Photography Now 2019: The Searchers
November 9, 2019 – January 19, 2020
Gallery Opening: Saturday, November 9, 4-6pm
The Center for Photography at Woodstock is pleased to announce Photography Now 2019, juried by Maurice Berger and Marvin Heiferman. Featured artists include Cynthia Bittenfield, Martha Díaz-Adam, Maureen R. Drennan, Nona Faustine, Luther Konadu, Sara Macel, Jean Sousa and Derrick Woods-Morrow.
Each year, CPW invites a curator of national or international repute to apply their unique curatorial vision in creating a survey exhibition of contemporary photography. Seen over time, Photography Now exhibitions create a timeline that depicts photography as the living, ever evolving art form it is.
This year’s installment of CPW’s Photography Now exhibition presents eight artists of a wide range of styles and backgrounds. We thank curators Maurice Berger and Marvin Heiferman for curating this compelling exhibition.
Derrick Woods-Morrow, Frederick on Lake Pontchartrain | After Lincoln Beach, 2019
CURATORS’ STATEMENT
Today, the search for identity—the need to understand and represent who we are and how we see ourselves—is widespread. Each day, we take millions of pictures of ourselves and the world around us in order to explore and carve out a personal space in a digital culture saturated with images. The artists in this exhibition are searchers, too. Their pictures—of themselves, others, and of places—thoughtfully reflect upon how photography itself functions as a search medium, one that enables personal, family, and community lives to be represented, shared and remembered.
In the context of a society that is quick to define and stereotype women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community, the artists of Photography Now 2019 celebrate their power as photographers to challenge clichés and find meaning through a variety of strategies. For some, photography functions as a valued tool in detective work and data collection. Others investigate aspects of identity and the construction of personal histories more evocatively. Some of the work focuses on specific relationships, while others challenge stereotypes, such as the historic tendency to represent the black experience largely through the lens of struggle and suffering or the Islamophobia that vilifies traditional Muslim dress and culture.
The Searchers recalls the work of the African American intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. A century ago, he envisioned the search for identity—as well as the medium of photography—as potent means for reinvention, reappraisal, and personal discovery in the face of a mainstream culture that all too often denigrates people or renders them invisible. Now, new generations of artists embrace photography’s potential to liberate, by portraying themselves, their families, friends, and communities in dynamic images that counter the media culture that we ferociously consume but neither own nor control.
ABOUT THE JUROR
Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Race Stories, his monthly column, for the Lens Section of the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to concepts and social issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, National Geographic, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, Pen America, Wired, and the Los Angeles Times. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010). Berger has received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, International Association of Art Critics, as well as an Emmy Award nomination. For his work on Race Stories, he was awarded the 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research from the International Center of Photography and the 2014 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation | Creative Capital.
Marvin Heiferman, a curator and writer, has organized exhibitions, web-based projects, and publications about photography and visual culture for institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, International Center of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S. 1 Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and the New Museum. Earlier in his career, as a gallerist and artist representative, Heiferman worked closely with numerous artists and photographers including: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, and Richard Prince, among others. Heiferman has written for museums, galleries, publications, blogs, and magazines including The New York Times, Gagosian Gallery, CNN, Artforum, Design Observer, Aperture, Art in America, and BOMB. He is the author and editor of over two dozen books on photography and visual culture, including Photography Changes Everything (Aperture/Smithsonian, 2012), and most recently, Seeing Science (Aperture/UBMC, 2019). A Visiting Scholar at the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Heiferman is a core faculty member in the ICP/Bard College MFA Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, and on the faculty of the School of Visual Art’s MFA Program in Photography, Video and Related Media. New entries to Why We Look, Heiferman’s ongoing social media project, track breaking news stories about imaging and visual culture and are posted daily.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Keep Your Chin Up is Cynthia Bittenfield’s homage to her mother’s life and death, utilizing photo albums and a family archive. Bittenfield’s work has been shown at the Julia Margaret Cameron Gala Awards, Wassaic Project, Baruch College, Griffin Museum of Photography, Void Gallery, Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery, Freies Museum and the Darkroom Gallery. She has participated in residencies at the Kala Arts institute, Vermont Studio Center, Picture Berlin and Wassaic Project. She was awarded grants from the Puffin Foundation and SVA. She lives and works in NYC and is on the board of Baxter St/Camera Club of New York. Bittenfield received her MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. www.cynthiabittenfield.com
Martha Díaz-Adam is a visual artist and documentary photographer, whose work encourages a cross-cultural understanding. Her work is an ongoing investigation of cultural heritage, traditional livelihoods, preservation of cultures, religious devotional practices, internal & external migration patterns and the empowerment of oppressed ethnic groups. Her most recent solo exhibition, Here, but not from here, was shown at Visual Ethnography in Logan, UT. Díaz-Adam was born and raised at the Dominican Republic in 1993 to parents of Lebanese descent. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Photography, minored in Anthropology Studies and Art History at Utah State University. www.marthadiazadam.com
Maureen R. Drennan’s project reimagines an adventurous two-week trip from New Hampshire to Alaska, taken by her stepfather and his friends in 1951. Mixing new photographs with original documentation, Drennan engages with the myth of the American western road trip.
