C. Wright Daniel

C. Wright Daniel works in lo-tech or camera-less techniques on black and white photo paper, focusing on photography as an entirely non-fictional medium. Historically a photograph is believed to capture a real event in real time; Daniel exploits this limitation to expand new methods in visual exploration and manipulation. He is currently pursuing his MFA at California College of the Arts. Check out his website if you haven't already and thank him for taking the time to come to our class and being so generous with us ! www.cwrightdaniel.com

How Chicano Is It?

I happened upon this article written by Carolina A. Miranda for ARTnews in the September 2010 issue and I thought it was an interesting read and a good point of departure for perhaps a future discussion.

Young artists of Mexican American heritage are gaining visibility for work that often touches on their ethnic identity—along with other themes, from the conceptual to the formal. But they're conflicted about being defined by it

by Carolina A. Miranda

On a spring night in 1972, a trio of Los Angeles artists—Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón III, and Glugio Nicandro (who goes by the nickname Gronk)—spray-painted their names at the entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It might have seemed a simple act of vandalism. For the artists, however, a collective that operated under the name Asco, it was a defiant, if temporary, work of art.

Earlier in the day, Gamboa had casually encountered a LACMA curator and pressed him about the absence of Chicanos (Americans of Mexican descent) from the displays of contemporary art. As the story goes, the curator dismissively responded that Chicanos didn't produce art; they joined gangs. That night, Gamboa and his colleagues returned to the museum and sprayed their signatures on the institution's Modernist facade. The following morning, they returned with the collective's fourth member, Patssi Valdez, and photographed her standing alongside their handiwork. The piece, dubbed Spray Paint LACMA, turned the institution into a giant, conceptual work of Chicano art. The museum painted over the tags within hours, but Spray Paint LACMA was set to become a touchstone for generations of Chicano artists.

In the intervening 38 years, the institutional visibility of Chicano artists has improved. Individual works by some of Asco's former members now figure in LACMA's permanent collection, as do pieces by painter Carlos Almaraz and conceptualist Carlee Fernandez. Chicano artists, including Daniel J. Martinez, Ruben Ochoa, and Eduardo Sarabia, have appeared in Whitney Biennials—some more than once. (At the 1993 show, Martinez famously handed out museum-admission badges that read, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white.")

On the commercial front, Chicano artists demonstrate the full range of experiences. While some established figures, such as Gamboa and Gronk, eschew the gallery scene to focus on institutional work, others show with leading American galleries, among them Ochoa, at Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, and Sarabia, at I-20 in New York. Mario Ybarra Jr., also a Whitney Biennial alum, is represented by Michael Janssen in Berlin, Mark Moore in Santa Monica, and Lehmann Maupin in New York.

Moreover, in the coming year, Chicano artists will figure prominently in a variety of programming, including a number of exhibitions tied to Pacific Standard Time, a cluster of California-focused shows supported by the J. Paul Getty Foundation that will open across more than a dozen major Southern California institutions in the fall of 2011. Most significantly, in late 2011, Asco will be the subject of a retrospective at—of all places—LACMA. Although the group received little to no recognition from the gallery circuit or Southern California's principal arts institutions during its '70s heyday, it had a significant underground following and touched a generation of artists who grew up hearing about the group’s conceptual exploits. "It's long overdue," says the exhibition's cocurator, C. Ondine Chavoya, professor of art history and Latina/o studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. "Their influence and impact over time has been pretty significant."

Even as a growing number of Chicano artists achieve a higher profile, however, institutional acknowledgment remains spotty, especially from the powerful art centers in New York. The 2010 Whitney Biennial did not include a single Chicano artist in its survey of American art. (For that matter, it didn't include a single Latino artist either.) The same goes for the New Museum, which didn't include any Chicanos or Latinos in its 2009 triennial, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus."

"Type in the word 'Chicano' on the Web sites of Sotheby's and Christie's and you get a big fat zero," says Gamboa, now a photography and media professor at the California Institute of the Arts. "Look at the collections of the major museums. That will also tell you something."

