Carleton Watkins :: Yosemite Photographs

Did You Know :: Carleton Watkins’ Yosemite Photographs

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) had virtually no practical photography experience during the Civil War, as did many of his contemporaries. In 1851, when he was twenty-one, Watkins left Oneonta, New York, for California, following the example of Collis P. Huntington, another Oneonta native who had moved to California to make his fortune. After a stint in Huntington's store in Sacramento, Watkins moved to San Francisco, where he chanced into an apprenticeship with the daguerreotypist Robert Vance. By 1858, Watkins had established an independent practice, photographing mining operations and land claims for financiers who were building their careers in the lap of the new state.

Watkins and his contemporaries Charles Leander Weed and Eadweard Muybridge labored under difficult conditions to produce enormous photographs of Yosemite that pushed the technological limits of the medium and mirrored the scale of the place beginning in the 1860s and continuing into the 1890s.

In 1861 Carleton Watkins made history when he hauled a huge box camera—custom-designed around the glass-plate negatives needed for large prints—into Yosemite. Once a shot was framed, the plate was coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, then exposed and developed on-site in a dark tent. It was a grueling process, in which a drop of sweat or a stray insect could ruin the image and hours of work. Watkins’s 1861 photographs were among the first in the world to be considered landscape art. Three years later, Weed took his own mammoth plate camera to Yosemite, but Watkins’s main competitor was Eadweard Muybridge. Often composed like landscape paintings, Muybridge’s Yosemite photographs differed stylistically from Watkins’s classically structured works. Muybridge also signed his negatives to avoid the piracy that plagued Watkins, whose prints were reissued without credit to the photographer. Together, these three men transformed photography as an art form and inspired generations of artists. Their legacy persists in Yosemite, which remains among the most photographed landscapes in the world.

In 1861, Watkins traveled with one of his patrons, Trenor Park, entrepreneur of the Mariposa gold mine, on a family excursion to Yosemite. Unknown to white settlers until 1849, the valley was twenty hours by stage and mule from San Francisco. But word spread fast at the Mariposa mine, and by 1858 there were land claims, a better road, and tourists enough to support a hotel. In 1859, Charles Leander Weed photographed the valley, and by 1861 Easterners had come to know of the awe-inspiring site from articles in the Boston Evening Transcript, written by the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King.

The 30 mammoth-plate (18x22 inches) and 100 stereo views that Watkins took in Yosemite in 1861 were among the first photographs of the valley sent back east. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson received copies through Starr King, and in 1862 the photographs excited further interest when they were exhibited at Goupil's New York gallery. It was partly on their evidence that President Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 declaring the valley inviolate and leading the way to the National Parks system.

Watkins combined a mastery of the difficult wet-plate negative process with a rigorous sense of pictorial structure. For large-format landscape work such as he produced in Yosemite, the physical demands of this process were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, Watkins’ glass negatives had to be as large as he wished the prints to be, and his camera large enough to accommodate them. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed while the collodion remained tacky, requiring the photographer to transport a traveling darkroom as he explored the rugged terrain of the American West.

Relevant Vocabulary

Mammoth Plate an oversize glass plate used to make a negative image in nineteenth-century photography

Albumen Print a photographic print made on paper coated with albumen (egg white)

Ambrotype a mid-nineteenth-century photographic type in which a positive image was recorded on collodion wet plate.

Daguerreotype an early photographic type in which an image is recorded on highly polished piece of metal coated with a light sensitive emulsion. Daguerreotypes were one-of-a-kind images that could not be reproduced.

Wet Collodion a nineteenth-century photographic type in which a piece of plate glass was coated with a silver halide emulsion and placed in a camera while still wet. A latent image was recorded, and then the wet plate was developed, fixed, and varnished to create a glass negative for production of stereograph and mammoth plate photographs.

Silver Gelatin Print the most common form of twentieth-century black-and-white photographic print, in which a piece of paper is coated with a light-sensitive silver gelatin emulsion

Stereograph a popular nineteenth-century photograph in which two small, side-by-side images made using a special twin lens camera create the illusion of a three dimensional scene.

Sublime a historical, philosophical, literary, and art idea that contributed to Romanticism the notion of a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

Romanticism an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature.

Framework

Explain to guests that the first Euro-Americans to see the Yosemite region were probably part of the Walker party in 1833, but the first official entrants were part of the Mariposa Battalion, who, in 1851, were sent to forcibly remove the Indian inhabitants of Yosemite after the discovery of gold on John C. Frémont’s ranch in the Mariposa/Bear Valley area of the Sierra Nevada foothills. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, publisher James Mason Hutchings entered Yosemite with a party of men, including Thomas A. Ayres, who created the first drawing of Yosemite Falls ever made.

Explain that the three most significant of Yosemite’s nineteenth-century photographers—Charles Leander Weed, Carleton E. Watkins, and Eadweard J. Muybridge—all created photographs of Yosemite from glass negatives, using the wet plate collodion process, and printing them on paper using the albumen process. All three men were famed for their mammoth plates, unusually large, plate glass negatives designed to capture the large sweeping vistas of Yosemite (and other western sites). However, all three men also created numerous stereographs or stereoviews. These much smaller, side-by-side images were popular for armchair travelers after their invention in the 1840s, and they were comparatively inexpensive, which made them an increasingly popular tourist souvenir commemorating a visit to a wondrous place like Yosemite.

