Did You Know? :: Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Flash in Naples," 1983

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an artist from Brooklyn, New York. He was born December 22, 1960; he died August 12, 1988, after a short but meteoric career during which his work was popularized and made famous in part by his associations with Andy Warhol, Al Diaz, Julian Schnabel and the musical performer Madonna.

As a child, Basquiat showed an affinity and skill for drawing, and was encouraged to create art by his mother, who was Puerto Rican by descent, and his father, who is of Haitian descent. As a result, Basquiat was fluent in Spanish, French and English from an early age.

In late 1977, while a student at City-As-School high school in Brooklyn, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the signature of "SAMO". The graphics were messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an escape clause". In December 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the writings. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph "SAMO IS DEAD" written on the walls of SoHo buildings.

Basquiat dropped out of high school in September 1978, at the beginning of his senior year. He decided to leave his home and began living with friends, earning money by selling T-shirts and postcards on Manhattan's streets, and working in the Unique Clothing Warehouse on Broadway. By 1979, Basquiat had appeared on Glenn O'Brien's live public-access cable show TV Party. In the late 1970s, Basquiat formed a band called Gray with Vincent Gallo, Shannon Dawson, Michael Holman, Nick Taylor, Wayne Clifford. Gray performed at nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrahs, and the Mudd Club. Basquiat starred in an underground film Downtown 81 which featured some of Gray's recordings on its soundtrack. He also appeared in Blondie's video "Rapture" as a club disc jockey.

In June 1980, Basquiat participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition, sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab) and Fashion Moda. In 1981, Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine, which brought Basquiat to the attention of the wider art world.

In late 1981 he joined the Annina Nosei gallery in SoHo. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly, and alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, became part of what was called the Neo-expressionist movement. He was represented in Los Angeles by the Larry Gagosian gallery, and in Europe by Bruno Bischofberger. He started dating then-aspiring performer Madonna in autumn 1982. That same year, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated in 1984-1986. He was also briefly involved with artist David Bowes. Basquiat worked on his paintings in Armani suits and often appeared in public in these same paint-splattered $1000 suits.

By the mid 1980s, he had left Annina Nosei gallery, and was showing in the famous Mary Boone gallery in SoHo. On February 10, 1985, Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist". He was a phenomenally successful artist in this period, but increasing drug use began to interfere with his personal relationships. After Andy Warhol's death in 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated, and his drug use and depression increased. After attempting to quit heroin use during a trip to Hawaii, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in his New York studio on August 12, 1988, at the age of 27.

Selected Bibliography

Deitch J, Cortez D, and O’Brien, Glen. Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981: the Studio of the Street, Charta, 2007.

Fretz, Eric. Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 2010.

Hoban, Phoebe. Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (2nd ed.), Penguin Books, 2004.

Marshall, Richard. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Abrams / Whit

ney Museum of American Art. (Catalog for 1992 Whitney retrospective, out of print).

Marshall, Richard. Jean-Michel Basquiat: In World Only. Cheim & Read, 2005.

Marenzi, Luca. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Charta, 1999.

Mayer, Marc, Hoffman Fred, et al. Basquiat, Merrell Publishers / Brooklyn Museum, 2005.

McCluskey, Danny. "Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art Capitalism Mascot or Radiant Child?” Cameron, 2009.

Tate, Greg. Flyboy in the Buttermilk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Thompson, Margot. American Graffiti, Parkstone Press, 2009

Looking at Flash in Naples

• Ask guests what they see in the mixed media piece Flash in Naples.
• Ask guests if they know who the Flash character was. Ask guests what they think about comic book art.
• Explain that the Flash is a name shared by several fictional comic book superheroes from the DC Comics universe. Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert, the original Flash first appeared in Flash Comics #1 (January 1940). Nicknamed the Scarlet Speedster, all incarnations of the Flash possess "super-speed", including the ability to run and move extremely fast, use superhuman reflexes and seemingly violate certain laws of physics.
• Explain that Basquiat was fascinated by symbols, Roman mythology, comics, and numerous other narrative references.
• Writer, curator and gallerist Fred Hoffman called Basquiat’s work “a rich compendium of figurative imagery and references” with “an array of specific textual references to Greek mythology, Roman history, African tribal culture, systems of monetary exchange, and natural commodities, as well as states of health and wellbeing.”
• Explain that the neo-expressionist movement in contemporary art was influenced by Pop Art of the 1960s, and formed in reaction to the late 1970s fascination with conceptual and minimalist art.

Did You Know? :: Pablo Picasso, "Musical Instruments and Fruit Bowl on a Pedestal," 1913

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso, was born October 25, 1881; he died April 8, 1973.

Pablo Picasso, Musical Instruments and Fruit Bowl on a Pedestal, Fall 1913. Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 32 inches. Private Collection. © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Picasso was baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad, a series of names honoring various saints and relatives. Added to these were Ruiz and Picasso, for his father and mother, respectively, as per Spanish law. Born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913) and María Picasso y López. Picasso’s family was middle-class; his father was also a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. Ruiz’s ancestors were minor aristocrats.

The Blue Period (1901–1904) consists of somber paintings rendered in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors. This period’s starting point is uncertain; it may have begun in Spain in the spring of 1901, or in Paris in the second half of the year. Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children date from this period. In his austere use of color and sometimes doleful subject matter—prostitutes and beggars are frequent subjects—Picasso was influenced by a trip through Spain and by the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas.

