The Art of Observation: The Best of Photographer Elliott Erwitt

Systems of belief concerning the medicinal, magical and spiritual uses of plant materials were well established in the lives of European forest, nomadic and ancient peoples. However, these beliefs were forcibly supplanted as pagan practices were displaced across Europe and other continents in the wake of Christianity and the rise of capitalism. The consequences of the suppression and attempted erasure of this plant-based belief system continue to be profound. Knowledge, often held by women, of the healing and spiritual effects of plants has been replaced by a significantly more limited emphasis on their predominantly aesthetic qualities. This separation informs our contemporary relationship to plants as being primarily one of commodification. The images in worm, root, wort…& bane are part of the re-assemblage of fragments of this old knowledge and, in their ontology, invoke the persecution of wise women, witches and wortcunners who kept this knowledge safe but whose understanding of plants and their connection with reproduction, in particular, represented a threat to the new order. This body of work asks that we reconsider this complex nexus of lost understanding; that we re-examine the continuing persecution of women, their gender roles and physical bodies, and honour the position they have held in this long-contested space. Worm, root, wort…& bane engages with botanical knowledge as a sphere in which politics have been played out then and now, continuing to effect Western attitudes to women, to nature and to privilege. Put in the context of ecopolitics and intersectional feminisms, the current environmental emergency and the many impacts of this high capitalist moment, these works signal a rupture that has taken place. This has distanced us economically and spiritually from our environment and ultimately led to our current crisis. THIS EXHIBITION IS SUPPORTED BY the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Richmond County Savings Foundation, Ruth Foundation For the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

For the first time, the North Carolina Museum of Art (in Raleigh) and SECCA (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem), present a shared exhibition on both campuses, bringing awareness of global artists to audiences across our state. Examining place and theology from North Carolina to eastern Texas, From Alpha to Creation: Religion in the Deep South explores the ideological relationships among various belief systems, highlighting the blending of spiritual practices throughout our daily lives. The exhibition distinguishes itself from antiquated or heavily stereotyped studies of Southern culture that often disregard our complexities. It instead focuses on the spiritual innovations that allow many of us to maintain a dedicated relationship with our religious heritages, from Abrahamic denominations to composite belief systems like Hoodoo. For many artists throughout the exhibition—who originated or worked extensively in the region—the South represents a unique context for religious expression reflected by our racial, political, and economic structures. From Alpha to Creation leads with documentary photography that grounds its analysis of Southern culture with actual people and circumstances throughout the region. Landscape photography illustrates the physical prominence of iconography and messaging embedded in the environment. Meanwhile, portraiture demonstrates the social effect of adornment throughout different faiths, with examples of people using dress to signify their devotion or hierarchy. The exhibition's video and sculpture complete the survey of spiritual practices by interpreting the extensive rituals and traditions that span as far back as precontact Indigenous societies. The Winston-Salem installation of the exhibition features works by Allison Janae Hamilton, Ambrose Murray, Baseera Khan, Bill Aron, Brandon Thibodeaux, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Deborah Luster, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Heather Baebii Lee, Jamal Cyrus, Logan Lynette Burroughs, with newly commissioned works by Keni Anwar, Luzene Hill, and Ralph Burns. From Alpha to Creation: Religion in the Deep South is organized by Maya Brooks, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, with support from Georgia Phillips, Curatorial Intern.

