CHESTER HIGGINS – THE INDELIBLE SPIRIT

Posted on 2021-05-10

“These subjects will not be forgotten; they cannot be erased. They matter.” – Chester Higgins

Chester Higgins walked into the photographic studio of P.H. Polk in Alabama in 1967 to pick up a photograph for an advertisement in his Tuskegee University newspaper. He left with something entirely unexpected–the first awareness of a passion that would unfold throughout his life. Higgins caught a glimpse that day of photographs hanging behind Polk’s studio curtains that he had taken during the 1930s of people in the rural South. The beauty, dignity and strength of character in those photographs captivated Higgins, and reminded him of the people he knew and had seen in his church and among farmers in rural Alabama where he grew up. The power of Polk’s images inspired Higgins to ask the elder photographer several days later if he would teach him to use Polk’s own camera. Surprised by the naïve and audacious request, Polk lent Higgins his camera for a few hours. This extraordinary gesture of generosity and the valuable information and insights he subsequently gave Higgins, started the young man on a long and extraordinary journey with photography.

Opposite – Early morning coffee, Harlem, 1974

Exhibition runs through to June 26th, 2021

Bruce Silverstein Gallery
529 West 20th Street
New York
NY 10011

www.brucesilverstein.com

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KAREN NAVARRO: THE CONSTRUCTED SELF

Posted on 2021-05-10

A vivid and even more tactile expansion of the artist’s earlier portfolio El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times), Navarro’s The Constructed Self realizes meditations on self-representation and identity through dynamic photosculpture configurations. Disrupting photography’s traditional two-dimensional presentation, these colorful new works come assembled in a multitude of ways-some stacked and spinning, others paneled and puzzled together. These geometric complexities illustrate the abilities we all have to reorder and rearrange the many facets of our public-facing identities.

Opposite – Fractured, 2021

Exhibition runs through to June 25th, 2021

Foto Relevance
4411 Montrose Boulevard, Suite C
Houston
TX 77006

fotorelevance.com

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J HOUSTON – TUCK AND ROLL

Posted on 2021-05-03

This desire to find a place to belong can be greatly complicatedby being a Trans or Queer person. As a photographer, J Houston has harnessedthe large-format camera’s ability to take the raw material of the world andcreate a place all their own. In the pictures, being Trans and Queer is thedefault, where there is no struggle for acceptance, just the ease with whichthe subjects welcome the camera into their intimate spaces, creating room forthe artist and by extension the viewer.

The people in Houston’s pictures exist in settings that could be anywhere, witheveryday objects like yoga balls, seat cushions and carpeting that seem tingedwith magic and heightened importance. Houston’s pictures come alive in themundaneness of the portrait subjects’ everyday emotions, romance, solitude,dignity, sadness, vulnerability, pleasure. It is the drama of a sharedhumanity, the little building blocks of experience, that create a community inthe pictures. Images, which in their making involved meeting, getting to knowand becoming part of subjects’ lives form a small Trans-Queer utopia thatmanifest from the art into the world.

Exhibition runs through to May 30th, 2021

THE JAVA PROJECT
252 Java Street
Broklyn
NY 11222

arizona.edu

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PICTURING THE AVANT-GARDE

Posted on 2021-05-03

Featuring photographs by: Jaime Aelavanthara, Keliy Anderson-Staley, Patrick Scott Bell , Diana Bloomfield, Jillian Marie Browning, Kimberly Chiaris, Karen Hymer, Rachel Wolf.

Picturing the Avant-Garde aims to broaden the interpretation of photographic imagery beyond traditional printing. The works included in this exhibition explore the conceptual potentiality of various alternative and experimental photographic processes such as gum prints, tin types, chemigrams, cyanotypes, gold orotypes, and lumen prints among others.

Opposite – Jaime Aelavanthara, A Wing Lifted, With No Twin, and Therefore, No Flight, 2021

Exhibition runs through to June 12th, 2021

Southeast Museum of Photography
1200 W. International Speedway Blvd
Daytona Beach
FL 32114

southeastmuseumofphotography.org

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THE SKY – KATE BREAKEY AND BRETT STARR

Posted on 2021-05-03

The Sky exhibition of images by two Tucson artists, Kate Breakey and Brett Starr, who recently discovered they had a mutual interest in the heavens. Each of them having looked upward, and felt compelled to make images of the sky, for years. For this exhibition they have gathered together their daytime and nighttime images-of clouds, rainbows, the sun and the moon, comets and cosmic events.

Most recently they collaborated to make deep sky images using an online telescope on the other side of the world. ‘It was exciting and conceptually poetic to instruct a telescope that is 9,000 miles away to point at an object – a galaxy, or nebulae- on the other side of the universe, and make an image for us to contemplate and print. The incomprehension and wonder you feel is transforming – it puts time and life on earth into perspective, and that is always a good thing’

Opposite – Brett Starr, “Above The Horizon”

Exhibition runs through to June 19th, 2021

Art Intersection
207 N Gilbert Rd #201
Gilbert
AZ 85234

artintersection.com

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