It's hard to know exactly how many Chicano artists are represented in museums, since institutions generally don't categorize their collections by the creators' ethnicities. But a cursory search for names of some of the most prominent contemporary Chicano artists indicates that they certainly aren't overrepresented. The Whitney can confirm the presence of three Chicano artists—Martinez, Ochoa, and urban-landscape photographer Anthony Hernandez—in its permanent collection, while the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum can each confirm one, the same one: Hernandez. "If you look at the roster of any gallery or group exhibition, there is still not really parity," says Rita Gonzalez, curator of contemporary art at LACMA, who is working on the Asco retrospective and who cocurated "Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement," a traveling show that started at LACMA. "If it's not in the curator's consciousness to think about these issues—about representing the breadth of the American landscape—then it doesn't play itself out."

As Chicano artists seek recognition within this arena, they tread a path fraught with politics. The easiest alternative for many seeking exposure has historically been the regular group shows organized around a narrow gamut of ethnicity-centered works. ("Cinco de Mayo shows" is how one artist describes them, sardonically.) But these can leave many artists feeling boxed in by their identities. "If they get exhibited under that category and then they don't get exhibited elsewhere, it becomes the totality of what they are," says Chon Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, who cocurated "Phantom Sightings" for LACMA, where he is adjunct curator. "That can be frustrating for artists who are broadly engaged with the world."

Some are wary about being dubbed a Chicano artist out of concern that their work might be automatically categorized as "Chicano art"—a label often associated with the graphic-heavy, narrative-style imagery that accompanied the Chicano civil-rights movement of the '60s and '70s. In fact, a number of artists approached for this story declined to be interviewed. And many of those who did speak, especially the younger ones, gave highly nuanced views of how they see themselves. Ybarra is a 36-year-old Southern California-based artist whose pop-infused installations have appeared at Tate Modern in London and the Art Institute of Chicago. "I am a Chicano, but do I make Chicano art?" he asks rhetorically. "I do not."

Chicano art, as a category, emerged during the civil-rights and antiwar movements of the '60s, when migrant farm workers were striking for better working conditions and Mexican American students in Los Angeles were staging walkouts in demand of improved educational services. It was during this time that the word "Chicano," once used pejoratively to describe Mexican immigrants in the United States, came into broad use as a term of empowerment.

The art that was tied to and emerged from the movements served as both political broadside and cultural affirmation. Poster artists—influenced by turn-of-the-20th-century Mexican printmakers and the stark Cuban revolutionary posters of the '60s—created flyers to announce protests. Painters incorporated images from indigenous history and Chicano popular culture (think zoot suits and lowrider cars) in ways that paid tribute to Latin American folk art and the Mexican muralists. A couple of iconic figures to emerge from this period are Frank Romero, who paints vivid scenes of barrio life, and Carmen Lomas Garza, best known for depictions of domestic settings. They, and others working in this vein, were featured in a high-profile traveling show, "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge," curated by René Yañez from works in the collection of actor Cheech Marin.

For many historians, art writers, and curators, it is this socially minded work that defines the category. But the scene was hardly monolithic. "There were a variety of ideologies," says Rupert Garcia, a Bay Area artist who will have two decades' worth of his prints on view in "Rupert Garcia: The Magnolia Editions Projects," opening at San Francisco's de Young Museum on February 26. "It wasn't as black and white as many would like to say it is. It was fluid and exciting." Garcia is a case in point: a trained artist, he has crafted well-known political posters, but has also produced lesser-known paintings that reflect his abiding interest in art history. A 1989 pastel in "Phantom Sightings" riffedñin an abstract wayñon Gustave Courbet's troubles following the Paris Commune of 1871.

Other Chicano painters have paid tribute to art-historical figures as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and Leonardo da Vinci. And, of course, there is Asco, the group that explored performance, conceptual photography, and guerrilla theater as early as more prominent '70s artists like Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy. In Walking Mural, a well-known Happening from 1972, the group dressed up as parodic versions of traditional Chicano mural imagesñincluding a Goth-looking Virgin of Guadalupeñand paraded along Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. The piece was a flamboyant deconstruction of the clichéd imagery used by many Chicano muralists.