Explain that publisher and entrepreneur James Mason Hutchings made another visit to Yosemite in June, 1859, this time with photographer Charles Weed, rather than a painter or drawer, as he had in 1855 with Thomas Ayres. This was in part because Ayres’ drawings and lithographs, which had been published in Hutchings’ California Magazine in 1855, were deemed by readers to be fanciful—and Hutchings needed to prove that Yosemite Falls were indeed as dramatic as they had been earlier represented.

Explain that Weed took the first photograph of Yosemite in 1859, an imperial-sized (10x14-inch) salt print of Yosemite Falls. During this first visit, he made twenty imperial prints, and forty stereograph views of Yosemite, beginning what would become Later, in 1863/1864, Weed returned with a camera capable of holding 17x22-inch mammoth plates. Gold-toned albumen prints, a new technology that hadn’t been available in 1859, were made of these later negatives, which were richer and clearer than the earlier imperial salt prints.

Explain that all of Watkins’ photographs included in the exhibition are mammoth plate albumen prints from 1861-1865. He made his first visit to Yosemite in 1861, two years after Weed’s first visit, and three years before Weed’s second visit. This enabled him to make a name for himself as a Yosemite photographer, as his 18x22-inch mammoth plate images were very well received by the public, and by scientists such as Josiah D. Whitney, William Henry Brewer, and Clarence King. In a game of one-upsmanship, Charles Weed returned to the valley in 1864, and Watkins returned in 1865 with an even bigger camera with a higher quality lens.

Explain that the wet plate collodion process was an extraordinarily labor intensive photographic process. The artist would have to work quickly. First he had to clean a sheet of plate glass perfectly, removing any dust, lint, streaks, and so forth. Second, in the darkness of a tent, he coated the plate in a viscous, light-sensitive mixture of chemicals called collodion. Third, while the plate was still wet with collodion, the photographer would place the plate in a light-proof plate holder, slip it into the enormous cabinet of the large-format view camera, and remove a lens cap or board from the front of the lens or the front of the plate holder (he would have already trained and focused his lens on his subject), and make an exposure of a few seconds. The lens cap or board would be replaced, and the still-wet plate taken back to the dark tent, and developed, fixed, and varnished using a number of different chemical solutions.

The prints were made from the glass negatives (the negative-making process is described above) and then printed on albumen-coated paper. Photographic chemicals, namely silver salts, had to be bound to paper using albumen, or egg whites. The albumen printing process included the following steps: first, a piece of paper is coated with an emulsion of egg white (albumen) and table salt (sodium chloride), then dried. The albumen seals the paper and creates a slightly glossy surface. Second, the paper is dipped in a solution of silver nitrate and water, rendering the surface light-sensitive. Third, the paper is dried in total darkness. Fourth, the dried, prepared paper is placed in a frame in direct contact under a negative, often a glass negative with collodion emulsion, and exposed to light until the image achieves the desired level of darkness. Fifth, a bath of sodium thiosulfate fixes the print’s exposure, preventing further darkening. Finally, optional gold or selenium toning improves the photograph’s tone and stabilizes it against fading (e.g. the Weed photograph from 1864).

Explain to guests that Watkins and his contemporaries created both mammoth plate photographs and smaller stereoviews. Like their painter counterparts, the photographers sold their mammoth plate prints to discerning collectors, often wealthy patrons including the likes of Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, and their smaller stereoviews to tourists and armchair travelers elsewhere in the country.

An Interview with John Baldessari

For a lovely introduction to John Baldessari's thinking, you can read a wonderful interview with artist John Baldessari from 2004, originally published in Artnet, for a sense of his personality, artistic sensibility, and interest in contemporary ideas...

For some further information, read the biographical essays associated with the Magical Secrets: A Printmaking Community website.

Mary Snowden: Levittown

Levittown
2001
Painting on panel
Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Gift of the artist

Levittown, New York, a tract-home development built upon 1,200 acres of potato fields in 1947, has long been considered the quintessential postwar American suburb.
While similar subdivisions were constructed in hundreds of thousands of towns and cities across America, Levittown remains a meaningful reference for contemporary artists commenting on the influence that suburbs have had on the American psyche.

Mary Snowden nostalgically recalls the postwar era in her painting Levittown, which features an American GI and his aproned wife parachuting to their new life of domestic bliss. An anonymous landscape of single-family detached houses stretches long into the horizon. These mass-produced houses functioned as more than basic shelters for veterans and their families; they also became status symbols that embodied conventional domesticity, the nuclear family, and homeownership— all of which became inextricably linked to the American Dream.

Faces: Chuck Close and Contemporary Portraiture Tour Blueprint

Introduction
Faces: Chuck Close and Contemporary Portraiture features artworks selected from the San Francisco collection of Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the GAP Corporation. The works in the exhibition reflect the Fishers’ interest in collecting a broadly representative body of contemporary art of the highest quality—so much so that they are currently in negotiations to build a new museum on the Presidio in San Francisco to be called CAMP (Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio).

The artworks selected for this exhibition represent just a fraction of the Fishers’ extensive collection of contemporary art; here viewers’ attention is focused on contemporary expressions of ideas about portraiture, raising new questions about one of the oldest genres of art in the historical periods (the oldest extant portrait to date is approximately 27,000 years old in southwestern France).

This exhibition is generously sponsored by International Game Technology with additional support from the Portrait Society of Reno.