The Rose Period (1904–1906) is characterized by a more cheery style with orange and pink colors, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins known in France as saltimbanques. The harlequin, a comedic character usually depicted in checkered patterned clothing, became a personal symbol for Picasso. Picasso met Fernande Olivier, a model for sculptors and artists, in Paris in 1904, and many of these paintings are influenced by his warm relationship with her, in addition to his increased exposure to French painting. The generally upbeat and optimistic mood of paintings in this period is reminiscent of the 1899–1901 period (i.e. just prior to the Blue Period) and 1904 can be considered a transition year between the two periods.

Cubism

• Arguably the seminal art movement of the twentieth century, cubism enjoyed only about 12-14 years of prominence before the events of World War I and its aftermath helped to extinguish the avant-garde spirit that brought Cubism into being.

• Works in several different cubist styles (see below) are marked by visual abstraction, obfuscation, temporal disorientation, avant-gardist rejections of past values, and the breakdown of class and art hierarchies such as “fine” and “folk” art.

• It is hard to overstate the extent to which Cubism developed in a period of rapid change and impending war, shaped by a coalition of artists committed to an idealistic conception of society opposed to war.

• Cubism is generally broken into two categories, Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism (see below). However, the two were not distinct movements so much as an evolution of the experimentation of the avant-garde style.

• 1907-1909 was a period of intense interest in all things “primitive,” especially children’s art, and art from the so-called “primitive cultures” of Africa, Oceania, and indigenous cultures, to which the Primitivist Modernists attributed an authenticity of vision and spontaneity of expression that they felt had been eroded from the contemporary styles of their art forms.

• Between 1909-1912 Cubism was widely explored, and the avant-garde experimenters revolted against nineteenth-century academic techniques of perpectival illusionism and the related assumption that a painting must represent a single moment in time and be seen from a fixed point in space (or, for that matter, depict a single position in space). The works of this period experiment with multiple viewpoints, distortions of form, ambiguous spatial relations in part in response to new theories about space and time being developed concurrently.

• 1907-1914 Cubism has a kind of cultural-political motivation in its subversion of nineteenth-century academic art styles, as well as the development of a kind of French artistic nationalism following the success of cubism.

• 1912-1914 is the period during which Cubism explodes conceptions of art beyond painting, and reaches into fields of design, architecture, and beyond, through the advent of collage and assemblage sculpture. Collage represented another rejection of academic tradition (oil on canvas) and assemblage problematized traditional sculpture by exploding the dichotomy between “high” and “vernacular” art through the use of everyday materials.

Analytic Cubism (1909–1912) is a style of painting Picasso developed along with Georges Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colors. Both artists took apart objects and “analyzed” them in terms of their shapes. Picasso and Braque’s paintings at this time have many similarities. Synthetic cubism (1912–1919) was a further development of the genre, in which cut paper fragments—often wallpaper or portions of newspaper pages—were pasted into compositions, marking the first use of collage in fine art.

Analytic Cubism is one of the two major branches of the artistic movement of Cubism, and was developed between 1908 and 1912. In contrast to Synthetic Cubism, Analytic cubists "analyzed" natural forms and reduced the forms into basic geometric parts on the two-dimensional picture plane. Color was almost non-existent except for the use of a monochromatic scheme that often included grey, blue and ochre. Instead of an emphasis on color, Analytic cubists focused on forms like the cylinder, sphere and the cone to represent the natural world.

During this movement, the works produced by Picasso and Braque shared stylistic similarities. Both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved toward abstraction, leaving only enough signs of the real world to supply a tension between the reality outside the painting and the complicated meditations on visual language within the frame.

In Paris in 1907 a major museum retrospective exhibition of the work of Paul Cézanne opened shortly after his death. The exhibition was enormously influential in establishing Cézanne as an important painter whose ideas were particularly resonant among young artists in Paris. Both Picasso and Braque found the inspiration for Cubism from Paul Cézanne, who said to observe and learn to see and treat nature as if it were composed of basic shapes like cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Some believe that the roots of cubism are to be found in the two distinct tendencies of Cézanne's later work: firstly to break the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint, thereby emphasizing the plural viewpoint given by binocular vision; and secondly, his interest in the simplification of natural forms into cylinders, spheres, and cones. However, the cubists explored this concept further than Cézanne; they represented all the surfaces of depicted objects in a single picture plane, as if the objects had had all their faces visible at the same time. This new kind of depiction revolutionized the way in which objects could be visualized in painting and art.

Synthetic Cubism was the second main movement within Cubism that was developed by Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris and others between 1912 and 1919. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter. It was the beginning of collage materials being introduced as an important ingredient of fine art work.

Considered the first work of this new style was Pablo Picasso's "Still Life with Chair-caning" (1911–1912), which includes oil cloth that was printed to look like chair-caning pasted onto an oval canvas, with text; and rope framing the whole picture. At the upper left are the letters "JOU", which appear in many cubist paintings and refers to the news-paper titled "Le Journal.” Newspaper clippings, sheet music, and like items were also included in the collages. Whereas Analytic Cubism was an analysis of the subjects (pulling them apart into planes), Synthetic Cubism is more of a pushing of several objects together. Less pure than Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism has fewer planar shifts (or schematism), and less shading, creating flatter space.

