“Meet the Artist” with Wendy Ewald

On Thursday, August 29, we welcome Wendy Ewald to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Ewald will be presenting a selection of her previous projects spanning the past 50 years, including work done in Labrador, Kentucky, Mexico, Chicago, Margate England, and Philadelphia. She will also discuss her recent book, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, published alongside fellow editors Susan Meiselas, Laura Wexler, Leigh Raiford and Ariella Azoulay. She will have books available for sale, including Towards a Promised Land, America Border Culture Dreamer, The Devil is Leaving His Cave, Portraits and Dreams. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6pm.

Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

For over fifty years, Wendy Ewald has collaborated with children, families, women, and teachers around the world in Saudi Arabia, Holland, Morocco, Tanzania Colombia, Mexico and in the United States.

Starting as documentary investigations of places and communities, Ewald’s projects probe questions of identity and cultural differences. In her work with children, she encourages them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams. Ewald herself often makes photographs within the communities she works with and has the children mark or write on her negatives, thereby challenging the concept of who makes an image, who is the photographer, subject, the observer and who is the observed. In blurring the distinction of individual authorship and throwing into doubt the artist’s intentions, power, and identity, Ewald creates opportunities to look at the meaning and use of photographs in our lives with fresh perceptions.

She has published fourteen books including most recently Portraits and Dreams:  Stories and Photographs of Appalachian Children MACK 2020, and The Devil Is Leaving His Cave, MACK 2022.

Wendy Ewald has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Art.  She has had solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, International Center of Photography, the Queens Museum, the Fotomuseum in Switzerland, Center for Creative Photography in Melbourne among many others. Her work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial and collected by museums across the United States.

Banner image © Wendy Ewald