CFEVA at 40: Four Decades of Supporting Contemporary Art celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) with an exhibition of work by 40 contemporary artists affiliated with the center who represent the Philadelphia region’s artistic excellence, its legacy, and its future.  CFEVA was founded in 1983 as a support system for the visual artists of the greater Philadelphia region. Since its inception, the organization has dedicated itself to making artistic practices sustainable, helping artists reach new audiences, and promoting awareness and understanding of visual art among community members. CFEVA’s support of visual artists is critical to maintaining and expanding an equitable and accessible cultural ecosystem, the free exchange of ideas, and the region’s creative economy. 2023 also marks CFEVA’s 40th year of serving artists through its prestigious fellowship program The artist fellows, selected by CFEVA’s Artistic Advisors, go on to shape our region’s cultural community as leaders in the arts. 40 artists have been chosen to represent CFEVA from over 300 fellows whom CFEVA has mentored over four decades and the dozens of established artists who have given their time and talent as advisors, including Mahtab Aslani, Will Barnet (1911-2012), Katie Baldwin, Jill Bell, Henry Bermudez, Rita Bernstein, Tom Birkner, Christina Bothwell, Charles Burwell, Ziui Chen, Donald E. Camp, Anne Canfield, Vincent Desiderio, Amze Emmons, Trey Friedman, Colette Fu, Sophie Glenn, Sidney Goodman (1936-2013), Mary Henderson, Jeff Hurwitz, Leroy Johnson (1937-2022), Mami Kato, Mark Khaisman, Daniel Kornrumpf, Chelsey Luster, Douglas Martenson, Ray K. Metzker (1931-2014), Maggie Mills, Jedediah Morfit, Lydia Panas, Andrea Packard, Serena Perrone, Tim Portlock, Csilla Sadloch, Laurence Salzmann, Julia Stratton, Ron Tarver, Ada Trillo, and Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib, with Eugene Lew. Image: Kitty, Black Tulle, 32 x 40", 2011, from the series Something Like Love © Lydia Panas

In partnership with Magnum Foundation, CPW presents a group exhibition of five international contemporary photographers. “Counter Histories” includes artists Tamara Abdul Hadi, Alan Chin, Naomieh Jovin, Billy H.C. Kwok, and Qiana Mestrich. These artists confront difficult histories by reconstructing perspectives that have been omitted from previously accepted or official accounts. Their deeply personal visual narratives are reconstructed out of found images derived from family photo albums, books, magazines, or community archives. The works in “Counter Histories” ask probing questions about our construction of the past, such as, What new meanings are suggested by the absences and silences one finds in archives and historical records? How can artists engage with histories that are not photographed? How can these revisionist archives contribute to fuller understandings of the past and future? Counter Histories is organized by Magnum Foundation with the support of The Henry Luce Foundation. The exhibition is accompanied by the Spring 2024 issue of Aperture magazine, “Counter Histories,” produced in collaboration with Magnum Foundation. Additional support for the Counter Histories Initiative is provided by The Fledgling Fund, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowships, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation. Image: © Qiana Mestrich

Take it From Here features artworks by photographers who use the camera as a multifaceted site of imagination, play, and self-exploration. Considering photography's sordid relationship with the politics of representation, the selected artists collectively highlight new freedoms and visual possibilities of self-expression alive within the medium. Image: Polarities, 2015 © Alec Kaus

Seen Together showcases over forty previously unexhibited works acquired by the Morgan’s Department of Photography since its founding in 2012. The pieces selected, and their thematic arrangements, reflect the department’s two highest priorities: first, to build a photography collection that converses with other collections at the Morgan, including drawings, printed books, and literary manuscripts; and second, to draw from widely varied historical contexts and traditions for photographs that collectively tell larger stories about the medium. One wall of the exhibition features eighteen photographs of prominent figures from many creative disciplines, notably visual art (Yayoi Kusama, Marcel Duchamp, Saul Steinberg), literature (Marianne Moore, Jack Kerouac), performance (Yoko Ono, Harlem Renaissance dancer Edna Guy), and music (Louis Hardin, aka Moondog). Visually inventive photography of artists—transcending “portraiture” in the familiar sense—forms a major ongoing focus for the department. It has grown out of two early initiatives: the 2007 acquisition of seventy-one photographs by Irving Penn and Diane Arbus portraying artists collected by the Morgan and the 2013 launch of the Peter Hujar Collection, which today numbers over 150 works. Other themes explored in Seen Together include kaleidoscopic and abstract camera imagery, the visual dynamic between (artistic) “landscapes” and (touristic) “views” in the nineteenth century, and the artist’s own body as subject. A unique and engaging group of thirty-one anonymously made snapshots, compiled by the collector Peter J. Cohen, finds the camera being used to document the work lives of everyday people. Two artists are seen in some depth: Irving Penn, with three photographs demonstrating his work for Vogue magazine in fashion, travel, and food; and Eleanor Antin, whose influential series of fifty-one postcards, 100 Boots, was mailed, card by card, to several dozen correspondents forty years ago and given, as a complete set, to the Morgan in 2022. Image: Miyake Fashion, White and Black, 1990 (negative), 1992 (print) © Irving Penn

