social Pedagogy, Technical University of Berlin ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS 2014-2018 Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) 2013-2017 Chair, Department of Africana Studies, Barnard College 2011-2013 Director, Africana Studies Program, Barnard College 2009-2010 Director of Graduate Studies, Women’s Studies Program, Duke University 2005-06 Interim Director, Women’s Studies Program, Duke University 2004 (fall) Interim Director, Women’s Studies Program, Duke University 2003-06 Director of Graduate Studies, Women’s Studies Program, Duke University 2000-02 Coordinator, Feminist Studies Research Unit, University of California, Santa Cruz RESEARCH APPOINTMENTS AND ACADEMIC FELLOWSHIPS 2019-present Research Associate, Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa 2018-19 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow, Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris 2007-08 William S.
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Arabindan-Kesson, Seeing Empire
ISSN: 2471-6839 Cite this article: Anna Arabindan-Kesson “Seeing Empire,” Bully Pulpit, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.10057. Seeing Empire Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Assistant Professor, Department of Art & Archeology, Princeton University The United States is an empire. It is a nation founded on the brutal and legislated domestication of its internal subjects. The histories of the forced labor and death of Black and Indigenous people that underpinned the nation’s foundation structure the forms of racial capitalism that now underwrite its political and social relations.1 These structures also sustain its imperialist ideologies manifested, as they are, in events that might take place “elsewhere” or in the ways people are figured as threats at “home.”2 My work on the historical representation and material cultures of cotton continually returns me to this position.3 Fig. 1. Deana Lawson, Nation, 2018. Pigment print, collaged photograph, 55 1/2 × 67 1/4 in. Artwork © Deana Lawson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York Deana Lawson brings to light the visual logic of the practices and processes of empire in Nation (fig. 1). Here are three young African American musicians. Two are seated; one is standing, texting. We only see him from the torso down, for over his head is a superimposed photograph of George Washington’s dentures. The orthodontic theme continues: one of the men, Ruben, wears a dental apparatus that Lawson had sprayed with gold, matching the sitters’ bright gold necklaces. For Lawson, gold references a pan-African heritage, while the gold mouthpiece also evokes associations with instruments of slave torture, creating a journalpanorama.org • [email protected] • ahaaonline.org Arabindan-Kesson “Seeing Empire” Page 2 complicated expression of Blackness: powerful, beautiful, and vulnerable.4 There is another layer: the dentures, which we now know include nine teeth taken from unnamed African Americans who may have been enslaved on Washington’s plantation.
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Fey: Drawings by Joe Sinness,Strandbeest: the Dream
Fey: Drawings by Joe Sinness In Joe Sinness’s recent drawings, portraiture and still life become glossy, yet melancholic, tributes to queer performance. These meticulous works filter cinematic performance, sharp humor and sexual desire through carefully staged still lives and closely observed portraits. Sinness considers this performance a type of strip tease that creates an erotic tension loop between what may be broadly considered sacred and profane. Take a bow, Colored Pencil on Paper, 16”x28”, ©2015 Joe Sinness Given:, Colored Pencil on Paper, 20”x21”, ©2014 Joe Sinness Phantasm, Colored Pencil on Paper, 26”x21”, ©2014 Joe Sinness ABOUT THE ARTIST: Sinness received his BA from St. John’s University and an MFA in Studio Art from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2013 he was awarded a McKnight Visual Arts Fellowship and an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Notable past exhibitions include Ace Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Rochester Art Center and MAEP Gallery of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Sinness was recently chosen as a recipient of an artist residency with the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR) during the Summer of 2015. Fey: Drawings by Joe Sinness September 25 – October 21, 2015 Law Warschaw Gallery Macalester College St Paul, MN FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS AND ADVICE METRO GALLERY FRAME Standard Profile: 106 Type: floating gallery frame Wood & Finish: maple wood frame with clear finish Purchasing Options: joined wood frame Custom Wood Spacer: 1/4″ wood frame spacer Custom Wood Strainer: 1/2″ wood frame strainer Custom Frame Acrylic: UV acrylic cut to size Custom Frame Backing Board: archival coroplast backing Framing Advice: fitting gallery frames Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen at the Peabody Essex Museum The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) announces the first U.S.
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Letter from the Director
Letter From the Director the historical and contemporary Romare Bearden’s centennial cel- significance of “crossroads” and the ebration, this fall we celebrate value of “collaboration.” Caribbean: the hundredth anniversary of the Crossroads is the culmination of birth of noted photographer, writer almost a decade of research and and filmmaker Gordon Parks with dialogue about a region that is— Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family like Harlem—complex, culturally 1967. This exhibition features Parks’s diverse and full of art and artists. photographs of the Fontanelle family As I write this, the Museum galleries from his iconic Life magazine feature, are abuzz with Harlemites and A Harlem Family, alongside never- visitors from around the world enjoy- before-seen images from the same ing Caribbean: Crossroads, Primary series, providing unique insight Sources: Artists in Residence 2011– into Parks’s creative process. 12 and Illuminations: Expanding And with the help of my camera the Walls 2012, while our staff is phone, I’m taking my own impromptu planning an amazing slate of exhibi- photographs! You can see my snap- Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders tions and programs for this shots of Harlem life and details of fall and winter. works of art that inspire me on my Today, the Studio Museum is at I’m always being asked when new Instagram feed. Search for a crossroads—literally and figura- the Studio Museum will add a new thelmagolden to check out some tively. We are located on the main chapter to our beloved series of of my latest images and let me know thoroughfare of a neighborhood “F” exhibitions.
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How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making
T THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making Perhaps our best contemporary photographer, she creates work that insists on the worth of black women - both in art and in life. Carrie Mae Weems, photographed in New York City on Aug. 7, 2018. Photographby Mlckalena Thomas. Styled by Shlona Turin! By Megan O'Grady Oct. 15, 2018 ON CARRlE MAE WEEMS'S deck in Syracuse, N.Y.,locusts are buzzing about the space like doomsday portents, emerging from the ground after 17 years only to drown boozily in our cups of rose. It's a warm day in late June, and a summer languor - or maybe it's a news-cycle-induced torpor - is in the air, but Weems, perhapsme, our greatest living photographer, is juggling so many projects that when we were emailing to work out the interview logistics, she warned "We'll need all your skills on this." She is simultaneously working on a trio of shows: a retrospective at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art this fall, an installation for Cornell University and a group show she's curating, "Darker Matter," whichwill include a new series of her own, at the Park Avenue Armory around 2020 - a follow-up to the creative think tank of artists, musicians and writers she organized at the venue last winter titled "The ShaP-eof Things_." But first, she wants to show me her peonies. A few weeks before we meet, she emailed me a JPEG of a flower in full bloom, a still-life hello.
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