Ignored (or reviled) by figures within the Chicano movement for not adhering to traditional forms, Asco was also at a remove from art-world power centers. "We fell into a state of not being accepted on either front," recalls Gronk, one of the group's founding members, a successful painter and photographer who has shown at international venues, including the Pompidou Center in Paris, and who this past spring created a mural at UCLA's Fowler Museum. He thinks that this lack of critical acceptance "allowed us a lot of creative leeway for exploration. There were no limitations to the possibilities we had with Asco. We could be critical of ourselves."

In recent years, curators have attempted to emphasize the broad range of mediums and subject matters employed by Chicano artists. LACMA's generally well-received "Phantom Sightings"—which took as its lynchpin Asco's early works—was key in this regard. The survey, featuring the work of more than two dozen artists, examined the conceptual, abstract, and art-historical practices of Chicano artists working in the '70s and '80s. There were works that referred to everything from California Minimalism to the environment. The show also extended to another generation, by including artists in their 20s and 30s—some of them biracial, others from the suburbs, few of them with a direct connection to the Chicano civil-rights movement. By and large trained in art schools, this younger cohort works in the conceptual idioms that for so long have fallen outside of the definition of Chicano art. Much of their work tackles the issue of identity in a diffuse and abstract way.

In the 2006 self-portrait photo series "Man," for example, Los Angeles—based artist Carlee Fernandez, now 37, explores her physical relationship to men whom she considers influential, from her Mexican father to Austrian artist Franz West to Megadeth guitarist Dave Mustaine. In the series, she mirrors their looks and poses. It is a subtle exploration of identity by an artist who is biracial and who spent much of her youth living in Europe. "I've always felt as if I've had one foot in and one foot out," she explains, a common sentiment among many of the artists I spoke with. Cruz Ortiz, a 38-year-old San Antonio-based artist who does performances as a post-punk antihero named Spaztek, echoes the idea. "It's difficult for me when people call me up for Chicano shows," says Ortiz, who this past summer had a solo project at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. "I'm like, 'Really?' It's much more complex than that."

"Phantom Sightings" explored this complexity—which is now playing itself out among two generations of Chicano artists. Part of the struggle is putting a name to what they are doing: these artists are not working within the established parameters of Chicano art, yet they are Chicano, and in many ways their ethnicity informs their work. But it's not the central aspect of what they do. So what do we call it? Everyone I spoke with seemed to have a different answer. (Variations on "I'm a contemporary artist who happens to be Chicano/a" was a favorite refrain.) Noriega likens it to the condition facing that nebulous grouping known as feminist art. (Is it feminist because it's made by women or because it displays feminist themes? Discuss.) Interestingly, the "Phantom Sightings" curators chose not to label the work Chicano art, opting for the subtitle "Art after the Chicano Movement."

Despite the issues with classification, LACMA's Gonzalez says that broad themes unite these artists. "There's a sense of fluidity and hybridity," she says. "You're talking about artists who, for the most part, are living in an urban environment and who interface with a multiethnic cast." And while the ways in which they express these ideas are varied, there is the shared experience of having to navigate more than a single reality. Ortiz says he is particularly fond of the term "negotiator"—"people who jump back and forth, playing hopscotch, trying to figure what works and what doesn't."

The amorphous and tenuous categories of ethnic identity have led some critics to declare that art should not be presented through that prism. Yet many curators, who say that Chicano artists remain woefully underrepresented, disagree. Pilar Tompkins, an independent curator based in Los Angeles, has organized exhibitions for the city's department of cultural affairs and is at work on three shows related to Pacific Standard Time. "I think more articles have been written about whether Chicano art exists than there have been art exhibits dedicated to exploring the idea," she says. "This has not been fleshed out."

Moreover, in a society obsessed with issues of race, many artists see ethnicity as a potentially interesting organizing principle for a group show—provided it's rigorously and sensitively done. "I'm not boxed in," says New Mexico-based photographer Delilah Montoya, an artist whose border photographs were featured in "Phantom Sightings" and whose images will appear in the group photography show "With Open Eyes" at the Museo de las Americas in Denver next February. "The subject is really deep. I'm digging a well and haven't hit water yet."

