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.

The ARCHIVE [negative] project includes the work of roughly a dozen regional and/or national photographers selected by Manifest Resident Instructor and Photographer Michael Wilson. Public demonstration days led up to the exhibition allowing the public to observe and interact with Wilson in a laboratory-like collaboration. Wilson worked with the negatives provided by each participating photographer and printed them in the Manifest darkroom.

Featured Artists: Matthew Albritton, Barry Andersen, Gordon Baer, Maureen France, Melvin Grier, Barbara Houghton, Cal Kowal, Guennadi Maslov, Maurice Mattei, Nancy Rexroth, Gregory Rust, Brad Smith, Jane Alden Stevens, Connie Sullivan

Spanning 35 years in the career of acclaimed photographer Wing Young Huie, We are the Other collectively reflects the cultural complexities of American society. While his work has been shown in international museums—more than half a million people have viewed his traveling exhibit in China—his most well-known projects, Lake Street USA and University Avenue Project, transformed the Twin Cities thoroughfares into six-mile photo-galleries that reflected the everyday lives of thousands of people. Although much of his work has been focused on his home state of Minnesota, it includes photographs from around the United States and China. Nearly every one of the thousands of people he’s photographed is a stranger, but in many cases he interviews and documents their conversations, which are then displayed alongside their portraits.

When Wing Young Huie started as a documentary photographer, his goal was to make what he thought was a good photograph: the photograph as an aesthetic object. But the interactive process emerged as an important factor, if not more important than the resulting photograph. A photograph, no matter how good, is still just a surface description.

How then to create an image that goes below the surface to reveal the relational aspects of photographing strangers? Wing Young Huie has employed a variety of concepts to expand his documentary instincts: having people write revealing statements on chalkboards, introducing neighbors who don’t know each other to each other and photographing them collectively in each other’s places, and wearing the clothes of Chinese men whose lives he could’ve had, blurring the boundary between photographer and subject.

Out of the Stacks explores how photographs and images are organized and the exceptional narratives and histories that they impart. Using the Lloyd’s collection, artists conducted research and utilized photographs and photographic materials to create new art books. The Lloyd Library and Museum’s collection provided inspiration for the Cincinnati Book Arts Society artists to conceptualize new artistic designs and formats—to exercise artistic freedom to form collages, montages, and sculptures using photographic mediums and resources. Out of the Stacks examines how photo archives are specific to the modern period in human history, and how the proliferation of photography has become a significant reference point to modern art in all mediums.

The Lloyd Library and Museum has a long history of utilizing photographs in the scientific study of mycology through the work of one of its founders, Curtis Gates Lloyd. Photography became an essential tool in his quest to document mycological specimens for scientific study. Lloyd’s pioneering scientific photography forms the majority of the National Fungus Collection held by the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. The Lloyd Library is an independent research library devoted to bringing science, art, and history to life serving as an inspiration to scientists, historians, and artists.

Also on view: A Year on the Edge: A photographic narrative of the Edge of Appalachia Preserve
The Lloyd Library partnered with two photographers, TJ Vissing and Rick Conner, to fill their gallery with nature photographs that focus on the Edge of Appalachia preserve in Adams County.

ARCHIVE [photo] brings together works of photographic and lens-based art that in one way or another, literally or figuratively, represents the concept of archive. As an accumulation of records or the place they are located, archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime and are kept (or presented) to show the function of that person or organization. Manifest’s mission, as a nonprofit entity, is to function as an organizational archive of the artwork and artists’ histories it presents and interacts with. This juried exhibition, along with the other exhibitions on view at Manifest, provides a comparison between photo and non-photo approaches and inspires consideration of the role of visual art in the process of housing, presenting, and preserving primary source information—and of one’s part in the process of interpreting or feeding into the archive.

Featured Artists: Mike Callaghan, Alyse Delaney, Karen Hillier, Jieun Beth Kim, David Knox, Kent Krugh, Isabella La Rocca, William Nourse, Vesna Pavlovic, Crystal Tursich, Jenny Zeller

Also on view: Four additional exhibitions on view during the FotoFocus 2018 Biennial at Manifest Creative Research Gallery. Three solo photography shows and one ARCHIVE (non photo) themed show. The Photo Solo exhibitions will include works by Wes Battoclette, Greg Sand, and Dominic Lippillo.

Reveal investigates how the order and display of images can make previously unknown (or secret information) known to others. Featuring five artists exploring how photographs—originally intended to tell one story—can be altered by their presentation to reveal another story. The artists expose an intended story, in a specifically designated space, to show how one image can stand on its own or how it “collaborates” with its surroundings to present other revelations. The photographs, when installed together, create an entirely new story presented as part of a larger context. The images compel viewers to interpret the intended story and explore what lies behind the intent. What emotions, ideas, or goals do they project? Does the state of the physical environment matter? Reveal encourages the collection, sorting, and organization of information from the images, and the creation of an individual narrative based on new contexts.

Featured Artists: Sue Milinkovich, Steven Miller, Greg Rust, Jerry Stratton, Dan Wheeler

“Ron Geibert photographs with the sensibility of a jazz musician.  He delights in taking chances, in exploring the edge where identifiable form shades into apparent randomness, and in discovering beauty and pleasure in the unexpected. His pictures have about them an air of improvisation, a freedom from deliberation and predictability; his photographic “touch” is attuned to subtle nuances more than to conspicuous gestures.  Geibert’s photographs reflect qualities of discernment and sophistication, a sense of timing and apparent ease that put one in mind of a performer who plays in the vicinity of the note and next to the beat, but who is never so common and obvious as to play right on them.” —Sean Wilkinson

Four Decades celebrates the work of Professor Emeritus Ron Geibert and his 27-year career at Wright State University. Commonly artists work with a particular theme, problem, or issue for long periods, which is the case for artist Ron Geibert. For 20 years he was a color documentarian, followed by 20 years as an experimental installation and multi-media artist focused on Orwellian issues of deception and the oversaturation of stimuli. Recently, Geibert returned to the camera, then an iPhone, and then onto obsolete software to modify previously made works. Geibert simultaneously explored revised ideas, new ideas, and old ideas throughout his career.

This survey show includes many photographic works and publications generated over four decades of Geibert’s career. Acknowledging that the printed book is perhaps an instrument destined for obsolescence, Geibert’s plates are a visual tour of the beauty and beguiling power of images and text found within the pages. His panoramic “sliver” prints are a return to early ideas, though now illustrating information conveyed more by bits and pieces in the digital age. Traditional silver prints provide insight into his undergraduate days, while the panoramic inkjet prints using an iPhone are new ideas he discovered through the “sliver” exploration.