Deborah Jack explores the shoreline of the (is)land as a liminal space. The fluidity of the water as it interacts with the shore and the lines that are created by that encounter as well as the temporal quality of those lines. Climate change has caused the warming of the oceans which has led to hurricanes that are more explosive in strength, last longer and storm surges that push further inland. The work engages ongoing questions that serve as a point of departure: Does water have memory? What is the resonance when the water and the land connect? If the hurricane is a natural memorial to the Middle Passage, a haunting. How can we re-imagine altered shoreline during the storm surge? The invasion of salt water beyond the shore. The merging of fresh and salt water bodies and the ecologies in-between that struggle to survive. Image: © Deborah Jack

The Jewish Museum presents RBG Collars: Photographs by Elinor Carucci, an installation of two dozen photographs of former US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collars and necklaces taken by the contemporary photographer Elinor Carucci (Israeli, b. 1971) shortly after Ginsburg’s death in 2020. The suite of photographs is being shown at the Jewish Museum for the first time since they were acquired for the Museum’s collection in 2021. The installation will also include jewelry from the collection, reflecting freely on the expressive possibilities as well as the cultural and religious aspects of adornment. RBG Collars: Photographs by Elinor Carucci will be on view from December 15, 2023, through May 27, 2024, in Scenes from the Collection on Floor Three of the Museum. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020), who was the second-ever woman to sit on the US Supreme Court, wore collars not just to emphasize the long overdue feminine energy she brought to the court, but also to encode meaning into her dress—a sartorial strategy practiced by powerful women throughout history. Her early penchant for traditional lace jabots was later joined by necklaces made of beads, shells, and metalwork from around the world, many of them gifts from colleagues and admirers. Seen as a whole, the photographs of these collars offer a collective portrait of the late Justice through these objects imbued with her personal style, values, and relationships. While Ginsburg often chose them on a whim, she occasionally used them as a form of wordless communication; in every instance, they served as a reminder that her august responsibilities were carried out by a particular human being. Towards the end of her life, Ginsburg’s style helped to make her a feminist pop culture icon: collared and bespectacled, she adorned tote bags, t-shirts, and tattoos as “the Notorious RBG.” Ginsburg’s Jewish upbringing was formative to the person she became. Questioned about her sensitivity to racial bias, she invoked her experiences growing up Jewish in Brooklyn the 1930s and 1940s, while the horrors of the Holocaust unfolding in Europe cast ominous shadows over antisemitic slights encountered at home. She often noted how the Jewish principle of tikkun olam (repairing the world) guided her work. Over nearly 30 years, she wrote many notable majority opinions that helped to advance legal protections for women and members of other historically marginalized groups. Alongside Carucci’s photographs is a selection of jewelry from the Museum’s collection. Many of the necklaces, pendants, fibulae, and other items included in the installation bear amuletic inscriptions; some have compartments in which scrolls with magical inscriptions can be stored. For the most part, those who made and wore these items came from corners of Jewish history and geography quite distant from the twentieth century American context in which Ginsburg lived and worked. Yet she too understood how adornment—particularly jewelry, given its close association with the body and its ability to express individuality in settings where possibilities for self-expression are limited—can communicate beauty and power, joy and defiance, optimism and resolve. The installation is organized by Shira Backer, Leon Levy Associate Curator, the Jewish Museum.

I move, I move a lot. People ask me how I find my pictures. I tell them I move around. I move and move and I mostly don’t find anything that is interesting to me. But then, something calls out. Something that looks sort of off or maybe an empty space. Sometimes it’s a lovely scene. Sometimes it’s just a ray of sunlight. I like that kind of stuff. So I take the photos and some are good. And so I keep moving and looking and taking pictures. Todd Hido (American, b. 1968) is a prolific photographer whose works of suburban and urban homes have been shown in galleries and businesses throughout the nation. He was born in Kent, OH, and is now based in San Francisco, CA. Todd Hido works with the Leica SL2, SL2-S and S3 Cameras in recent work.

Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona is pleased to announce the opening of its penultimate public exhibition, Barbara Van Cleve: Old Friends - The 40th Anniversary Exhibition, celebrating her career as the leading Western photographer of ranchers, ranches, horses, cattle, and the Western landscape. The gallery's final exhibition will be in June of 2024 featuring Miguel Gandert, celebrating his career as the leading photographer of Hispanic Culture in the Southwest for 50 years including groundbreaking documentary work on Indo-Hispanic Ceremonies from the Southwest United States to South America. In September 2024 the Andrew Smith Gallery will scale back to a by-appointment private dealer status. The Gallery will continue to represent its leading contemporary artists, Shelley Niro, Zig Jackson, Victor Masayesva Jr. [Duwawisioma], Barbara Van Cleve, and Miguel Gandert as well as the estates of Patrick Nagatani and George Gardner. The Gallery will continue working with large collections and important historic and classic photography particularly Geologic Survey photography and the works of Laura Gilpin and Ansel Adams. Barbara Van Cleve (b. 1935) is nationally and internationally recognized for her photographs depicting traditional ranching life in the American West. Descended from Montana pioneers, she was born and raised on her family's historic ranch founded in 1880 near Big Timber, Montana. By age eleven she was photographing with a Brownie Box camera, and she has never stopped working. Van Cleve currently lives in Big Timber, Montana but for twenty years she was a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In August of 1985, Andrew Smith Gallery then located in Albuquerque, had its first solo exhibition of work by Barbara Van Cleve. Van Cleve’s first love and second career is photography. She left the family ranch for college where she studied Victorian poetry and became a college teacher and administrator in Chicago. In the summers she was always back at the ranch, as she said in a 1989 interview: “I was born and raised on a ranch, so I've worked cattle all my life I've packed a camera with me since I was 11. It's second nature. Also, working cattle is relatively slow compared to running horses. It's "Hell for leather," running horses from horseback! When I'm at the family ranch for four months every summer I'm so busy I can't pick up a camera unless I really make a tremendous effort. My interest in photography and the demand for it has grown so much that I'll be spending less time on the ranch. My mother, brother, married sister, and her husband are there to run things on a year-round basis. My real love at the ranch is taking care of the horses, making decisions about the brood mare stock, getting the colts halter broken, really gentled, and started. Riding everyday all day with the guests on the dude ranch when we move and sort cattle, gathering horses, and branding colts among other things is what eats up my time and energy.” Barbara has released a group of exquisite vintage silver gelatin prints of classic images in celebration of 40 years of working with Andrew Smith Gallery. Image: Ground Blizzard, 1981 ©Barbara Van Cleve

Hamidah Glasgow Honorable Mentions: Debra Achen, Mona Bozorgi, David Ellingsen, Susan Goldstein, Michele Lyn, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Dean Terasaki Charles Guice Honorable Mentions: Mona Bozorgi, Mehreen Khalid, Denise Laurinaitis, Michele Lyn, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Mouneb Taim Selected Artists: Debra Achen, Geoffrey Agrons, Ashley Allen, Laurel Anderson, Filippo Barbero, Nancy Baron, Tabea Borchardt, Mona Bozorgi, Marisa Brown, Tuan Bui, Tracy Burke, Patty Carroll, Anahit Cass, Alex Cassetti, Madeline Cawkins, Jo Ann Chaus, Patricia Christakos, Matthew Conboy, Seth Cook, Jesse Egner, David Ellingsen, Dan Florin, Patricia Fortlage, Debora Francis, Susan Goldstein, Charlotta Hauksdottir, Austin Jensen, Luke Jordan, Richard K. Kent, Mehreen Khalid, Frazier King, Sandra Klein, Gershon Kreimer, Judy Labib, Susan Lapides, Denise Laurinaitis, Ana Leal, Traci Marie Lee, Drew Leventhal, Michele Lyn, Mara Magyarosi-Laytner, Lawrence Manning, Christina McFaul, Jason McKinsey, dee (darren lee) miller, Greer Muldowney, Robin North, Eleanor Oakes, Laurie Peek, Oriana Poindexter, Austin Pope, Nathan Rochefort, Gjert Rognli, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Angela Scardigno, Rebecca Sexton Larson, Anastasia Sierra, Olga Steinepreis, Mouneb Taim, Jerry Takigawa, Dean Terasaki, Anne Vetter, Suzanne Theodora White, and Michael Young.

In Their Own Light: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools by Melissa Ann Pinney, is on view at Pictura Gallery from April 5th to May 31st. During a five year artist residency, Pinney documented the daily lives of students from a variety of schools in the city. Her portraits capture their evolving identities as they move through the particular challenges of the pandemic and continuing racial inequality.