Exhibition: July 23 – October 16, 2016
Gallery reception on Friday, July 29, starting at 6pm
Artist talk with CPW artists-in-residence Jared Thorne and Sheida Soleimani, starting at 7pm
Curated by Sarah Lewis
The Center for Photography at Woodstock is pleased to present Race, Love, and Labor, an exhibition of work by CPW’s artist-in-residence. Curated by Sarah Lewis, the traveling exhibition will be on display at CPW from July 23 through October 16, 2016. The public reception will be held on Friday, July 29 at 6pm, followed directly by an artist talk, starting at 7pm.
The artists whose work is featured in this exhibition are Endia Beal, William Cordova, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tommy Kha, Deana Lawson, Alma Leiva, Gina Osterloh, Dawit L. Petros, Tim Portlock, Xaviera Simmons, and Joanna Tam.
If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron …
— James Agee
It is impossible to separate the history of photography from the history of labor, love, and race in America. At the advent of photography, a deal was struck: the medium would document both the intimacies we cherish and their cost in human toil. It is a paradox that Frederick Douglass would remind us of during the Civil War: photographs were instruments used to erase part of the human family and it would take images of human dignity and determination to rectify it. The labor of photography is to wrestle with this legacy. It is not work but labor: a means through which we birth ourselves anew.
This exhibition, culled from the collection of the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s Artist-in-Residency program, displays images by artists, who understand the needs of labor in the fullest sense of the word. They are part of a 15-year-old tradition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, which offers artists of color one of the requirements for a sterling creative practice — embryonic time to probe deeply, unfettered by distractions. At the 20th anniversary of the Center for Photography’s partnership with the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, it is a moment to not only honor this residency, but to examine the themes that have emerged from the resulting, irreplaceable pictures.
A reflective look at the CPW collection shows how photographers, working with a vast range of aesthetics, play a critical role in the labor of becoming and the work it entails — on the land and within our inner worlds. This exhibition includes a range of such photographs, from pictures by LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose fierce portrayals of the consequences of work on wellbeing and human dignity sears the soul with a light that Walker Evans could have never anticipated, to images by Deana Lawson who expertly shows a hard won self-possession through her pioneering portrayal of nude forms. Here too are images of the full landscape of self-determination movements. In William Cordova’s photographs of archival materials, it is as if an archeologist has found the Black Panthers and Young Lords in both sites and hidden sights in Peekskill and Albany, NY. Gina Osterloh’s pen-and-ink fabricated triptych shows us what comes of will and determination of another kind — the will required to create an inner landscape of ambitions.
What unites these images is an animating sense of what it means to live in this lineage of photography’s paradox — to reduce and to exult. These photographs, the gift of a moment in time through a unique residency, show us where a future path may lead. My gratitude goes to my three colleagues — Dorsky director Sara Pasti, Dorsky curator of exhibitions Daniel Belasco, and the (former) executive director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Ariel Shanberg — for the honor of organizing this show, and to the artists for entrusting me to present their images as a new constellation.
— Sarah Lewis, 2014
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Sarah Lewis is the Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Modern, London and taught at Yale University School of Art. Her scholarship been published in many journals as well as in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Aperture, Artforum and in publications for the Smithsonian, The Museum of Modern Art, and Rizzoli.
Lewis is also the guest editor of the “Vision & Justice” special issue of Aperture (Summer 2016) and author of the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. Lewis’ board service includes the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts and Creative Time. She received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard, an M. Phil from Oxford in Economic and Social History, and her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale. She lives in Cambridge, MA and New York City.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
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Originally shown under the title Race, Love, and Labor: New Work from the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s Artist-in-Residency Program, this exhibition is an excellent example of curatorial collaborations between CPW and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art drawn from CPW’s permanent collection. These exhibitions have their genesis in The Dorsky’s longstanding relationship with CPW, which began in June 1995 when CPW delivered 895 photographs on long-term loan to the SUNY New Paltz campus. Since then, the collection has grown to more than 1,800 objects.
The exhibition began at the Dorsky in 2014. Its final stop will be at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University in 2017. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes a curatorial statement by Lewis, and texts by Dorsky Museum Director Sara Pasti and former CPW Director Ariel Shanberg. Designed by William van Roden, the catalogue is published by The Dorsky Museum and distributed through SUNY Press. Major funding for the publication is provided by the Howard Greenberg Photography Endowment at The Dorsky Museum.
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EXHIBITION SCHEDULE AND LOCATIONS
Race, Love, and Labor will be on view from Saturday, July 23, 2016, through Sunday, October 16, 2016. CPW galleries are free & open to the public Wednesday – Sunday, 12pm – 5pm and by appointment. CPW is located at 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498.
Image Credit: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mommie, 2008, gelatin silver print, 14 5/8 x 18 1/4″