Did You Know? Tim Hawkinson: Totem

BIOGRAPHY
Tim Hawkinson was born in 1960 in San Francisco. He graduated from Cal State San Jose and later earned his MFA from UCLA. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. A twenty-year survey of his work was shown at the Whitney and then again at LACMA in 2005. Hawkinson’s work consists of drawings, prints, and photo-collages; however, he is most recognized for his sculptural creations. Hawkinson’s human-centric sculptures are often abstracted representations of his own body and usually incorporate homemade mechanical inventions in their creation and/or completion. His sculptures range greatly in size from his two inch sculpture of a bird skeleton made from his own fingernails to the stadium-sized installation at MassMOCA (and later at the Getty) of “Überorgan” – a fully automated bagpipe-like creation of inflated plastic sheeting resembling internal organs that emit an original groaning musical compilation.



Überorgan, 2000


Bird, 1997

Hawkinson’s work has a distinct handmade quality. He works with ordinary materials in unusual ways. He is known for his simple mechanical innovations in the creations of his sculptures. In his sculpture Signature Chair (1993) Hawkinson used a repurposed record player to create a machine that would automatically crank out copies of his signature. In Hawkinson’s intestine-like drawing Wall Chart of World History from Earliest Times to the Present (1997) he created a drawing tool using a basic drill with a pen attachment to create his large-scale linear drawing.

TOTEM, 2009

Hawkinson uses recognizable, ordinary, scavenged, personal and or collected materials to create his extraordinary sculptures. In Totem you will notice the forms of various plastic bottles and containers. The fountain we have on display at the Museum was based on a 2007 collaged sculpture of the same name made of string, plastic containers and papier mache. The Totem (2009) fountain on display is one of an edition of four. The one at the Nevada Museum of Art is the first installation of the piece. It is here on loan from the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York.

TRADITIONAL TOTEM POLES

Totem poles are attributed to the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast and are traditionally carved from cedar. Totems vary greatly in subject matter but were traditionally used to illustrate local legends, family lineage, notable happenings or personal tributes.



TOUR FRAMEWORK

• Ask visitors to think about this sculpture without the water. How does the water change the way we interpret the sculpture?

• Ask visitors to think of the storytelling aspects of traditional totems and to create a story about Hawkinson’s modern Totem.

• Ask visitors to think about the relationship between Native American cultural traditions and land use and water use conflicts and how this might relate to Hawkinson’s sculpture.

• Ask visitors to think how this sculpture might relate to modern-day issues of consumption and waste.

Views from China: Yang Yongliang and the Modern Metropolis

Did You Know? :: Views from China: Yang Yongliang and the Modern Metropolis



Yang Yongliang, Viridescence, Stock World, 2009. Inkjet print on paper, 16 x47 inches. Courtesy of the artist and LIMN Gallery, San Francisco.

Main Text
Upon first glance, Yang Yongliang’s photographs appear as dreamlike Chinese paintings, not unlike the traditional Chinese art he studied extensively as a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Upon closer inspection, however, one finds that his works are cleverly crafted from montaged digital photographs of China’s bustling cities—and then manipulated into haunting imaginary landscapes that critique China’s rapidly developing built environment.

Born in 1980, Yongliang is a resident of Shanghai, China, who depends heavily on a camera and a laptop computer to make his art. Using only these tools—and a knowledge of traditional Chinese painting—Yongliang invents urban scenes that depict skyscrapers under construction, freeway systems, electrical power plants, and bustling urban corridors. His compositions reveal the impacts of technological progress that China has undergone over past decades.

Between the years 1966 and 1976, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the nation of China experienced a period of political instability. During this time, artistic production came under strict government supervision. Yongliang is among a generation of young artists who came of age after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and therefore embraces a level of artistic freedom that is not common among earlier generations of Chinese artists. This is Yongliang’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

Traditional Chinese Scroll Painting

• Handscrolls provide a continuous horizontal surface of silk or paper on which to develop a composition. Though often displayed in their entirety in museums, traditional handscrolls are meant to be viewed by only one or two people and unrolled from right to left two or three feet at a time. In this way, the viewer may "travel" through a story or landscape that conveys a progression of time. Separate papers containing titles or colophons may also be attached and the complete scroll mounted with silk boards. A wooden dowel is attached on the left end of the scroll and a semicircular rod at the other end. After viewing, the scroll is rolled up around the dowel from left to right and secured with ties.

• Hanging scrolls provide the artist with a vertical format for an image. The painting surface of paper or silk is mounted with decorative silk borders. A wooden rod is attached at the bottom to give the scroll the necessary weight to hang smoothly on a wall, as well as a means of being rolled up for storage. A thin wooden strip with a cord is attached at the top for hanging the scroll. The composition of a hanging scroll usually places the foreground at the bottom of the scroll with the middle and far distances moving upward toward the top of the scroll. Hanging scrolls are displayed only for short periods of time and are then rolled up from bottom to top and secured with ties for storage.

• Scholar Officials Chinese painters and calligraphers were often members of an educated class of men. Their formal education in classic Chinese literary, historical, and philosophical texts, as well as in the history of Chinese calligraphy, painting and music, was considered essential for a cultured man. Their knowledge was highly respected in Chinese society. An educated man's responsibility was to use his knowledge to serve his ruler, the emperor, and to improve society. By the beginning of the Song dynasty (960–1279), scholars or educated men were generally required to pass a series of difficult exams to serve in the government.