Text Panels

FACES: Chuck Close and Contemporary Portraiture
Portraiture is one of art’s oldest genres, with roots tracing back to the ancient Egyptian era. Defined as a painting, photograph, or sculpture in which the human face is depicted, a traditional portrait aims to capture a human likeness—sometimes in an idealized manner and at other times with stark accuracy.

Beginning in the twentieth century, however, many artists began to challenge the conventions of the genre. Does a portrait need a human face to be considered valid? Can a portrait be employed as part of a larger social or political message? The contemporary artists in this exhibition are noted for the innovative ways they explore the answers to these questions. Whether examining issues related to history and popular culture, or investigating personal identity and autobiography, the artworks in this exhibition are as varied and diverse as the artists who made them.

Chuck Close
A leading figure in contemporary American art since the 1970s, Chuck Close is celebrated for his successful efforts to reinvigorate the field of modern portraiture. Best known for the monumental faces he has painted, photographed, printed, and most recently woven into tapestries, Close developed a formal methodology based on color and structural analysis that radically departs from traditional modes of portraiture. The process of making these large-scale works is labor intensive—taking anywhere from four months to two years to complete a painting—and requires collaboration from a range of assistants.

Chuck Close Tapestries
Chuck Close's tapestries were woven in collaboration with Magnolia Editions, a fine art studio in Oakland, California. Magnolia Editions' innovative approach to the time-honored medium of tapestry brings together a printmaker's eye for color and a scientist's attention to accuracy to create Jacquard weavings using electronic and digital technologies ordinarily limited to industrial production.

Proprietary color matching techniques developed by Magnolia Editions were used to create sophisticated digital weave files that were then sent to a small, family-owned
mill in Belgium that owns a customized, seven-foot-wide loom. Each pixel of the weave file represents a weave structure (a combination of colored threads); thus, each weave structure results in a unique color. As the tapestries are woven directly from a computer reading the weave file—with no interference or mediation from weavers—the artist maintains complete control over the final work.

Close's tapestries are woven from scans of daguerreotype portraits of the artist's friends and contemporaries, including Philip Glass, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Kate Moss.

• Philip Glass is an American music composer. He is a prolific music writer, having written three Oscar-winning scores for films.

• Lorna Simpson is an important African American artist. In a 2007 Artinfo interview, she interestingly said with regard to self-portraiture: “I do not appear in any of my work. I think maybe there are elements to it and moments to it that I use from my own personal experience, but that, in and of itself, is not so important as what the work is trying to say about either the way we interpret experience or the way we interpret things about identity.”

• Kiki Smith is an American artist best known for her sculpture, although she works in many media. Her work focuses on issues related to gender and identity. She is a member of the artist collaborative known as Colab.

• Kate Moss is an English supermodel.

• Jacquard tapestries refer to tapestries woven on Jacquard looms, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801.

James
2002
Polaroid Polacolor photograph, masking tape, pencil and ink on mounted Foamcore

To make a painting, Chuck Close begins with a photograph of the person he wants to depict—in this case the artist James Siena. Close overlays the photograph with a hand-drawn grid, and then he draws a second grid on a large canvas. Then, he fills each square on the canvas with rings of colors that—when viewed from a distance—appear as an average hue. When seen up close, the gridded squares appear similar to computer-generated pixels, but when seen from afar the overall face emerges clearly.

Cindy Sherman
Untitled #97, 98, 99, 100
1982
Color coupler prints

This series of self-portraits, sometimes referred to as the Pink Robe series, is Cindy Sherman’s follow-up to her legendary Untitled Film Stills produced in the late 1970s. In these images, Sherman says she was “thinking of the idea of the centerfold model. The pictures were meant to look like a model just after she’d been photographed for a centerfold.” By completely concealing herself with a pink chenille robe and directing her gaze forcefully towards the viewer, Sherman aims to frustrate—both psychologically and emotionally—anyone who approaches the photograph. Unlike traditional centerfold photographs that typically objectify the female body, Sherman used techniques to subvert the vulnerability of the female model, allowing her to resist exploitation.

• Ask guests to consider the differences between a self-portrait and a portrait—aside from the obvious, are there conceptual or methodological differences between a portrait of oneself and a portrait of someone else?

• Explain that a central question about portraits has centered on whether the images are more like mirrors reflecting the viewer’s interests/needs/desires on the sitter, or whether they are more like windows revealing the identity of the sitter.

• Explain that Cindy Sherman’s work poses significant challenges to this question, as for her most famous series of portraits, Untitled Film Stills, she dresses up as numerous female characters from film and popular culture and photographs herself. These images are thus not self-portraits in any strict sense of the word.

• Ask guests to think about how women are or have been represented in different kinds of media. What kinds of stereotypes of women exist as a result of media portrayals?

• Ask guests to consider why or how they think that Sherman’s work might ask us to engage with such questions.

Andy Warhol
One of the most influential and provocative artists of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol looked to images of American popular culture, fame, stardom and glamour to create some of the most iconic and defining portraits of our time. Throughout his career Warhol captured faces ranging from those of musicians and movie stars to political figures—including Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mick Jagger, and Dolly Parton.