As with all things relating to race, it's a tricky balance. The artists I spoke with found that Chicano culture provided them with a rich source of inspiration—but it wasn't the only source. And they are ready to move beyond the notion that they can be identified with only one style of art making. Ybarra provides an interesting personal metaphor to explain the phenomenon. As a child, he used to visit his great-grandmother in her San Francisco apartment. Since she had a lot of grandchildren, those visiting would have to clearly identify themselves before being buzzed in. "You'd ring the bell and then you'd say, 'It's Mario—the son of Mario, the son of Salvador,'" he recalls. "Well, that's what Chicano art is for me. Something that has been passed down, that I feel an affinity for—in the same way I feel an affinity for other artists that came out of L.A.—but it isn't the only thing that defines me."

Carolina A. Miranda is a freelance writer in New York and regular contributor to WNYC. She blogs at C-Monster.net.

Carre Mae Weems

From the Kitchen Table Series, 1990



Carre Mae Weems, based in upstate New York, works with photographs, text, fabric, audio, installation, and video. She investigates family relationships, gender roles, the various histories of racism, sexism, and class, and political systems. She says, " Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment." She uses storytelling as a device to probe into these complicated and often contested arenas. She has been making work since the mid-1980s and has carved a path for many young artists.


To learn more about Carrie Mae Weems work, visit her website at www.carriemaeweems.net
There is also a great interview with Carrie Mae Weems conducted by artist, Dawoud Bey for BOMB magazine. http://bombsite.com/issues/108/articles/3307

Here is an excerpt below where she discusses the Kitchen Table Series (1990), the images that you see above.

DB There are some things that I want to ask you that are more specific to your work. Things I haven’t actually asked you but have thought about for some time. One has to do with an aspect of your work in which you are, conceptually, both in front of and behind the camera. You’re the subject and you’re the photographer. Certainly the earlier Kitchen Table series introduced that idea quite forcefully. More recently there’s a recurring figure that has been appearing in your work; what I would call a silent witness to history. This woman, although we can’t always see her face, seems to be a kind of omnipotent presence, signaling perhaps that what she bears witness to is more highly charged than what we might think. She seems like a witness who, through witnessing, almost carries the weight of each place. This woman—this avatar—who is she? What’s her function in relation to places and the narratives you’re constructing?

CMW I call her my muse—but it’s safe to say that she’s more than one thing. She’s an alter-ego. My alter-ego, yes. But she has a very real function in my work life. I was in the Folklore program at UC Berkeley for three years, working with Alan Dundes on the strategy of participant/observer. I attempt to create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it. I try to use the tension created between these different positions—I am both subject and object; performer and director. I only recently realized that I’ve been acting/performing/observing in this way for years—the work told me.

The muse made her first appearance in Kitchen Table; this woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience, she leads you into history. She’s a witness and a guide. She changes slightly, depending on location. For instance, she operates differently in Cuba and Louisiana than in Rome. She’s shown me a great deal about the world and about myself, and I’m grateful to her. Carrying a tremendous burden, she is a black woman leading me through the trauma of history. I think it’s very important that as a black woman she’s engaged with the world around her; she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.

Much of my current work centers on power and architecture. For instance, I find myself traveling in Seville, Rome, and Berlin. It’s been implied that I have no place in Europe. I find the idea that I’m “out of place” shocking. There’s a dynamic relationship between these places: the power of the state, the emotional manipulation of citizens through architectural means, the trauma of the war, genocide, the erasure of Jews, the slave coast, and the slave cabins. Here I can see an Egyptian obelisk in every major square, one riding on the back of Bernini’s sculpture. The world met on the Mediterranean, not on the Mississippi—these things are linked in my mind. From here, Africa is just one giant step away. Spain is closer than Savannah, Rome closer than Rhode Island. Mark Antony lost his power languishing in the arms of Cleopatra; Mussolini established Italian colonies in Egypt; the Moors and Africans controlled the waters of Spain, leaving their mark in the Alhambra. Money was minted here, not in Maine. See what I mean? I’m not here to eat the pasta. I’m trying in my humble way connect the dots, to confront history. Democracy and colonial expansion are rooted here. So I refuse the imposed limits. My girl, my muse, dares to show up as a guide, an engaged persona pointing toward the history of power. She’s the unintended consequence of the Western imagination. It’s essential that I do this work and it’s essential that I do it with my body.

Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra is a Dutch photographer best known for her portraiture. She produced a self-portrait during her recovery from a car accident which initiated a new direction in her work. She has a series, Beach, in which she photographs youth in various locations in the United States and Europe.

The following is an a conversation with Anne-celine Jaeger for PopPhoto.com which was excerpted from the book, "Image Makers, Image Takers: Interviews with Today's Leading Curators, Editors and photographers"

Rineke Dijkstra tends to work in series, concentrating on individual portraits. She focuses on people in a transitional stage of their life, such as women after giving birth in 'Mothers', adolescents and pre-adolescents on the beach in her 'Beach' series and new recruits in 'Israeli Soldiers'. Her subjects stand facing the camera against a minimal background. The simplicity of the resulting image encourages us to direct all our attention towards the isolated subject. Dijkstra has published two monographs (Rineke Dijkstra: Beach Portraits and Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits) and her work is exhibited in museums worldwide.

When did you get into photography?

I was studying to be an arts and crafts teacher, but didn't feel comfortable doing that. Then a friend lent me his camera once and I just thought, 'this is it.' I was 19. I did a photography course to learn the practical side of things and then went to Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, an art school in Amsterdam. I've always liked observing. Even as a kid I was obsessed with watching people that looked special to me.

Do you think it's important to be technically proficient?

It depends what kind of photography you do. It's important to know the possibilities in terms of what you can do. For example, how I use the flash and light is very important in my images. For me it was a case of learning by doing because I never understood anything they taught me at school. about authenticity. I try to find people that have something special. I don't even know what it is. It's intuition. The pictures of the kids in the Tiergarten in Berlin, for example, came about because those children were actually playing a game and I was simply to get to know them just by observing them when I am taking the picture. I try and look for an uninhibited moment, where people forget about trying to control the image of themselves. People go into sort of trance because so much concentration is needed from both photographer and the subject when you are working with a 4x5. Even the tiniest movement means you have to refocus. I also need to be able to relate to my subject. For example, when I took the portraits of the girls in the Buzzclub in Liverpool, England I could relate tothem. I tried doing the same in other clubs, but it just didn't work.

What interests you about the transition of a person?

I think photography really lets you examine how a person is changing. When I was photographing Olivier, the Frenchman who enlisted in the Foreign Legion, every time I went to see him I thought he hadn't changed at all. But in the picture you can see the change in his eyes, in his expression. They were subtle, but you could see them clearly.

What do you look for in your subjects?

It's important for me to know the location is right before I approach a subject. Then, I'll find the subject within that location and work from what the subject does. When subjects are posing for me, I don't ever want to manipulate them too much.

What is your aim when taking pictures?

I want to show things you might not see in normal life. I make normal things appear special. I want people to look at life in a new and different way, but it always has to be based on reality. It's important that you don't pass judgement, and leave space for interpretation. For example, in the Almerisa series, the young Bosnian refugee, whose portrait I took for the first time in the early 1990s, it was important for me not to show any specific details of her surroundings such as the décor of the apartment. If you show too much of a subject's personal life, the viewer will immediately make assumptions. If you leave out the details, the viewer has to look for much subtler hints such as how her shoelaces are tied, or her lipstick or the state of her The same goes for the picture of the boy in Odessa.You could show he is poor by including a trashcan or a stray cat in the picture. But for me it's all about subtlety and the fact that you really have to read the image to get clues about the boy.That makes it equal for everybody.

I like it when photographs are democratic. I usually find that portraits work best if you don't have a specific idea of what you are looking for. You have to be open for anything to happen. If you try and force something, there is always the danger of a picture becoming too onedimensional.

How did you come up with the idea for the 'Beach' series?