• Seals are impressions made from carved stones or other media pressed into a thick, red, oil-based paste. They are affixed to a document, painting, or calligraphy to certify authorship or ownership. Since artists and writers typically used several names throughout their lives, they had several seals inscribed with their given names, artistic names, the names of their studios, and, possibly, an identifying literary expression. Usually rectangular or round, seal designs are cut into materials such as jade, ivory, and soapstone. If the characters are incised, they will appear white in the impression; if carved in relief, they will appear red. The script often used for seals derives from an ancient script, known as "seal script," used during the late Zhou (ca. 1050–256 B.C.) and Qin (221–206 B.C.) dynasties.

• Yin and Yang constitute an ancient, fundamental concept that describes the underlying nature and order within the universe. The interaction between these two polar, yet complementary, opposites can be seen in nature: the darkness of night leads to the brightness of day. Yin is associated with darkness, softness, water, passivity, the moon, the feminine, and the earth. Yang is associated with brightness, activity, the masculine, the sun, fire, and the sky.

Did You Know :: Penelope Gottlieb: No $ Down

Penelope Gottlieb: No $ Down

Introduction

Penelope Gottlieb was born in Los Angeles and grew up next to the infamous housing development, Mt. Olympus. She received her BFA from Art Center College of Design and her MFA from UC – Santa Barbara. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries as well as the Krannert Art Museum. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 21c Museum, the Drawing Center New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous corporate collections, including the Fannie Mae Corporation.

Text Panel
For nearly a decade, Penelope Gottlieb has worked to produce a series of drawings that examine the archetypal American dream of home ownership, while also exploring the idea of the house as a status symbol, marker of class identity, and focal point of desire. In NO $ DOWN, Gottlieb’s colored-pencil drawings catalogue frontal views of popular domestic architecture. From storybook homes and tract houses to traditional bungalows and numerous other architectural styles, Gottlieb offers an artistic response to the complex and evolving narrative of real estate in America.

To create her drawings, Gottlieb scours newspaper ads and real estate magazines, seizing on small photographs of houses, which become the inspiration for her finely-detailed, monochromatic renderings—some of which are based on advertisements published in Reno-area newspapers that Gottlieb collected during a recent trip to northern Nevada. Once Gottlieb completes a work, she matches it with a vintage “fixer-upper” frame, which she then elaborately “refurbishes” and paints to match the correlating drawing. This process wryly mimics the act of “flipping” houses that was common during the real estate boom of the last decade.

Gottlieb’s installation of No $ Down also includes a selection of white-washed furniture based on interiors from popular television sitcoms such as The Beverly Hillbillies and The Jeffersons. Both of these television programs implicitly linked class status with home ownership, and Gottlieb’s inclusion of these items draws attention to that complex phenomenon. Contemporary perceptions of home ownership, Gottlieb acknowledges, have changed dramatically over the past year due to America’s economic downturn. On a final wall of the gallery, Gottlieb hangs a wall of souvenir glass plates, each imprinted with an image of a single family home. These delicate plates encourage viewers to reflect on the American Dream of home ownership—a dream that has recently proven to be more fragile than ever.

Tour Framework

• Ask guests (especially children!) to find a drawing of a house that reminds them of their own home or the home of someone they know.

• Ask guests to look at the titles of the works—where do the titles of Penelope Gottlieb’s works come from?

• Explain that Gottlieb’s drawings consider the implications of the housing boom, banking fiascos, and history of the idea of the American Dream of home ownership.

• Explain that although resonant because of their subject matter in today’s economy, the works are also related to art historical precedents, including photorealism and especially the paintings of Robert Bechtle; later painting by artists such as Darlene Campbell and Salomón Huerta; and the photography of such artists as Joe Deal, Henry Wessel, Rondal Partridge, Robert Adams, Robert Isaacs, Robert Dawson, Laurie Brown, Fandra Chang and Jeff Brouws.

• Ask guests about how they think the dream of home ownership is tied to the “American Dream.”

• Ask guests about their thoughts regarding the current economic downturn and how the spate of home foreclosures in Nevada is effecting the “American Dream” and the “dream of home ownership.”

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.

Did You Know :: Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell:
• Born February 12, 1925, in Chicago, Illinois.
• Considered a “second generation” Abstract Expressionist, along with Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler.
• Studied at Smith College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia University, and in the studio of Hans Hofmann (as did Lee Krasner). However, despite her interest in Hofmann’s teaching, she was put off by his brusque manner, which included such practices as erasing and re-drawing students’ drawings while they worked.
• Influenced by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse. In fact, much of her career was spent living in France, and for a time in a house and studio adjacent to where Monet himself painted in Giverny.
• Married briefly to Barney Rosset, an American publisher, before beginning a long and tumultuous relationship with Jean-Paul Riopelle, an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor from Quebec.
• Split her time between New York City, the heart of the American-born Abstract Expressionist movement, and France.
• Included landscapes and bridges as common abstracted elements in her paintings, reflecting her interest in the beautiful French landscapes she loved, and the Brooklyn Bridge, below which her American studio and home was located.
• Worked in extremely large scale—and multi-panel paintings became very common in her work, all of which relied on stylistic elements that included the use of long, curvilinear strokes and broad stains of color, often on unprimed canvas.
• Died in 1992, leaving in her estate support for future artists through the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which awarded Reno artist Michael Sarich an “emerging artist” award in 2008.