[I did find this wonderful quotation from an interview with Tyson Meade in 2001 for Interview magazine:

Dolly: “He was the only person I’ve met that’s weirder than me, that dressed worse and looked stranger. And didn’t care, just like me. I would always ask him, “What do you look like under that wig?”, and he’d reply, “What do you look like under that one?” I’d say, “Well, you’ll never know,” and he’d say, “Well, you’ll never know!”] –KD

Gerhard Richter
German artist Gerhard Richter is best known for oscillating between abstraction and representational imagery using a variety of media ranging from oils and watercolor to overpainted photographs. In the early 1990s, Richter created a series of mirror paintings using blood-red, color-coated glass that reflects whatever comes before it—whether it be the paintings hanging opposite it in the gallery or museum visitors walking in front of it. In undertaking this series of mirrors, Richter joined a centuries-old conversation in the field of Western art about whether artworks actually depict an authentic reality. Richter once noted that a mirror painting, “is the only picture that always looks different. And perhaps there's an allusion somewhere to the fact that every picture is a mirror.”

[Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Eastern Germany. He emigrated in 1961. His training had been in orthodox Communist-bloc Realist painting. He soon made a name for himself with three different types of work, uniquely his own: schematic, Minimalist abstracts; splashy, messy abstracts; and finely painted soft-focus photographic imagery–the latter his best-known work. In this show he has painted a mirror blood red so that the viewer can be the subject of the portrait.] –KD

• Ask guests to consider why a piece called Mirror Painting (Blood Red)—essentially an abstract piece—would be included in a portraiture exhibition.

• Ask guests what does a mirror require them to do?

Richard Artschwager
Richard Artschwager came of age at the height of the Pop Art movement in New York during the late 1950s; he also saw the emergence of Photorealist painting over the next decade. Like the Pop artists, Artschwager often looked to popular magazines and well-known personalities as subjects for his paintings—such as this portrait of beloved Manhattan art gallery owner Holly Solomon. With a background in commercial production (Artschwager also managed a furniture factory in New York for nearly ten years), he was introduced to mass-produced materials such as Celotex, onto which he painted this portrait.

[Artschwager was born in Washington, DC in 1923 but was raised in New Mexico. He received a BFA from Cornell University in 1948, his schooling having been interrupted by a tour in the US army in World War II. Through his long career as a sculptor and painter he has resisted categorization. In a 1988 review of an Artschwager retrospective Roberta Smith of the New York Times says: “Throughout the 1960s, his idiosyncratic, multi-faceted work hovered in the vicinity of Pop, Minimalism and Photo-Realism without ever requesting permission to land. A master of the reconstructed readymade, an assiduous manipulator of appropriated images, forms and uningratiating, non-art materials (often within the same hybridized painting-sculpture), Mr. Artschwager established himself as a free agent, a jack-of-all-trades.”

In this portrait of Holly Solomon, a prominent New York art collector/dealer, Artschwager chose to use his favorite painting surface -- a canvas-weave vinyl called Celotex. He is known for these paintings on Celotex as well as for abstracted furniture forms and faux-wood painting on countless surfaces.] –KD

Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld has been praised for his efforts to carry on the venerable documentary tradition of compiling a collective portrait of America. Similar projects were undertaken by photographers such as Walker Evans in the 1930s and Robert Frank two decades later. In 2001, Sternfeld published Stranger Passing, a series of sixty portraits that he took of Americans he encountered during his cross-country trips. The title Stranger Passing refers to Walt Whitman’s poem, “To a Stranger,” from Leaves of Grass:

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

[Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City in 1944. He earned a BFA from Dartmouth and began working with color photography in the 1970s, having been drawn to it through his interest in the color theory of Josef Albers. He uses an 8 x 10” camera, enabling him to achieve crisp detail. His subjects are found everywhere in the country, doing, for the most part, everyday things. His goal has been to search out a collective American identity. He labels each large color portrait with great detail, sometimes ironic, often poignant.] –KD

Günther Forg
German-born artist Günther Forg works in a wide variety of media. Claiming unlimited freedom in his art production, he treats materials in unconventional ways and quotes art-historical precedents as he wishes. Often associated with Minimalism because of his frequent use of the color gray and the simplicity of his compositions, Forg is also sometimes compared to an Abstract Expressionist painter because of his bold brushstrokes. This work also includes one of Forg’s large-scale photographs.

Sophie Calle
With the zeal of an investigator and the obsession of a voyeur, French artist Sophie Calle probes the border between public and private in her own life and the lives of others. In her series of Autobiographical Stories, Calle looks to her own past for incidents with deep psychological resonance. By recounting a memory about her own bed—and the man who later killed himself in it—she suggests that portraits of personal objects can convey powerful truths in the same way that human portraits do.

[Sophie Calle was born in France in 1953. She is described variously as a photographer, writer, videographer, Conceptual artist and an installation artist. With a cool documentary style Calle explores the interface of our private selves and public lives. She often orchestrates what she films. She has filmed people (friends, acquaintances) sleeping in her bed. She has followed strangers and recorded all they do in a day. She has hired a detective to follow her and record what she does (unbeknownst to her). She admits to being a voyeur, of other people’s lives and of her own.

Her work in the late 1980s, Autobiographical Stories, deals with memories of her past. The Bed, the photograph in this show, deals with a story from her life. Her parents had rented out her room after she had left home. The renter set himself on fire in the bed she had slept in for seventeen years. Calle photographed from an upper storey window the ruined, discarded mattress on the ground below. One critic, discussing the Autobiographical Stories series, states: “Despite its deep psychological resonance, the self-revealing aspect of Autobiographical Stories is tempered by a cool and distanced sensibility.”] --KD

Jim Dine
Jim Dine’s The Yellow Painting asks us to consider whether a human face is necessary for a painting to be considered a portrait. Dine is often associated with the 1960s Pop Art movement because he frequently incorporated common everyday objects into his work. Unlike many Pop artists, however, Dine developed a personal, symbolic language over the years and his work frequently makes autobiographical references. In The Yellow Painting, Dine affixes his own tools—including bolt-cutters, pliers, and brushes—to the canvas, implying that these instruments might stand in for himself.

[Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied art at the Boston School of
Applied Arts and received a BFA from Ohio University. He moved to New York in 1959 and was soon involved with the artists who were moving away from abstract impressionism and moving toward the creation of Pop Art. But Dine’s work is far more personal than that of most Pop artists. As a child Dine was fascinated with the racks of tools in his family’s hardware store, and these tools became a frequent personal motif in his work, along with artists’ tools and domestic objects. In The Yellow Painting in this show we see (maybe) bolt cutters, a monkey wrench, a kitchen knife, pliers, a stencil brush. Is it a self-portrait? A reviewer on Encarta states: “Dine’s tool drawings from the 70s are among his most subtle, characteristic and moving images.”

Dine’s body of work includes drawing, painting, sculpture, ‘happenings’, collage and assemblage.] –KD

• Ask guests to think about portraits (or self portraits) for a moment. What do they think? Can a group of objects such as a number of tools stand in for the portrait of a person and still be considered a portrait?

• Ask guests to consider what they would include in a self-portrait to represent themselves in a way similar to how Dine has done so in The Yellow Painting.

Sam Taylor-Wood
British artist Sam Taylor-Wood looks to Bram Stoker’s 1897 Victorian novel Dracula as inspiration for this series of self-portraits. In these photographs, Taylor-Wood presents herself in a range of poses that refer to a scene in the novel when Lucy—Dracula’s young, barely-clothed victim—is left alone on a chair as the vampire’s silhouette flees the room.

In Taylor-Wood’s images, Dracula’s silhouette is nowhere to be seen—not even his chair casts a shadow. Rather, we see a young woman who has been liberated from the constraints of Victorian society and enjoys unrestrained freedom. Her prominent shadow suggests that she has control of the situation.

[Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967. She is known as a Conceptual artist, a photographer, a singer, and a creator of multi-screen video works. White Cube, the gallery that represents her, had the following statement about these photographs, which they referred to as self-portraits: The Bram Stoker’s Chair series are “...conscious acts of self-iconoclasm in which the artist’s face (and fame) is obliterated, either by being draped with her hair or else masked by a trailing arm. These mark a departure from the trials of the emotional self towards physical trials of the body.”

“Taylor-Wood’s Bram Stoker’s Chair is so called because the chair in question, which magically supports her contortions in each photograph, casts no shadow. She has been trussed up by a bondage expert in constrictive harnesses and hung from wires attached to the ceiling for hours on end while performing her poses. The final images of seemingly effortless acrobatics were heavily doctored using computer manipulation, releasing her body from the bondage and supporting cables to float freely in midair.”] –KD

Shirin Neshat
For Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, who now lives and works in New York City, photography is a medium that allows her to explore Islamic traditions, gender roles, and the complexities of the contemporary Muslim world. Neshat’s work is concerned with the opposition that exists between man and woman in traditional Islamic society. In her large-scale arresting portraits, she demystifies Islamic women by unveiling their faces and presenting them as self-assured, dignified individuals.

[Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in pre-revolutionary Iran. Her parents prided themselves on being ‘Westernized’ and encouraged their daughters to go out into the world. Neshat studied in Los Angeles, at Dominican College in the San Francisco Bay Area, and received her MFA from UC Berkeley.

Neshat works as a photographer and video artist. She draws upon her conflicting feelings and nostalgia for her Iranian heritage as she explores Islam and gender roles. She is best known for her Women of Allah series—stunning, huge photographs of traditionally garbed Iranian women with flowing Persian calligraphy overlaying their faces. Her videos, often on two screens with the viewer standing between them, have won awards world-wide and caused controversy in conservative Islamic societies.]
–KD

John Baldessari
John Baldessari is a conceptual artist who has spent his career challenging the highly theoretical orientation of Conceptual art. In many ways he can be compared to Ed Ruscha—they share a low-key sense of humor—taking the seriousness out of the holy grail of Conceptualism. He is also compared to the French Dadaist Duchamp, as he uses his own art to question the nature of art itself. Duchamp believed that art should appeal to the intellect rather than the senses. His “readymades” were ordinary objects turned into art objects, e.g. The Fountain.

For Baldessari, the qualities of photographs have little was an art object but is a convenient mechanical tool. However in spite of this, he has been a great mentor and teacher in Southern California helping to emphasize a concern for content over a concern for pictorial issues.

In Perrier with Figures we see three images, a green bottle (Perrier), a larger and central image of a couple with their faces blocked out by circles, and a third image of a couple interacting with each other as in conversation. The piece begs the question. Why is this piece in a Portrait exhibit? Why are the faces blocked out? Is this a portrait or is it asking us, as the viewers, to look deeper into the meaning and the relationship between the three images. Or is it just Baldessari having a little fun at our expense? –JN

• Ask guests to consider how Neshat depicts the people in her photographs. What do the photographs convey about the people she chooses to photograph?

• Ask guests to consider how Neshat’s photographs might challenge conventional images of Iranian cultures prominent in western media?

• Explain that Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies and the complexity of certain dichotomies, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme with the technique of showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through such motifs as light and dark, black and white, male and female.

• Explain that Neshat tries to address the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives are not explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world.

