Mickalene Thomas challenges current standards and asserts new definitions of beauty and inspiration through her groundbreaking photographs in Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and companion exhibition, tête-à-tête. Identifying photography as a touchstone for her practice, much of her work functions as an act of deconstruction and appropriation—she draws inspiration widely, borrowing various visual motifs including 1970s black-is-beautiful imagery, 19th-century French painting, and 20th-century studio portraiture.

Equally important, the photographs presented reflect a personal community of inspiration—a collection of muses that includes Thomas herself and her mother, friends, and lovers. These muses emphasize the communal and social aspects of art-making and creativity that pervade her work. Nearly 50 artworks are highlighted in Muse, including a three-dimensional tableau reminiscent of a seventies-era domestic space, replicating the studio installation where Thomas and her models collaborate.

Communities of inspiration are further highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by Thomas. This mini-exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works by ten artists that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own work, these artists contend with many of the same themes central to Thomas’ practice.

Together, these exhibitions create a robust visual conversation about representation of the black body in today’s society and provide opportunities for guests to reflect on how various forms of visual culture help shape their own identities and how they, too, collect and process information.

Exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York.

Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by featuring artists that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, and reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Today, cartography is a relic, replaced with global positioning systems that describe geography through virtual, screen-based information that appears and disappears in a keystroke. If maps have outlived their original use, what truth might they still tell? In contemporary art, maps, along with books and other printed texts, remain potent sources of inspiration for exploring the intersections of knowledge and fantasy, and of experience and imagination.

Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials, asking viewers to look and think—and question—twice. At a time when alternate facts equate to misrepresentations of truth, the alternate fictions of art may speak more honest, deeper truths. The alternative reality of the 21st-century artist’s imaginative universe may offer the ideal arena in which to confront the present and envision the future.

Featured Artists: Slater Bradley, Nick Brandt, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alain Declercq, Adonis Flores, Anthony Goicolea, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Ann Hamilton, Miler Lagos, Yousseff Nabil, Paolo Ventura, Federico Somi

Also on view –  Spotlight: LaToya Ruby Frazier

As a part of New York’s blossoming art community in the early 1960s, Peter Moore (1932–1993) began what was to become an unmatched photographic archive of the defiance and spirit of the era’s Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater, and countless other happenings and performances. Moore’s work documents that heated moment in the art world when experimental performance, music, dance, and visual art intersected in radical and transformative ways.

Among the most radical were those staged by female artists, poetically preserved through Moore’s thoughtful eye. His photographs are often the sole visual records of the ephemeral events choreographed by artists like Charlotte Moorman, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Deborah Hay, Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Jackie Winsor.

Forty years later, Carl Solway Gallery presents Moore’s photographs as a pivotal historical recollection of the artists at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation during the late ’60s. Selected from his archive of more than a half-million photographs, this show presents iconic images of Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono. Conceived in collaboration with Barbara Moore, the show includes black and white as well as color photographs.

Artists Lorena Molina, Gina Osterloh, and Carman Winant form the foundation for this group show that portrays the female experience though photographs, videos, film, and performance.

Capturing and Archiving the Female Experience also includes a reading room with the latest and most respected photography publications, specifically focused on books about photography by and of women that convey the feminine experience in either the past or the present as part of the exhibition. Active programming in the space such as coffee and tea service and artist and student-led discussion groups are important to the exhibition’s impact and meaning. Conversations and connections made in real time are an essential component of the exhibition. At the close of the exhibition, the reading room materials will become part of the permanent collection of the UC DAAP Library, and will be a valuable resource for the faculty, students and community members.

Kelly Gallagher, Filmmaker, Curator, and Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University, NY, with Miranda July, Acclaimed Filmmaker, Artist, and Writer, Los Angeles, CA

Introduction by C. Jacqueline Wood, FotoFocus Guest Curator and The Mini Microcinema Director, Cincinnati, OH

Miranda July in conversation with Kelly Gallagher to discuss her Joanie 4 Jackie Archive.

In 1995, Miranda July dropped out of college, moved to Portland, Oregon, and typed up a pamphlet that she imagined would be the start of a revolution of girls and women making movies and sharing them with each other. The pamphlet said: “A challenge and a promise: Lady, you send me your movie and I’ll send you the latest Big Miss Moviola Chainletter Tape.”

Joanie 4 Jackie (aka Big Miss Moviola) was an underground film network for girls and women, formed in 1995. For more than ten years women sent their movies to Joanie 4 Jackie and received a “Chainletter” tape in return — their movie compiled with nine others. In a pre-YouTube world, this was one-way women could see each other’s work and know they weren’t alone.  The project inspired girls to make movies for the first time, circulated work by seasoned artists and connected women across the country through screenings and booklets of letters that arrived with each videotape. By the time the project had run its course the work of over 200 filmmakers was distributed through 22 compilation tapes, and Joanie 4 Jackie had exhibited movies all over the world, from punk clubs to the Museum of Modern Art.

In January 2017 The Getty Research Institute announced the acquisition of the complete Joanie 4 Jackie archives. Twenty-seven boxes of tapes, posters, letters, embarrassing notes, to-do lists, and grandiose plans will be made available to researchers and preserved for all time in a feminist and queer context, alongside the archives of artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Carolee Schneemann.

Vanguard composer and pianist Vijay Iyer and Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole perform the powerful interdisciplinary collaboration Blind Spot at Cincinnati’s historic Memorial Hall. Cole’s striking photography and spoken words are accompanied by a live score performed by Iyer’s adept trio—Okkyung Lee (cello), Patricia Brennan (vibes and marimba), Stephan Crump (bass)—for a musical investigation of humanity’s voluntary blindness to tragedy and injustice throughout history.