Her work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, Tacoma Art Museum, Art Museum of South Texas, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Ackland Art Museum, Aperture Gallery, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Transmitter Gallery, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Newspace Center for Photography. Her images have been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, Photograph Magazine, Huffington Post, Art 21 Magazine, American Photo, UK Telegraph, Refinery 29, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She has received awards from Aperture, The Photo Review, PDN, The Photographic Resource Center of Boston, Humble Arts, Artist as Citizen, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and the Camera Club of New York. She currently teaches at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, NY. www.maureendrennan.net
Nona Faustine’s work focuses on history, identity, representation, evoking a critical and emotional understanding of the past and proposes a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes. Her images have received worldwide acclaim and have been published in national and international media outlets such as Artforum, New York Times, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, among many others. Faustine’s work has been exhibited at Harvard University, Rutgers University, Maryland State University, Studio Museum of Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Schomburg Center for Black Research in Harlem, the International Center of Photography, Saint Johns Divine Cathedral, and many other institutions around the country. Her work is in the collection of the David C Driskell Center at Maryland State University, Studio Museum of Harlem, Brooklyn Museum and recently Carnegie Museum in Pennsylvania. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography at Bard College MFA program. nonafaustine.virb.com
Luther Konadu is an emerging writer and artist of Ghanaian descent, currently based in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. His studio activities are realized through photographic print media and painting processes. He is interested in how the histories of those mediums help shape prevailing perceptions of collective identities and seeks to reinterpret them. Konadu encourages viewers to “slow read” his images and to consider photographs as a breakaway from a reality as opposed to a representation of it. He is an editor for the publication Public Parking, a project that highlights working practices of emerging creators. He recently exhibited at New York’s Aperture Foundation. https://app.picter.com/p/oAZczJtvMlm
Sara Macel is an artist and photographer originally from Texas and now based in Queens, NY. She received her MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts and earned her BFA in Photography + Imaging from NYU. Her photographic work is narratively-based and often deals with themes of the archive, family, memory, place and time. What Did the Deep Sea Say is a photographic narrative about three generations of women in her family, who all came to the same beach to briefly escape their lives. Her work has been internationally exhibited and is in various private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Cleveland Museum of Art, Harry Ransom Center, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Sara was named one of PDN’s 30 Photographers to Watch in 2015. She is a recipient of the Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant from the Aaron Siskind Foundation and was recently an artist-in-residence at Light Work in Syracuse, NY. Her first monograph, May the Road Rise to Meet You (Daylight Books), was named one of PDN’s best photo books of the year. A traveling exhibition of that work was shown in solo shows around the country. Sara is a full-time professor and photography program coordinator at SUNY Rockland. www.saramacel.com
Chicago-based artist, Jean Sousa, has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and is the recipient of two artist fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and a regional artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2014 and 2017. Awards include a fellowship for residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Cliff Dwellers Artist Residency at Ragdale, an Artist Residency at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. Sousa works primarily in photography and film. Her work has been exhibited at the Southeast Museum of Photography, San Francisco Camerawork, the Union League Club of Chicago, and the Illinois State Museum, among other venues. Utilizing photographs she inherited from her Aunt Alice, Sousa rephotographed and re-imagined intimate, pocket-sized photos into large-scale portraits, and thereby shifts from specific memories of someone to a process of forgetting. http://jeansousaart.com
Derrick Woods-Morrow describes his work as a meditation on language and representation. He explores race, ethnicity & sexuality through photography, film, and performance. He has exhibited work in the Ground Floor Biennial exhibition at the Hyde Park Arts Center in Chicago, The BGSQD in New York, during the EXPO Chicago Art Fair a the 2018 Chicago Artadia Awardee, among other venues. He also presented a performance and lecture at the MCA Chicago. He has participated in residencies at Fire Island and the Chicago Artist Coalition. In 2019, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial as a collaborative effort with the artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Originally from Greensboro, NC, Woods-Morrow now resides in the Chicago area. www.derrickwoodsmorrow.com
Photography Now Submission Guidelines
Past exhibitions: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012