Did You Know :: Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner was:
• Born October 27, 1908, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family.
• Studied at the Cooper Union, the Art Students League of New York, and the National Academy of Design.
• Employed by the Public Works of Art Project in 1934, the first New Deal art program, and relied upon the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project until the program ended in 1943.
• Studied in the studio of renowned “first generation” Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann from 1937-1940. This experience profoundly altered her art: from a figurative, representational style to a geometrically-inspired, Cubist-influenced, expression. In one of his critiques of her work, Hofmann reportedly exclaimed “this painting is so good it could have been painted by a man.” She never forgot the experience.
• Met her more famous husband, Jackson Pollock, in 1941, though they had an informal encounter years earlier, in 1936, at a Federal Art Project party.
• Deeply appreciated the work of Mondrian and Matisse.
• Worked in collage, and also cut her paintings and studies into pieces to create them. Partly because of this working style, scholars believe that only 599 of her paintings exist today.
• In 1956, returned to a style that included figurative elements, though now more abstract than in her early career, in which human, animal, and especially plant forms are prominent.
• Vision and Revision are two constant themes in her work, connecting to cycles of life in nature.
• Died in 1984, shortly before the first full retrospective exhibition of her work opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In MoMA’s history, she is still one of just four women to have a solo retrospective exhibition ever.

Katie Holten Review in Circa

Another Katie Holten exhibition similar to our Atlas of Memory exhibition has been recently reviewed in the magazine Circa. Clicking on the image of the article above will open the article up at a readable size in a new window.

Margaret Whiting :: Laws of the Land Tour Blueprint

Introduction

Margaret Whiting: Laws of the Land consists of sixteen multimedia sculptures made from discarded law books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, natural history books, combined with natural objects such as shells, leaves, and bones. Whiting alters the books dramatically, tearing pages from their bindings, cutting the books into sections or strata, creating collages of legal texts, and highlighting keywords and phrases. Many of the book and paper pieces are then juxtaposed with natural objects or images from natural history texts. The works yield an interesting commentary on the relationship between American land use and laws, and bring to our attention the complex history of land use and the laws governing use of land in the U.S.


About the Artist
A native of northern Minnesota, Margaret Whiting now lives and works in Waterloo, Iowa. She graduated in Medical Technology from the University of Minnesota and received a BA with an emphasis in printmaking and papermaking from the University of Northern Iowa. Whiting worked as a medical technologist for ten years, and now dedicates most of her time to her art. In addition, she performs workshops and teaches classes in paper and bookmaking. Whiting has participated in regional, national and international shows, and her work is included in museum and private collections around the country. Recently, her work was included in two national traveling exhibitions, American River and Paper Cuts: The Art of Contemporary Paper.

Artist’s Statement
I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.

- Theodore Roosevelt, speech, Washington, D.C., 1900

The laws humans develop must instill respect for the land. Through my art, I reference our need to recognize the laws of nature and the interconnectedness of all living things on this earth. I collect old law books, science books, encyclopedia and dictionaries that have been discarded, utilizing them as raw materials in my art. I am particularly interested in law books that reference land use and property rights, because they contain decisions that have shaped our past and continue to impact our lives and the world around us. American society was founded upon the opposition between humans and nature. As Americans, we view ourselves separately from the environment. In reality, this conflict of man versus nature is an illusion. We live in, depend on and are part of an ecosystem.

While reading these old law books, I sometimes circle words in the text and create new statements regarding land use and the fundamental need to protect it for future generations. I incorporate found objects from nature, images of animals in old science books or drawings of the land in geological surveys with the law book pages. I juxtapose the written word with seeds, leaves, fossils, shells and other materials collected from nature to create a dialogue between human behavior and the environment. Incorporating texture, I tear, crumple, pierce, fold or bale the books into landscapes. These alterations often reveal landforms within the book itself.

The layers of pages simulate the sedimentary rock deep within the earth’s crust. My manipulation of books is not meant to destroy them or to refer to the destruction of our laws. Instead, I transform them into objects that propose new relationships.

All laws are dispositions for the future… protect the land… it is one estate of inheritance.

- Margaret Whiting, altered text taken from a law book

NMA Text Panel

Margaret Whiting combines natural objects such as leaves, seeds, fossils, and shells with discarded law books, science books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Her artworks explore contemporary issues related to land use and encourage thoughtful consideration of the definitions and laws that regulate American society's impact on the land.

In her mixed media sculptures, Whiting does not intend to destroy legal documents and environmental laws, but instead aims to provide new contexts for the information they contain and the authority they possess. According to Whiting, law books, in particular, reveal society’s entrenched cultural priorities; the volumes with which she works often contain legal judgments that have significantly shaped history and that will continue to determine our collective future.

By interacting with and altering the language of the law, Whiting offers her perspective on the complicated relationship between humans and their environment. “American culture seems to have been formed upon opposition between humans and nature,” she has explained. “In reality, man versus nature is an illusion. We live in, depend on, and are part of an ecosystem.” Taken together, the sculptures in this exhibition remind us of the fragile balance that exists between human law and the laws of nature.

This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA’s Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments.