I broke my hip about 15 years ago and started doing self-portraits after swimming in the pool where I was doing physiotherapy. I was fascinated by capturing something unconscious and natural in a photograph, something that was miles away from the boring and predictable businessmen I had until then mostly photographed. I was interested in photographing people at moments when they had dropped all pretence of a pose. Once I began taking these pictures, I realized I would prefer to do a series because it gave me a better grip on a subject.

What equipment do you use?

I use a 4x5 inch field camera with a standard lens and a tripod. The negatives are the size of postcards, which gives you really wonderful sharp detail and contrast.

The end result is that your photograph is almost more real than reality.

How do you set up your lights?

In the beginning I always had really complicated lighting set-ups because I thought: the more lights, the better the picture. Now I work with as few lights as possible.

For me, daylight is the main source of light, and the flash is really only there to lighten the
shadows. I use one Lumedyne flash. It works with batteries so you can use it inside and outside.

How many frames do you shoot per subject?

I take about four or five sheets of film per subject, but I might shoot about five different people in a park on any given day. I've realized that I can't just go to a park and wait for the right person to turn up. I have to start working. Then I get into it and become part of the environment. It's a development. For example, a picture I took of a little girl in Barcelona only came about at the end of my working day. I was actually finished and packing up but then I saw her. She was there with her dad riding that scooter, looking at me like 'What are you doing?' and it's exactly the same look as in the photo. That's what I'm looking for. It's got to be emphatic. If you see the picture, it shouldn't look forced, it should look like a snapshot. You're not supposed to think it's all set up. You should take it for granted and it should be totally natural somehow. I took three frames of her. That's how long her concentration lasted. But I got my picture.

How do you edit your pictures?

I scan the negatives and make them bigger so you can see more. Then I might leave them for two weeks because you need distance to see properly. It happens to me that I take a picture and I think it doesn't work at all and then I look at it three years later and I think it's a great picture. It's probably linked to having something in mind and being disappointed that your expectations weren't met, but then realizing later that it was in fact a lucky moment. But in general I make sure the light, the facial expression and the posture of the body look right.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I like the work of contemporary portrait photographers like Thomas Struth, Paul Graham and Judith Joy Ross as well as some of the older generation, in particular Diane Arbus and August Sander a lot, but generally I get more out of looking at old paintings such as the Rembrandts, Vermeers and Versproncks at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I think the light, as well as the emotional and psychological forces at play are so incredible in those paintings. I prefer the old classics to contemporary art shows.

What art form does photography come closest to?

Perhaps sculpture. I think it's important that people understand and look at photography in a more abstract way. It's about being able to imagine looking behind the image as if it was three-dimensional.

Why do you print your images large format?

I like it when a picture is monumental - especially in a museum setting. But for me it's also important that if you stand in front of my picture, you feel the urge to come closer. If photos are too large, people tend to look at them only froma distance. I like them to be printed big enough so people view them froma distance but small enough so that they step forward and look for all the details in the picture. I think there is a whole story in all those details. It's about intimacy too.

Do you ever do editorial work?

When I first left art school I did portraits for magazines and newspapers but found it difficult because I wanted to create something more substantial that related to everybody, not just to one specific person. I learnt a lot about how to be technical, how to work with people and how to work fast, but now I'm more interested in my personal projects. Occasionally I do assignments for The New York Times Magazine.

Do you think people can learn a certain way of seeing?

I think everybody can do it. Diane Arbus said that you just have to choose a subject and continue photographing it for as long as something comes out of it. You always have to use your own fascinations as a starting point. It's the same if you are in a group of people: you will always look at the people who are the most interesting to you. The same goes for photography, you have to photograph what you like. Passion is really important.

What excites you most about photography?

I love being totally in the moment, when everything comes together and is just right. You actually see things clearer. But I can spend weeks in the park without ever seeing anything interesting and I never know whether it is because it simply isn't there or because I just didn't see it.

What makes one image stand out more than another?

A photograph works best when the formal aspects such as light, colour and composition, as well as the informal aspects like someone's gaze or gesture come together. In my pictures I also look for a sense of stillness and serenity. I like it when everything is reduced to its essence. You try to get things to reach a climax. A moment of truth.