Additional Tour/Discussion Suggestions
• Explain that Close began his career shortly after graduating from the Yale University art department, an important influence on his development as an artist in the mid-1960s.

• Explain that Close’s first major work, Big Nude, 1964, was an enormous full-length portrait of a nude female model. Close was unhappy with the result, and focused his efforts on tightly cropped faces, or “heads” as he calls them himself.

• Explain that Close is very interested in the tension between the order of the grid system he uses to paint his large canvases and the organic shapes of his sitters.

• Explain that Close admired the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline.

• Explain that a ruptured artery within his spinal column led to his permanent paralysis in 1988.

• Ask guests to look at the large painting called James. Ask guests to consider how they think Close painted it.

• Explain that, as in many of his paintings, prints, and drawings, James is created from a photographic “maquette,” an image over which Close creates a grid that eventually helps him to transfer the image to a much larger surface.

• Explain to guests the Jacquard tapestries are computer-guided textile weavings that depict images taken from digital image files based on daguerreotypes Close has made of his friends and peers.

“Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.”
--Chuck Close

Frank Stella, "Agua Caliente"

FRANK STELLA

Agua Caliente
Print, Silkscreen, 1972

Frank Stella is one of America’s leading contemporary artists. He was a pioneer of the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s, a type of art that stressed the reduction of the image to its most basic elements of color, shape, and design. Minimalists strove to create artwork that was devoid of symbolism, representation, or opinion. Stella is famous for saying “What you see is what you get”. In the 1970s he deviated from Minimalist designs to incorporate sculpture as a third dimension in his work. By the 1990s he had progressed toward more complex imagery, creating elaborate, vivid works that paid homage to his extensive cultural and literary knowledge.. Stella’s abstract prints in lithography, screen printing, etching, and offset lithography ( a technique he introduced) have had a strong impact on printmaking as art.

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Mass, in 1936. He studied painting at the Phillips Academy in Andover and later at Princeton University. He moved to New York City in 1958 and has spent most of his life living and working in the city, though his art projects have taken him around the globe. He has done large scale outdoor sculpture, mural projects, and has done architectural designs for pavilions and museums. He did set design for dancer Merce Cunningham for the musical Pajama Game. He is a printmaker of the subjects and styles of his paintings. His series called “Indian Bird” is derived from one of his favorite pastimes, bird watching. He has won numerous awards, grants, and honors and has taught and lectured at universities and museums in America and abroad. Never one to rest on his laurels, Frank Stella is constantly evolving, changing, and responding to the world around him.

This biographical information is from several internet sites including AskART, Art Cellar Exchange, MetroArtWork, Hollis Taggart Galleries and Answers.com.

Submitted by Lois Smalley

Hans Meyer-Kassel, "Nevada Landscape"

HANS MEYER-KASSEL

Nevada Landscape
Oil on canvas, 1945

From the Nevada Historical Quarterly, by Jeff Nicholson:

"Hans Meyer-Kassel, a native of Germany, arrived in Nevada in 1937 at the age of 65. Prior to his moving to Nevada, he had enjoyed success and honors as an artist in Germany and had exhibited throughout Europe. Born Hans Meyer in 1872, he studied art at the University of Munich, choosing portraiture as his field of art. At the age of nineteen he was already welcoming clients to his first professional studio and received many important commissions in the years following. He became a professor at Germany’s Royal Academy of Art and was a founding member of the International Art Society of Munich. In recognition of his early achievements, his native city, following longstanding tradition, bestowed upon him the high honor of adding its name, Kassel, to his."

"A classically trained and accomplished painter, Meyer-Kassel produced a steady stream of landscapes, still lifes, nautical scenes, and portraits. In Nevada he had studios in Genoa, Reno, and Carson City. During the 1940s he did portraits of four of Nevada’s past governors as well as several Nevada dignitaries. Working in oils, pastels and tempera, he was a prolific artist and many of his works are in public and private collections throughout Nevada. Hans Meyer-Kassel maintained his vigorous painting until the last day of his life in 1952, when he simply laid down his brushes for an afternoon nap and never awoke."

Robert Swain Gifford, "Landscape with Cattle"

ROBERT SWAIN GIFFORD

Landscape with Cattle
Etching, 1888

Robert Swain Gifford was born in 1840 on Naushon Island, Massachusetts. He studied art with a Dutch artist, Albert Van Beest, in Bedford. In the early 1860s he had studios in New York and Massachusetts. By 1866 he had made New York City his permanent home, although he returned regularly to Massachusetts and other parts of New England to sketch and paint. In 1869 he traveled and sketched extensively in the Western States. In 1870 he began a series of trips to Europe and the Middle East. He was especially taken with the work of the Barbizon artists, especially those whose work he saw on a trip to Marseilles. Peter Bermingham in American Art in the Barbizon Mood, (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975) notes the change in Gifford’s style as a result of that exposure to the different palettes of some European artists: “...after that his style evolved from an overblown romanticism,....to stark, simpler compositions, wide spacious vistas, and, most typically, a cold, somber mood drawn from the barren dunes and rugged cedars of the New England coast.”

In 1877 Gifford began teaching at Cooper Union School in New York City. He remained there for thirty years, the last nine years as director. He helped establish the New York Etching Club in 1877 and was a founding member of the American Society of Painters in Watercolors. He won medals at Expositions in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Charleston, and Paris. He was a friend of Thomas and Mary Moran, both accomplished etchers. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He died in New York City in 1905.

