JR – TEHACHAPI

Posted on 2021-05-24

JR is known for installing large-scale, public murals in collaboration with those portrayed, often with an emphasis on social justice. In October 2019, JR was given access to a maximum-security prison in California with the purpose of working with the incarcerated inhabitants on a collaborative art project. The artist worked with 48 currently or formerly incarcerated people, as well as correctional officers and individuals involved in the incarceration process. Together, they executed a large-scale wheat-paste portrait of the participants, stretched across the prison’s main complex and visible from above Tehachapi.

In 2020, the artist returned to the prison for a second iteration of the project – together with the inmates, he wheat pasted on the courtyard’s walls a photograph of the surrounding Tehachapi Mountains. Both projects remained intact for several days before the harsh elements of the Southern California desert caused the wheat-paste to disintegrate. What remains today is documentation of the projects and the stories of each participant.

Opposite – Tehachapi, Mountain, February 6, 2020, 5.07p.m., U.S.A., 2020

Exhibition runs through to July 2nd, 2021

Perrotin New York
130 Orchard Street
New York
NY 10002

www.perrotin.com

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PAUL FUSCO – RFK FUNERAL TRAIN

Posted on 2021-05-24

In the years since they were taken these photographs have become a beloved and influential, series in photography. While in some ways they represent the end of the dreams of the sixties, at the same time they celebrate the idealism and diversity of America.

In the middle of 1968, two events shook the nation – the assassination of Martin Luther King and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Hastily arranged, Robert Kennedy’s funeral train took place on June 8th – a swelteringly hot early summer day. Paul Fusco, then a staff for LOOK Magazine, was given a place on the train. As the train made its progress from New York to Washington, where RFK was to buried at Arlington next to his brother, hundreds of thousands of mourners came out to line the railway tracks and pay their final respects. From inside the train, Fusco began to take pictures of the mourners – people from every section of society – black, white, rich, poor, in large groups and on their own. For the eight hours it took for the train to make the usually four-hour journey Fusco never put down his camera except to reload film shooting approximately 2,000 pictures.

Opposite – Untitled from the RFK train portfolio., 1968

Exhibition runs through to August 7th, 2021

Peter Fetterman Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., Gallery A1
Santa Monica
California 90404

www.perrotin.com

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SUSAN BURNSTINE – WHERE SHADOWS CEASE

Posted on 2021-05-24

The collective unconscious suggests that repeated patterns originating from ancestral archetypes are reproduced in religion, literature, myths and dreams as a means to provide insights into cultural perceptions and beliefs. Even when a system of beliefs is no longer accepted as true, lore can persist as a means to communicate cultural values.

America’s rich history of folklore, myths and morality tales have faded in cultural significance in part due to globalization, but also to social media’s one hundred and forty-character mindset. One constant remains: our relationship with the mythos and iconography of the American Dream.

Opposite – Down the Colorado, 2020

Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2021

Obscura Gallery
1405 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe
NM 87505

www.obscuragallery.net

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FEMALIA

Posted on 2021-05-17

Praxis celebrates pride month with FEMALIA.
Challenging Concepts of Gender and Femininity. Presenting 30 artists whose work explores ideas that challenge, criticize, redefines, and disrupts our concepts of female identity.

Opposite – Geoffrey Agrons, In the Heat of the Night

Exhibition runs through to July 3rd, 2021

Praxis Gallery
2715 E. 26th St.
Minneapolis
MN 55406

www.perrotin.com

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OUR STRENGTH IS OUR PEOPLE

Posted on 2021-05-17

This exhibition surveys the life’s work of Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940), the father of American documentary photography. Consisting entirely of 65 rare vintage prints, it covers the three overarching themes of Hine’s three-decade career-the immigrant experience, child labor, and the American worker-and culminates in his magnificent studies of the construction of the Empire State Building.

Opposite – Lewis Hine, Sadie, a Cotton Mill Spinner, Lancaster, South Carolina, 1908

Exhibition runs through to August 21st, 2021

Asheville Art Museum
2 South Pack Square
Asheville
NC 28801

www.ashevilleart.org

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BRUCE DAVIDSON – LIFT YOUR HEAD

Posted on 2021-05-17

An exhibition of works by Bruce Davidson from the permanent collection that explores historic context and viewer response as key factors in the evolution of meaning in photographs.

Photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933 Oak Park, Illinois) is known for his intimate and humanist approach to documentary photography. Through remembering the historical context in which he worked and the opposing views his work provoked, this exhibition explores how understanding and “reading” documentary photography has evolved over the past half century. Davidson never claimed to be driven by ideology or agenda; his art was born from his roving curiosity, a deep desire for human connection, and the willingness to be patient. But despite the artist’s best intentions to simply immerse and observe, ideologies and agendas can manifest far beyond the frame when it comes to documenting the world, and it is within this resulting conversation that we can find meaning in images.

Opposite – A civil rights demonstrator is arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

Exhibition runs through to July 18th, 2021

California Museum Of Photography – UCR Arts
3824 Main Street
Riverside
CA 92501

artsblock.ucr.edu

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