Orientation
You’ll find the exhibition installed in the Feature Gallery North on the third floor. The majority of the pieces are wall-mounted, but a few large pedestals and platforms stand in the middle of the space as well. With these, it is important to take every precaution to ensure that the pieces are neither bumped nor moved, as they are extraordinarily fragile.

Tour Framework
Explain to guests that Margaret Whiting was raised in northern Minnesota in a small, rural mining community not unlike many communities in Nevada.

Ask guests to consider why an artist from such a community might be interested in art that has to do with environmental and land use law.

Ask guests to look at any one of Whiting’s pieces. What do they notice about it? From what does it appear to have been made?

Explain that Whiting’s background is in papermaking and book arts, the mode of artistic expression that takes the traditions of bookmaking, papermaking, letterpress printing, and printmaking as central forms.

Ask guests why they think that the artist might be interested in the relationship between the natural objects she uses—the seeds, shells, leaves, and rocks—and the pages of law books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and natural history texts.

Ask guests what kinds of messages Whiting conveys by juxtaposing pages of law books and dictionaries with shells, seeds, and images from natural history texts.

Ask guests to look closely at the piece called There is Ground for Consideration but don’t convey to the group what the piece’s name is…yet.

Margaret Whiting, There is Ground for Consideration, law book pages, binder boards, objects from nature, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Ask guests what they think are some of the notable characteristics of There is Ground for Consideration. What do they notice about the piece right away? What, if anything, do they notice differently or additionally after looking at the piece for a few moments?

Point guests’ attention to the fact that Whiting circles key words on each page of the book from which the piece is made. What words does she circle repeatedly in the pages of the book?

Ask guests why they think Whiting chooses these particular words as opposed to the many others she could have chosen to emphasize.

Ask guests what the words ground and grounds mean as legal terms. In contrast, what do the words mean in terms of place, space, or environment?

Listen to the responses offered to these questions, and offer encouragement to anyone who offers a response to your questions—this is difficult artwork with which to grapple.

Explain that Whiting’s artistic interests lie in book arts and papermaking, but also in the plays on words and double (or more) meanings inherent in the language used in “official” texts such as laws, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. For Whiting, there is a very interesting interplay between American history, land use, land law, and language.

Ask guests to look closely at Analysis.

Margaret Whiting, Analysis, 2006, rolled law book pages in test tube racks. Courtesy of the artist.

Ask guests what kinds of meanings or messages can be derived from a piece of art in which the artist wraps pages of law books up into “tubes” and places them into a chemistry test tube rack.

Ask guests if they can think of any ways in which science connects people to the natural world. Can they also think of ways in which science seems to separate people from the natural world?

Encourage guests to think about the privileged status categories of knowledge such as “Science” and “Law” inhabit in our culture. For example, within our culture, scientists, judges, lawyers, and politicians enjoy a certain cultural “status” because of their work. How do such categories of knowledge compare to, say, “Art” or “Literature,” “Education,” “Carpentry” or “Farming?”

Explain to guests that Whiting is interested in these different “strata” or “levels” of knowledge, and the ways in which science and law often enjoy a higher status than art and humanities, and that her artwork raises questions about what are the “highest” or “best” ways to develop knowledge.

Encourage guests to look at the Law of the Land pieces in the gallery.

Explain that Whiting’s art, in addition to being examples of book arts and conceptual artwork, are also examples of abstract landscape artwork. Whiting cuts the books she uses laterally, and places the cut pieces side-by-side. The effect is a sort of silhouette or profile representation of a landscape, and harkens back to her interest in the words she highlights in the pages of the law books she uses: ground.

Ask guests to consider the piece entitled By Putting in More Cattle than the Pasture Can Sustain Both the Land and the Right of Common are Injured.

Ask what the guests make of the artist’s meaning.

Explain that the work references the ancient idea of the “tragedy of the commons.” This theory—largely based on ideas about economics—deals with conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good.

Explain that this is an idea that has roots in Aristotelian philosophy, but also in much more contemporary science writing—though it is not without controversy.

Explain that Whiting’s By Putting More Cattle […] gets at the problem of the use of common space—in this example it might be a cattle pasture, or Yosemite National Park—that suffers overuse because of unregulated use of the pasture by cattle, or unregulated use by National Park visitors.

