The Hope Narrative: Finding Resilience in Contemporary Photography and Family Photo Archives is the signature exhibition at REFUGE, which redefines the waiting room experience of the Health Hub. Artist Emily Hanako Momohara worked with a team of youth apprentices to make artwork for and about the community at Academy of World Languages and its new adjacent Health Hub. This artwork creates a welcoming, safe, and community-reflective atmosphere for clients and patients in the lobby and hallway areas, with a public component on view in Washington Park.

The inspiration for each of the works comes from interviews and personal artifacts from Academy of World Languages families and Evanston residents. Momohara and the apprentices interviewed families representing the diverse backgrounds and familial structures of future Health Hub clients. Their stories of cultural activities and wellness practices; family photos; and heirlooms are used to create the artworks through collage. There are multiple photo collage pieces representing the interviewed families’ unique stories of how they spent time together, particularly outdoors, which highlight the similarities and connections between families. These pieces are a combination of photography, collage, and textiles specific to the community’s stories. The artworks are for, and inspired by, the community, designed to break down barriers and increase cultural connections.

The idea of communities of inspiration is highlighted in tête-à-tête, an exhibition curated by artist Mickalene Thomas. Serving as a companion exhibition to Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs, this mini exhibition within the larger Muse show includes works that have inspired Thomas. Placed consciously in dialogue with her own practice, these artworks contain many of the same themes central to Thomas’ works, such as references to motherhood and family.

The 10 featured artists—from older generations of artists to those who are part of Thomas’s generation or younger—include Derrick Adams, Renée Cox, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems.

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

Both exhibitions acknowledge the art-historical canon and popular visual culture, while simultaneously creating an archive of artworks that stand in opposition to the traditions, reclaiming agency for both the artists and the subjects depicted.

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

The exhibition is a celebration of residents working to create a greater sense of community in the city of Mason, which has experienced a rapid rise in residents over the past 20 years. A once small and sleepy farm town has morphed into suburban sprawl with more than 30,000 residents. In a place where, not very long ago, everyone knew everyone, there is now a large contingent of people who are transient; residing only for a few years before they move on. As a result, the city struggles to create a sense of community and bridge the line between Old Mason and New Mason. In celebration of those residents striving to build a greater sense of community, local artists were invited to take their portraits. These artists honor those individuals and their contributions to increasing the well-being of the community. The portraits are the backbone of the exhibit, surrounded by photo-booth style images of the greater community. The exhibition is intended to encourage and inspire communication and interaction throughout the community of Mason.

Featured Artists: Tracy Doyle, Chrystal Scanlon, Kim Kalo, William Northern, Tracy Fitch, Jon Williams

Transitions is based on the Surrealist Game “Exquisite Corps” and features 20 local photographers creating one collaborative work of art. The process is simple: the first photographer creates a photo, the second photographer sees only the right side of that first photo and creates a work in response, the third photographer sees only the right side of the second photo and responds by creating yet another photograph. This process continues with the next seventeen photographers, each only seeing the right half of the previous image. All the photographs are then printed sequentially in one long mural and hung in the gallery, revealed as a single collaborative work of art.

Featured Artists: Paige Widman, Bryn Weller, Paul Grilli, J. Miles Wolf, Tina Gutierrez, Suz Fleming, Tom Uhlman, Helen Adams, Lisa Britton, Melvin Grier, Celene Hawkins, Irvin Madsen, Linda Gillings, Kent Krugh, Anita Douthat, Cal Kowal, Jonathan Gibson, Brad Austin Smith, Natalie Mancino, Erika Nj Allen

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.

The Barn (Woman’s Art Club Cultural Center) features a selection of Nancy Ford Cones pictorialist photographs (some of her original prints from various archives, and some digital images) alongside contemporary smartphone photos submitted by the public. The general public is invited to respond and reinterpret Cones’s images by submitting their own smartphone photos. These responsive photos were either inspired by her work, expressed a similar intent, or contrasted “then” and “now.” The best submitted photograph will be selected to complement each Cones photograph, resulting in a paired exhibit of early 20th-century pictorialism and early 21st-century “pixelism.”