-- Kathleen Durham

Harold Joe Waldrum, "Morning Light"

HAROLD JOE WALDRUM

Morning Light
Aquatint etching, 1991

Joe Waldrum is best known for his paintings, aquatint etchings, and linocuts of the adobe churches and mud-hewn moradas of New Mexico. His color-saturated paintings have minimal lines, but he has mastered the use of light and shadow to portray these sacred places. For several years Waldrum made his “window series:, which were works with the “painting as a window” type of composition. Just as Matisse, Magritte, and other artists have been drawn to that format, so was Waldrum. The churches of New Mexico proved to be a passionate subject for him as he depicted the spiritual and mysterious aspects of these earthy structures in his works.

Harold Joe Waldrum was born in Savoy, Texas on August 23, 1934. He earned a college degree in music from Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, and a master’s degree in studio painting from Fort Hays State College in Kansas. Waldrum taught art and music in the public schools of Kansas for sixteen years. In 1970 he moved to the hill country of Texas and then in 1971 to Santa Fe, New Mexico. After he killed a man during a break-in in his studio, Waldrum moved to New York for a time to escape the man’s angry relatives. By 1979 he had returned to New Mexico and began painting the churches. He lived on a remote ranch and raised mules. In 1994 Waldrum had a book published with provocative essays, photographs of his “Mountain Ranch” mules, and color reproductions of his work. Joe Waldrum died in 2003 in his beloved New Mexico.

Quotes from the artist:
“There is a beautiful place in the United States of America. It is in northern New Mexico between the two mountain ranges. This place is called “The Cradle”. Its people, the land, and its elements are special and peculiar. I find the genius of this place reflected in the churches”.

“When my analyst in New York identified me as socially schizophrenic, I felt better knowing that my malady had a name; and when I first saw the mountain range of the thieves...I felt better knowing there was a place for the socially schizophrenic to live.”

This information compiled from articles from Artspace Quarterly, the online gallery of Rio Bravo Fine Arts, and the online archives of AskART.

-- Lois Smalley

Harold Lukens Doolittle, Morning in Yosemite

HAROLD LUKENS DOOLITTLE

Morning in Yosemite
Aquatint (no date)

Harold Doolittle (1883-1974) was an etcher, furniture maker, and civil engineer from Southern California. Though he worked in all the graphic processes including photography and collotype, he is most known for his beautiful aquatints. Doolittle was an inventive man who built his own press and mezzotint rocker, and preferred to make his own linen paper.

Doolittle was born in Pasadena and studied at Cornell University and Throop Polytechnic Institute, now known as Caltech. He worked for many years as chief design engineer for the Southern California Edison Company.

He served as President of the California Print Makers in the 1940s and 1950s. Other memberships that he held included Pasadena Society of Artists, Society of American Graphic Artists, and several chapters of the Society of Etchers. Doolittle is represented in the Library of Congress, California State Library, and public libraries of the cities of New York and Los Angeles.

This biographical info provided online by two galleries representing Doolittle’s works: The Blue Heron Gallery and the Annex Galleries.

--Lois Smalley and Kathleen Durham

William Dassonville, Yosemite Valley

WILLIAM DASSONVILLE

Yosemite Valley
Photograph, Platinum Print, 1906

The following is from the book Dassonville, with a biographical essay by Peter Palmquist.

William Dassonville’s photographic legacy is considerable, including an outstanding body of fine photographs in the pictorialist tradition. During his lifetime his photographs were widely published and he won numerous prizes and honors. He was an innovative craftsman and self-taught chemist, a perfectionist who developed and marketed his own line of photgraphic printing paper: Charcoal Black.

Born in Sacramento, CA, in 1879, William Dassonville was given a camera as a youth and made photos of his friends and relatives. In 1900 he opened a portrait studio in San Francisco, and about that time he joined the California Camera Club. In addition to portraits he did landscapes and seascapes. His favorite areas to photograph included Yosemite, the High Sierra, the Pacific Coast around Monterey and Carmel, and Marin County north of San Francisco. Dassonville exhibited at the San Francisco Photography Salons of 1901, 1902, and 1903. His works traveled the nation with the American Photography Salon. In 1906 the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed his studio and all negatives of his pre-1906 work were lost, but he continued to exhibit his photographs. By 1910 his portrait business had grown and he had many customers of significant financial means. When World War I caused a critical shortage of platinum printing papers which Dassonville’s work depended on, he began to experiment with a silver bromide emulsion to coat high quality paper. This led to his Charcoal Black paper and in 1924 he sold his portrait studio to concentrate on the manufacture and marketing of Charcoal Black. He had good success with this as it was popular with photographers such as Ansel Adams. In 1941, at age 62, Dassonville sold the business. He continued to be active in photography, and worked as a medical photographer at Stanford University’s Hospital in San Francisco. William Dassonville died July 15, 1957, in San Francisco.

-- Lois Smalley

Jeff Nicholson, Sunset Down South

JEFF NICHOLSON

July Down South
Oil on canvas, 1979

Jeff Nicholson has been painting landscapes for 35 years, working primarily in oil and watercolor, making art that captures the beauty of Nevada and the Great Basin. He has been described as the “consummate Nevada realist painter”, and his works are in several permanent collections, including the Nevada Museum of Art, the University of Nevada Reno, and the Governor’s Mansion in Carson City.