David Maisel: Black Maps Tour Blueprint

Introduction
The exhibition David Maisel: Black Maps consists of aerial landscape photographs of three separate but related projects (he refers to them as “chapters”) by Maisel: The Lake Project, Terminal Mirage, and Oblivion. Each chapter contains images of landscapes deeply impacted by human hands, the images’ beauty belying the environmental degradation they depict. The Lake Project (2001) contains images of the desiccated bed of Owens Lake in east-central California; Terminal Mirage (2003) consists of images made of The Great Salt Lake and Tooele Army Depot munitions storage facilities; finally, Oblivion (2006) depicts the urban-suburban interface of Los Angeles, the fabric of an urban environment that is desecrated and yet also somehow alive.
Maisel studied architecture, landscape architecture, and photography at both Princeton University and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design before embarking on his professional career as a photographer. He studied photography with Emmet Gowin, an artist whose work is held in The Altered Landscape Collection. His studio is located in the Bay Area.
Artist’s Statement, from Lens Culture
The Black Maps project is comprised of aerial photographs of environmentally impacted landscapes. These images have as their subject matter the undoing of the natural world by the wide-scaled intervention of man’s actions. Looking down on these damaged wastelands, where man’s efforts have eradicated the natural order, the views through my camera are both spectacular and horrifying. Although these photographs evidence the devastation before me, they also transcribe an interior psychic landscape that is profoundly disturbing. As otherworldly as the images seem, they depict a shattered reality of our own making.
The Black Maps project has unfolded in chapters, focusing on such subjects as strip-mines, clear-cuts, cyanide leaching fields, tailings ponds, firestorms, the drainage remnants of Owens Lake, and other manipulations of the natural world.
The most recent chapter of my work is Terminal Mirage. Inspired by Robert Smithson’s apocalyptic writings on the Great Salt Lake, I have embarked upon an aerial survey of this surreal and brutal region, including site of evaporation ponds covering some 40,000 acres along the eastern and southern shores of the lake, and the blood red color of the lake itself.The photographs in this series are presented as either 30”-x-30” or 48”-x-48” color C-prints. The large-scaled prints begin to encompass the viewer’s peripheral vision, and their lushness and strange beauty are psychologically demanding as well as visually exhilarating. They convey something of the sublime, seemingly limitless aspect of the sites from which they are made. In these photographs, the forms of environmental disquiet and degradation function on both a documentary and metaphorical level, and the aerial perspective enables one to experience the landscape like a vast map of its undoing. These images are meant neither to vilify nor glorify their content, but rather to expand our notions of what constitutes landscape and landscape art. Engaged as I may be in the immediate political issues, I am not attempting to make literal records of environmental destruction. Rather, I seek to reveal the landscape in something other than purely visual terms, the photograph transcribing it as an archetypal space of destruction and ruin that mirrors the darker corners of our consciousness. Maps, like photographs, are designed to offer an objective overview, a means to comprehend our location; they are both place and concept, figurative and abstract. But a map that is black, as the title of this work suggests, is a kind of negation. Black maps are indeed unknowable and unnamable; they are ciphers. Perhaps these are the only kinds of pictures, with their compelling ambiguities, with which we can mark the demise of these landscapes.
Orientation
The photographs are largely organized chronologically by “chapter,” to use Maisel’s vocabulary, and are laid out counterclockwise—you’ll find images from the earliest “chapter,” The Lake Project, along the title wall; they stretch down the right-hand-side (east) wall of the Hawkins Contemporary Gallery. Proceeding along to the right (east) and around the gallery, the images on the north and west walls of the main area of the gallery are from Terminal Mirage, and the final area in the gallery, on the west and south walls of the space, you’ll find the black and white images of Oblivion, Maisel’s most recent project. (Note: Some of the Oblivion images are positive, while others are negative).
Tour Framework
Explain that David Maisel: Black Maps are aerial landscape photographs created by photographer David Maisel, who is based in San Francisco, and who was trained in architecture, landscape architecture, and photography at both Princeton University and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Ask guests to consider how the photographs are different from other landscape photographs they have seen.
Explain that as landscape photographs, and even as aerial landscape photographs, the images are unique because of the way that they abstract the landscape, removing any kind of instantly recognizable reference points, including, most importantly, horizon lines.
Ask guests to consider what they think they might be looking at in the photographs.
Explain that the images from The Lake Project (2001) are photographs Maisel made while flying over the desiccated bed of Owens Lake in eastern California, about five miles south of Lone Pine, California, on Highway 395. The images show the alkaline, dried bed of the lake, with what remains of the Owens River leading into and away from the lake itself—the blood-red ribbon seen in the images from The Lake Project.
Explain that beginning in 1913, the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting the water from Owens Lake and the Owens River to feed the Los Angeles Aquaduct, a project begun to help slake the thirst of the growing population and development of the Los Angeles Basin in the early decades of the twentieth century.
If people ask you why the water, or what remains of the water, is red, explain that the alkaline levels in the lakebed are at levels high enough to accommodate some forms of bacteria and algae, including the pink halophilic (salt-loving) bacteria recorded in the images: they are among the few kinds of living organisms that can tolerate the toxicity of the now-drained lake.
Explain that after 2002, the City of Los Angeles began purposely re-flooding the lake bed because of increasing environmental health hazards caused by alkali dust storms that drop up to four million tons of toxic particulate matter on communities downwind of the lake.
Explain that the Terminal Mirage portfolio consists of images made largely in 2003, when Maisel conducted another aerial survey, this time of the Great Salt Lake, the Tooele Army Depot, in Tooele County, Utah, near the Great Salt Lake. Maisel identifies the apocalyptic writings on the Great Salt Lake of the land artist Robert Smithson, who created the now-famous Spiral Jetty, as inspiration for the Terminal Mirage photographs.
Explain that Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was created during a drought in 1970, but that for twenty-five years, between about 1975 and 1999, the jetty was covered by the waters of the lake. Since 1999, it has been exposed again, and though it’s made of black basaltic rocks, the rocks are now encrusted with salt from the lake, and appear white.
Ask viewers why they think the colors of the water are so different in each image. Explain that the Great Salt Lake is rich in a number of key minerals, including magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, and sulfate, among others. Each mineral suspended in the waters of the lake has its own color, and the richness of the colors says something about the densities of the minerals at a given time in the water.
Explain that the images of the Oblivion portfolio were taken by Maisel beginning shortly after September 11, 2001, and as a result, Maisel experienced some difficulty in his efforts to fly in the airspace of the city.
Explain that some of the images are presented as negative images, while others are positives.
Ask viewers what their thoughts are about the effects of Maisel’s choice to present the images in negative form. What does the negative image convey that a positive image might not?