Submission Deadline: September 18th, 2018
Submission Information: Photo2Foto_08_finalprospectus.pdf

Featured Artists: Kylee Dhonau, Gillian Fajack, Paul Filipkowski, Abby Graham, Christine Kuhr, Gary Long, L Long, Alleen Manning, Maya Mehlman, Aquila Stoner, Joe Stoner, Kimberly Baer-Walk

Time, Space, and Place brings forward a selection of photographs from the archives reflecting the experience of diverse artists at different time periods and locations, sharing their personal viewpoints and providing glimpses into the past—preserved slices of life and time, flashes of memory.

Featured Artists: Gordon Baer, John Wimberley, Kojo Kamau, John Chewning, June Archer

Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott explores the encounter between American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) during the 1920s—an encounter that would have profound and lasting effects on the careers and legacies of both artists. Berenice Abbott and Eugène Atget met in Man Ray’s Paris studio in the early 1920s. Atget, then in his sixties, was obsessively recording the streets, gardens, and courtyards of the 19^th-century city—“Old Paris”—as it was undergoing modernization. Abbott acquired much of Atget’s work after his death and was a tireless advocate for its value. In 1929, she relocated to New York and emulated Atget in her systematic documentation of that city, culminating in her epic photographic series Changing New York.

Abbott paid further tribute to Atget by publishing and exhibiting his work in the United States, and by printing hundreds of images from his negatives, using the gelatin silver process. Through Abbott’s efforts, Atget became known to an audience of photographers and writers who found diverse inspiration in his photographs. Abbott herself is remembered as one of the most independent, determined, and respected photographers of the 20^th-century, and is celebrated in particular for her photographs of 1930s New York.

This exhibition and publication bring together for the first time selections from two enormous bodies of work—Atget’s Old Paris and Abbott’s Changing New York—and explore the legacy and artistic influence between two great photographers and their obsession with documenting the transformations of two of the world’s great modern cities.

Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (Yale University Press) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and the exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati.

A Kick in the Head: Uncouth Stories of Sunken Beauty focuses on a disparate group of artists that utilize various photo-based techniques to archive lives lived on the edge, finding dark beauty in unseen and often misunderstood aspects of humanity. Their stories are told through bodies of work that focus on subcultures or obsessions that can only be properly conveyed when a viewer is able to experience a multiplicity of images. These are artists that utilize the photographic medium to express their dissatisfaction, their otherness as obsessives and outsiders, or a fixation on the odd and obscene. The images are evidence of activities, documentation, categorization, and obsession. Invention and reinvention share the stage. Genesis P-Orridge explains the motivation for h/er practice and life: “I’ve been involved in a total war with culture since the day I started…I am at war with the status quo of society, and I am at war with those in control and power. I’m at war with hypocrisy and lies.”

For many of these artists, the publication of their images in book form is a critical aspect of their practice. This allows them to create a narrative through the curation and sequencing of images, as well as ensuring that their story reaches a much wider audience and is preserved as a specific document. Many of these publications are included in the exhibition, and Alternate Project’s concurrent, pop-up bookstore offers a wide variety of rare publications and editions.

Curated by Michael Lowe and George Kurz.

Presented in conjunction with Alternate Projects, Covington

Featured Artists: Vito Acconci, Nobuyoshi Araki, Morton Bartlett, Richard Billingham, Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, Larry Clark, Bob Flanagan, Katy Grannan, Mike Kelley, Richard Kern, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Annette Messager, Pierre Molinier, Otto Muehl, Catherine Opie, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Rob Pruitt, Arnulf Rainer, Lucas Samaras, Penny Slinger, Bob Wade, Count Zichy