Introduction by Drew Klein, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Contemporary Arts Center Performing Arts Director, Cincinnati, OH

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Isaac Julien’s landmark 1989 film Looking for Langston, the Columbus Museum of Art presents an installation of the film alongside a selection of related photographic works. Made at the height of the AIDS epidemic in London and New York, Looking for Langston is composed of archival moving images and original footage that reimagines on the life of poet Langston Hughes and a community of gay artists during the Harlem Renaissance. The film collapses both time and geography, mixing the words of Hughes, James Baldwin, and Essex Hemphill and the sounds of blues, jazz, and 1980s house music.

While some photographic works distill the narrative of the film, others reflect upon its own making and artistic lineages. Julien’s sumptuous monochrome images consciously mine the aesthetics of black and queer histories, from James VanDerZee’s funerary and studio portraits of Harlem residents during the 1920s and 1930s, to George Platt Lynes’s male nudes during the 1930s, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotized photographs of black men during the 1980s. Foregrounding black, queer experiences within both an American and international context, the work maintains its urgency today.

Isaac Julien: Looking for Langston will be presented in conjunction with I, Too, Sing America, a major survey exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography, literature, music, and film made in Harlem and beyond during the 1920s and 1930s, including 40 photographs by James VanDerZee.

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents the region’s first major exhibition featuring the British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing, whose work is widely regarded as being among the most significant artistic statements of our time. Since her emergence in the London art scene of the 1990s, Wearing has taken as her subject nothing less than the experience of being human. Her photographs, videos, and sculptures illuminate unspoken dimensions of our most common relationships and acts, shedding light on the ways we inhabit personae and expose or conceal interior thoughts and desires. Life: Gillian Wearing includes a concise selection of the artist’s iconic lens-based works along with three new projects receiving their world premiere in Cincinnati.

Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was appointed O.B.E. in 2011 for services to art, is best known for documenting strangers’ thoughts and confessions through film and photography, as well as re-presenting herself as other artists or family members through the use of masks and elaborate staging. The video installations and still photographs on view at the Museum chart new territory in the artist’s engagement with identity, self-revelation, and contemporary media culture, exploring tensions between public and private life, the drive to tell our own secrets and know the secrets of others, and the blurry line between documentation and a constructed point of view.

FotoFocus at The Mini: Cinema and Archive is a month-long screening series examining film and video’s complex relationship to the photographic archive. The Mini Microcinema will present over 30 screenings and events, featuring more than 50 makers with programming by five different curators. Ultimately, film and video’s relationship to archive, both on and off the screen, can be examined and interpreted in a variety of ways. In the most traditional sense, cinema is a storytelling mechanism with the power to capture and archive an artist’s ever-changing process. Archival material, both still and moving, can also be used as source material for the construction of new works. Like collage or sound mixing, the use of appropriated media has the ability to create greater meaning through montage, as well as the ability to re-examine and re-interpret the past. Oftentimes, experimental film and media makers use photographic archives as both objects and subjects in their work, which prompts the viewer to consider the similarities and differences between the mediums themselves. Further, the film still is an aspect where film and video calls on its photographic origin, and considers the role of filmmaker as photographer. Animation, specifically stop-motion, underscores the notion of the filmstrip as a photographic archive because the production directly involves snapping photo after photo, slightly changing the content within the frame. Here, the filmmaker literally constructs a moment in time, rather than capturing it, thus animation could represent an archive of a fully constructed reality. The examination of film and media collections are another fascinating way to learn about media’s historical impact in relationship to the socio-political moment in which the archive derives. FotoFocus at The Mini: Cinema and Archive presents a variety of work exploring the many intersections between cinema and the photographic archive worth further thought and examination.

Participants: Stéphane Aubier, Stephanie Barber, Stephanie Barber, Matthew Bauman, Steve Boot, Dr. Svea Braeunert, Dan Browne, Paul Bush, Alberto Couceiro, Studio Creature, Victoria Santa Cruz, Thirza Cuthand, Nazli Dincel, Cheryl Dunn, Paz Encina, Rhiannon Evans, Harun Farocki, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Kelly Gallagher, Ariana Gerstein, Karø Goldt, Joan C. Gratz, Adriana Vila Guevara, Vanessa Haroutunian, Vashti Harrison, Carrie Hawks, Dr. Todd Herzog, Narcisa Hirsch, Dr. Elisabeth Hodges, Desiree Dawn Kapler, Abbas Kiarostami, Evalds Lacis, Kirsten Lepore, Nicki Lindroth, Jayne Loader, Robert Loebel, Azucena Losana, Guy Maddin, Vincent Patar, Jean-Gabriel Périot, PES, Annalisa D. Quagliata, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty, Mónica Savirón, Ann Segal, Shelly Silver, Alejandra Tomei, Hui-ching Tseng, UC Center for Film and Media Studies, Péter Vácz, Carlo Vogele, Spencer Williams, Liz Wolf (dream tiger), C. Jacqueline Wood, Alice Pixley Young

For Cinema and Archive Program descriptions, click here.

For the first time in their lives, 20 Holmes Middle School students held cameras in their hands. The team at i.imagine worked with students throughout the 2017—2018 school year to teach the art of photography, the fundamentals of exposure, and how to apply those concepts inspired by the work of photographers featured in the FotoFocus Biennial 2018. Through photography walks, sharing family photos, and field trips, students evolved as artists with new perspectives on the world around them. Program founder Shannon Eggleston and teaching assistant Claire Brose empowered students to work with the joys and struggles of being a teenager in today’s world and to connect emotionally, bringing deeper purpose and meaning to each photograph. Holmes Middle School students and their experiences are celebrated uniquely, as each young photographer’s work is printed on a tile and composed into a permanent art mural in Covington, Kentucky, as a symbol of the beauty represented in their neighborhood and its people.