Nicholson was born in 1947 in Arcata, moved to Reno in 1962, and graduated from Reno High School in 1966. He attended the University of Nevada Reno, completing his studies there in 1978. Nicholson has been involved in art-related employment for many years; he served as a draughtsman in the U.S. Army in the Panama Canal Zone (1967-68), and has worked as a commercial silkscreener and layout artist. He has taught art at Truckee Meadows College and is founder and co-owner of Great Basin Gallery in Carson City. Over the years his art has been exhibited at several Reno and Carson City galleries, and the Nevada Museum of Art has twice honored him with one-man shows. Nicholson states the inspiration for his art is drawn from noted artists Maynard Dixon, Robert Caples, and Craig Sheppard.

Quote from the Artist (from the late 1970s):

“I’d like to pay tribute to Maynard Dixon, whose works I have studied so intensely. One day I hope it can be said that I accomplished as much in capturing that mystical, spiritual quality of the high desert as he did.”

Biographical information from Scenic Nevada.org and Renown Health Center Online Art Gallery.

--Kathleen Durham and Lois Smalley

Frank de Haven, Sunset Landscape

FRANK DE HAVEN

Sunset Landscape
Oil on canvas, 1910

Frank DeHaven was born in Bluffton, Indiana (date unknown). He came to New York in 1886 and studied with George Henry Smillie. He was one of several artists who painted shoreline scenes on Long Island and in Massachusetts. In his father’s obituary in 1915 there were flowery descriptions of the rest of the family. Frank DeHaven was described as “the well-known landscape painter of New York City”. In another amazing passage the unknown author states: “It is not surprising to find latter-day Hudson River School influences, and an intense Barbizon, or more specifically, Tonalist sensibility in much of DeHaven’s work.” DeHaven was also known as an accomplished violin maker. He and his wife traveled extensively through the United States always searching for new places to paint.

--Kathleen Durham and Lois Smalley

Edwin M. Dawes, Fields of May

EDWIN M. DAWES
1872-1945

Fields of May
Oil on canvas, ca. 1915

Edwin Dawes was born in Boone, Iowa in 1872. He studied art in Pennsylvania with William Lathrop and the New Hope school of American Barbizon painters. He supported himself as a sign painter in Minneapolis for several years, but continued to paint and study art in his spare time. He exhibited with the Minneapolis Artists’ League and his work was shown at the 1913 Chicago Art Institute show.

In 1914 Dawes moved West, traveling and painting in Montana, Arizona, Missouri and Nevada. He worked for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company, painting the Grand Canyon and Glacier National Park. He settled in California in 1915, but left frequently to explore mining possibilities in gold and silver. He lived for a time in Fallon and in Reno. Dawes died in Los Angeles in 1945.

--Kathleen Durham and Lois Smalley

Suzanne Kanatsiz, Ceremonial Cloak II

SUZANNE KANATSIZ

Ceremonial Cloak II
Mixed Media, 1994

Suzanne Kanatsiz works in sculpture, installation, and drawing. Her forms are wide-ranging; relief panels, earthworks, steel sculptures, and more. Her experimental and conceptual work makes use of diverse combinations of organic and manufactured/machined materials. Many of these works have primitive features, and are created via slow, laborious processes. Concentric rings, circles, and spheres done in repetition are prominent in her designs. Ceremonial Cloak is an example of that type of work. The principal material of the cloak is from pine cones, which were an important part of the Washoe Paiute Indian culture, and the pattern of the piece is repetitive and concentric. It was made during a time when Kanatsiz was living in Nevada.

Born in Detroit, Suzanne Kanatsiz grew up in San Diego and earned a BFA in painting from San Diego State University on 1984 and an MFA in sculpture from San Jose State University in 1988. Arabic text has long been a part of her work due to her Turkish heritage; Kanatsiz is one of two daughters born to an American mother and a Turkish father. She has lived and traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, including a teaching appointment at Sabanci University in Istanbul. She has also traveled to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Scotland, Korea, and other places in order to observe/learn the culture of the native peoples of the region and incorporate that into her artwork. She has taught sculpture at the University of Nevada Reno and at Weber State University in Utah. She currently lives in Ogden with her husband and son.

Quotes from an interview by a writer and friend of hers, Jordan Clary:

Question by Clary: “A lot of your art seems to be inspired by tribal societies. What is it about that that you try to convey with your work?”

Kanatsiz: “Indigenous peoples had a highly sophisticated relationship to the arts and its transformative powers. I am interested in imbuing that power in my work. Also different landscapes reflect my inner landscape. I love the ancient feel of a dry desert, the expansiveness of that is powerful.”

Information from “A” Gallery of Salt Lake City, The Utah Artists Project, and artist-at-large.com interview, 2007.

--Lois Smalley and Kathleen Durham

Mildred Bryan Brooks, Twilight

MILDRED BRYAN BROOKS
1901-1995

Twilight
Etching, 20th Century

Mildred Brooks was born in Missouri and came with her family to Long Beach, California in 1907 when she was six years old. She graduated with honors from USC. She went on to study at Otis and Chouinard Art Institutes. Her teachers/mentors were Tolles Chamberlin (also in this show), and Arthur Millier, who steered her toward printmaking, with an emphasis on etching. She began her career designing Christmas cards but soon acquired her own printing press and began working on her own. She taught at Stickley Art School in Pasadena, the Los Angeles Art Institute, and Pomona College. Her work won awards nationally, including one from the Chicago Society of Etchers – their first ever awarded to a woman or a Westerner! During the Depression she was able to support her family completely with her printmaking. She is best known for her etchings of trees.

--Lois Smalley and Kathleen Durham