The Road to Reno: Inge Morath Tour Blueprint

Introduction, from The Road to Reno: Inge Morath, by John P. Jacob, The Inge Morath Foundation

Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. She studied languages in Berlin, and after the Second World War became Austrian editor for Heute magazine. A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, Morath wrote articles to accompany his photographs. Together, they were invited to Paris by Robert Capa to join the recently founded Magnum Photos, where she worked as an editor. Morath began photographing in 1951, and assisted Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher in 1953-54. She became a member of Magnum in 1955.

In the following years, Morath traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. Her knowledge of history and facility with languages, including Russian, Romanian, and Mandarin as well as English, Spanish, and French, provided Morath with a unique perspective into the people and places she visited. After her marriage to Arthur Miller in 1962, Morath settled in New York and Connecticut. She and Miller traveled to the USSR together in 1965, and in 1978 they made the first of many trips to the People’s Republic of China. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Morath continued to pursue both assignments and independent projects. She died in 2002, leaving a photographic archive encompassing more than fifty years of her life.

Inge Morath was a serious and gifted reporter who could not resist infusing a touch of surrealism into her photographs. This playful element lifted her work above mere reportage by revealing the mysterious at work within the ordinary and the everyday. It has been the distinguishing feature by which Morath’s photographs have, until now, been recognized. Another gift is her feeling for places: her pictures of […]artists’ studios and cemetery memorials, are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present.

[…] Morath carried her portable typewriter wherever she traveled, as indispensable as her cameras. Words, as much as film, were her medium. Attempting to be true to both her process and her voice, [this exhibition] follows Morath’s markings on her contact sheets to determine the selection and the flow of images, while leaving her non-native English, with its typographic charms and frequent structural indulgences, intact. In combining the three distinct elements of her work, images, journal writings, and caption notes, The Road to Reno presents Morath’s work as she created it: as a story.

What is most unique about this particular story is that it has never before been publicly told. It is the story of Morath’s encounter with her own future; with Arthur Miller who would become her husband, and with the United States, which would become her adoptive homeland. Until recently, Morath’s American road trip was unknown outside the circle of her family and friends. […]Inge Morath, setting out with Henri Cartier-Bresson (on assignment across the country to the film set of The Misfits) defines the vertices of her route simply: 18 days; New York to Reno; a friend, camera and a typewriter. […] Morath’s 18 days on the road stitch a trajectory through July and through 1960, leaving room between her careful photographs and her astute, poetic written observations […]

Exhibition and Tour Details

The Road to Reno: Inge Morath exhibition is organized by The Inge Morath Foundation, created by her family members and Magnum Photos in Morath’s name to document, promote, and care for the work created during her 60-year career. In its first several weeks, The Road to Reno: Inge Morath exhibition has proven to be much more interesting to, and popular among, visitors than we had anticipated that it would. As a result, there is reason to consider making the exhibition a fairly significant portion of your tours, particularly after “Andy Warhol’s Dream America” closes in May but before “Deborah Butterfield: Horses” opens in mid-June.

Orientation

You’ll find the exhibition in the third floor feature gallery north, where the Voces Latinas exhibition was located previously. The exhibition tells the story of Morath’s and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s trip across the country to document the filming of the 1961 film The Misfits, directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller, and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter. Morath and Cartier-Bresson set out from New York and spent 18 days traversing the U.S., heading south and eventually west before ending in Reno in July, 1960. The exhibition is laid out chronologically and counterclockwise—that is, you’ll encounter the earliest images in their trip first (they’re in the hallway) and the final images, documenting the actual sets of the filming of The Misfits, to the left of the main portion of the gallery.

Tour Framework

Explain that the exhibition contains photography created by Inge Morath, who was given the opportunity to travel across the country to document the filming of the 1960 film The Misfits. Explain that Morath had begun her photography career in Europe in 1950-51, and then became affiliated with the Magnum Photos agency herself in 1955, with other well-known documentary photographers of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Explain that Arthur Miller, who Morath married in 1962, had written the screenplay for The Misfits for his then-wife Marilyn Monroe.

Invite guests to consider the impact of Morath’s photography: how does she depict the places that she visits on her way to Reno? Does she seem to be creating a portrait of America? What kind of portrait?

Explain that Morath not only documented the trip and the sets in her photgraphy, but that she also kept a journal of type-written notes. In fact, Morath, after marrying Miller in 1962, was a prolific collaborator with her husband—they created a number of book projects together, in addition to the more than a dozen photography books of her own.

Ask guests to consider Morath’s eye for the mundane and humorous in everyday life. Do / can they get a sense of Morath’s sense of humor from her photographs? How? While humorous, even ironic at times, are they also respectful of their subjects? How can you tell?

Ask guests to look closely at the contact sheets (a reference print of film negatives produced by laying negatives directly on print paper and then exposing the paper to light, resulting in a actual-size print of the negative strip including the frame numbers which appear along the edge of the film stock). What kinds of information is documented on the contact sheets? What does it suggest about how Morath made choices about which photographs would become her final prints?

Ask guests to consider whether Morath seems to try to define her subjects with her photographs, or whether she seems to capture fleeting moments that pass quickly.