Malick Sidibe

Malick Sidibe began photography in 1956 in Mali. He had his own portrait studio, Studio Malick, in Bamako and made photographs of middle-class youth culture at parties and other ceremonies. Sidibe captures the festive spirit of Mali's Independence (1960) from French colonial rule.

"independence was the energizing influence of young culture in my country. People went out and enjoyed themselves and had a lot of fun, and it was a very energetic place. But as the development of a socialist system took hold, imposing a police force that was in charge of taking care that people couldn't be out during the day and all that, this energy became much more constrained. So after '68, it was forbidden, for example, that women wear miniskirts. There were surveillance police who oversaw what the young people were doing. There were even times when people couldn't go out and take a walk." -Malick Sidibe

Malick Sidibe: Chemises published by Steidl brings together these party photographs made between 1962 and 1974.

In 2006 Tigerlily Films made a documentary entitled "Dolce Vita Africana" about Sidibe filming him at work in his studio in Bamako, having a reunion with many of his friends (and former photographic subjects) from his younger days and speaking to him about his work.

In 2008, Sidibé was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Riley and his Story

Riley and his story is the result of a collaboration initiated by Monica Haller with Iraq war veteran, Riley Sharbonno. Haller wanted to make sense of what was happening in Iraq. She was interested in the fluidity and instability of memory in relationship to these images. The book combines text from the conversations they shared over three years along with images that he took while working as nurse in combat.

The archive of Riley is an intricate interpretation of experience, memory, and sentiment. Haller states, "This project is about what a book is, what reading is, what interacting with images is. How a book is deployed, disseminated, and staged all change the way it is used. Evolving technologies, or redeploying of old technologies, changes the way information is received."

Monica Haller is based in Minnesota and has received grants for her collaborative work with Latina youth in Minneapolis and the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists. She has exhibited in local venues in the Twin Cities, including The Soap Factory, Soo Visual Art Center, Intermedia Arts, and nationally at the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Ind.) and the Washington Street Art Center (Cambridge, Mass.). She has lectured, taught courses and organized workshops at various institutions including Macalester College, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Notre Dame Peace Conference.

To read more about this project go to rileyandhisstory.com where you can also download a pdf with excerpts from the book.

Funny Face I Love You!

Tammy Rae Carland

Funny Face, I Love You

September 10 - October 23, 2010

Opening Reception: September 10, 6 – 8PM

Silverman Gallery is pleased to present Funny Face, I Love You, an exhibition of new work by Tammy Rae Carland on view from September 10 - October 23, 2010.

The artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery features a suite of new photographs, a selection of mixed media works as well as a cast porcelain sculpture. Inspired by the history of female comedians, Carland explores questions of humor and desire,

juxtaposing images of empty stages with singular figures caught mid-act. These works isolate the body, focusing less on the artifice of public personas than the sheer spectacle of performing corporealities. Through these, Carland foregrounds the fragility and pathos inherent in these acts of vulnerability and self-humiliation—acts which also resonate with the unraveling of gender roles through acting out. Invariably, the conversation opens onto a larger meditation on the fragmentation of the body and the currency of the abject, while engaging the politics of performativity and the legacy of feminism.

Tammy Rae Carland received her MFA from UC Irvine, and also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her work has been screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin and Sydney. She has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum and Pulse. She is co-founder and owner of Mr. Lady Records, an independent record label and video distribution company. She is currently chair of Photography at California College of Arts and Crafts. Carland lives and works in Oakland, California.

For more information contact info@silverman-gallery.com

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Alessandra Sanguinetti is an Argentine artist who just moved to the bay area from New York, where she attended the International Center for Photography.  She has won the Hasselblad Foundation grant, is a member of Magnum, and has book On the Sixth Day published by Nazraeli Press.

Alessandra has been working on an ongoing series of photographs following the lives of the young cousins Guillermina and Belinda as they grow up on their family’s farm outside Buenos Aires.  She has been working with the girls since 1999 and the images deal with the fantasies and angst of moving from childhood into adulthood.  There is a blend of staged photographs and candid images of the girls.  You can see more of this work and another series, entitled on the sixth day where Alessandra photographs livestock, amazing work.