THE CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AT WOODSTOCK’S AFFINITY AWARDS HONORING MERYL MEISLER AND PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA
(Woodstock, NY) – The Center for Photography at Woodstock is pleased to announce our virtual 2021 Affinity Awards celebration on Thursday, June 3 at 8 pm ET. CPW will be honoring two dynamic artists, Meryl Meisler and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, who have participated in CPW’s artist-oriented programs and continue to create rich and engaging work, exemplifying how artists inspire and connect us.
The Affinity Award was created in 2016 to acknowledge organizations and individuals, who have made significant contributions to CPW. This year, we will recognize two artists who represent the breadth of the community we serve, and whose distinct work elevates CPW’s core initiatives—our artist-in-residence program (Woodstock AIR), artist workspaces, and exhibitions program.
During our virtual Affinity Awards, we’ll hear a short presentation from each of the artists on their current work, followed by a moderated conversation between the two artists and, of course, a celebration of their accomplishments.
Tickets start at just $25 (suggested donation). To join in our celebration, please click here.
Please consider becoming a Benefit Chair with a generous gift of $250 or above. Honorary Benefit Chairs show their enormous support for CPW, its artist programs, and our esteemed honorees Meryl Meisler and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. They will be listed on the website and receive a special thanks during our live event.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Meryl Meisler was born 1951 in the South Bronx and raised in North Massapequa, Long Island, NY. Inspired by Diane Arbus, Jacques Henri Lartigue as well as her dad Jack and grandfather Murray Meisler, Meryl Meisler began photographing herself, family, and friends while enrolled in a photography class taught by Cavalliere Ketchum at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1975, Meisler returned to New York City and studied with Lisette Model, continuing to photograph her hometown and the city around her. After working as a freelance illustrator by day, Meisler frequented and photographed the infamous New York Discos. As a 1978 CETA Artist grant recipient, Meisler created a portfolio of photographs which explored her Jewish Identity for the American Jewish Congress. After CETA, Meisler began a three-decade career as a NYC Public School Art Teacher.
Meisler has received fellowships, grants and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Light Work, YADDO, VCCA, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, Time Warner, Artists Space, CETA, the China Institute and the Japan Society. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Historical Society, Dia Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, Islip Art Museum, Annenberg Space for Photography, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, New-York Historical Society, Steven Kasher Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in public spaces including Grand Central Terminal, South Street Seaport, Photoville and throughout the NYC subway system. Her work is in the permanent collections many art institutions including the American Jewish Congress, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Book Art Museum- Poland, Columbia University, Smithsonian Institute, and many more.
Upon retiring from the NYC public schools, Meisler began releasing large bodies of previously unseen work. Her newest monograph, New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco, will be published in June 2021.
Meisler lives and works in New York City and Woodstock, NY, continuing the photographic memoir she began in 1973 – a uniquely American story, sweet and sassy with a pinch of mystery. Her work is represented by ClampArt.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya was born in 1982 in San Bernardino, CA. He received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004 and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2016. Sepuya’s work highlights the constructed nature of the photographic document and the performative space of the photographic studio, embracing the medium’s potentials for fragmentation and connection. In Sepuya’s closeup studies of human forms, subjects are enmeshed in creative, desirous exchanges.
In the Darkroom Mirror series (2017), Sepuya positions his camera and tripod in front of a mirror, depicting himself—occasionally accompanied by the limbs of a companion—in the act of taking a photograph. Through revealing his own tools and apparatuses, Sepuya presents artificial, enigmatic scenes that raise questions about the medium’s processes of exposure and concealment, the relationship between surface and depth, and the connection between the lens and the mirror as devices of capture and reflection. The mirrors in Sepuya’s images often bare palimpsestic traces of smudging, disturbing the transparency of the picture plane and heightening the photograph’s tactility.
Sepuya’s work also engages with the suggestive, unstable meanings of “darkroom,” which refers to, in the artist’s words, “both the historical origin of the photographer’s craft as well as the privileged yet marginalized site of queer and colored sexuality and socialization.” The personal and the professional collide in Sepuya’s studio, as his subjects are not strictly models but also friends, lovers, peers, and members of the queer community. Such intimate depictions explore complex intersections of desire, collaboration, and creative exchange. They also imagine the studio as a site for expanding the possibilities of queer subjectivity and expression.
Sepuya has had solo shows at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis (2011); Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York (2017); Team Gallery, New York and Los Angeles (2017 and 2019, respectively); Document Gallery, Chicago (2018); and Fotomuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands (2018). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015); Artist Institute, Hunter College, City University of New York (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016); New Museum, New York (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018). Sepuya was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Los Angeles Emerging Artist Grant in 2017.
Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles. He participated in CPW’s residency program, Woodstock AIR, in 2010.
ABOUT CPW:
Founded in 1977, the Center for Photography at Woodstock is an artist-centered nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artists working in photography and related media and engaging audiences through opportunities in which creation, discovery, and learning are made possible.