Ann Stewart Fine Art is pleased to announce the following news and exhibitions:
NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM EXHIBITION
HOOPS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BILL BAMBERGER
401 F Street, NW, Washington, DC
March 9, 2019–January 5, 2020
This exhibition presents outdoor images of basketball courts and hoops—public and private—that have captured the attention of photographer Bill Bamberger. Collectively, they celebrate the sport and reveal both its global importance and enduring appeal. Hauntingly devoid of people, the images are nonetheless remarkable neighborhood and community portraits.
Bamberger has a keen eye for elevating the everyday—often in overlooked, forgotten, or neglected places—into timeless, classic views of place. As he notes, “A photograph of someone making a great shot or a great move takes place in a fraction of a second, but an image of that same court taken without people is about a period of time in the layered history of a place. It is about the people who played on that court, who built that community, many of whom have come and gone.”
HOOPS will present a selection of large-format photographs taken across the country and in more than half-a-dozen countries, from the deserts of Arizona and Mexico to the hills of Appalachia, and from the streets of the Northeast to the playgrounds of South Africa. Whether tacked to the side of barn, subject to salt-water breezes, or surrounded by brick and chained links, the hoops and courts presented in the exhibition are sure to resonate and captivate the imagination.
HOOPS opens just in time for “March Madness” and the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball East Regional games that will take place at nearby Capital One Arena.
Public school playground, Sedona, Arizona. 2009. Photography by Bill Bamberger.
HALSEY INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION
SOUTHBOUND: PHOTOGRAPHY OF AND ABOUT THE NEW SOUTH
Alex Harris and Christopher Sims are both showcased in the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, which is on view through March 2, 2019.
Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South is an unprecedented photography exhibition co-curated by Mark Sloan, director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and Mark Long, professor of political science, both of whom are on the faculty of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina.
Southbound comprises fifty-six photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the twenty- first century. Accordingly, it offers a composite image of the region. The photographs echo stories told about the South as a bastion of tradition, as a region remade through Americanization and globalization, and as a land full of surprising realities. The project’s purpose is to investigate senses of place in the South that congeal, however fleetingly, in the spaces between the photographers’ looking, their images, and our own preexisting ideas about the region.
Recognizing the complexity of understanding any place, let alone one as charged as the American South, the curators’ approach is transdisciplinary. The photographs are complemented by a commissioned video, an interactive digital mapping environment, an extensive stand-alone website, and a comprehensive exhibition catalogue.
Southbound will travel to venues in North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana through 2021.
Installation view of Southbound shows Christopher Sims’s work on left from Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan. Installation photograph by Rick Rhodes Photography.
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY / NASHER MUSEUM OF ART AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUGH MANGUM, 1897-1922
Alex Harris’s and Margaret Sartor’s newest publication, Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922, forms the basis of an exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
Self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum was born in 1877 in the newly incorporated, tobacco- fueled boomtown of Durham, NC. As an itinerant portraitist working primarily in North Carolina and Virginia in the shadow of the segregationist laws of the Jim Crow era, Mangum welcomed into his temporary studios a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse. After his death in 1922, his glass plate negatives remained stored, out of sight, in a tobacco barn on his family farm for 50 years. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last moment, and with it, this surprising and unparalleled document of life at the turn of the 20th century, a turbulent time in the history of the American South.
One of the profound surprises of Hugh Mangum’s work is its artistic freshness. Mangum’s multiple-image, glass plate negatives reveal the open-door policy of his studio. And as art historian Deborah Willis writes in the catalogue foreword, the photographs “show us lives marked both by notable affluence and hard work, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality, self-creation and often joy.” Seen and experienced in the present, the portraits hint at unexpected relationships and histories and also confirm how historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives. Mangum’s photographs are not only images; they are objects that have survived a history of their own and exist within a larger political and cultural history. Rendered here in full color with the aid of 21st-century digital technology, Mangum’s portraits demonstrate the unpredictable alchemy that often characterizes the best art—its ability over time to evolve with and absorb life and meaning beyond the intentions or expectations of the artist.
The exhibition was organized in conjunction with the publication of the book Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922, from the University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in the series Documentary Arts and Culture.
Informal Gallery Talk at the Nasher Museum of Art: January 18, 2019, from 5:00 to 7:30 pm.
Hugh Mangum photographs courtesy of Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, Durham, NC.
BILL FERRIS NEWS AND EXHIBITION
Bill Ferris won two Grammy awards February 10th in Los Angeles. Ferris’ box set “Voices of Mississippi” won best historical album and best album notes. The four-disc set features dozens of Ferris’ audio recordings of blues and gospel musicians, storytellers and documentary films.
“When I heard I was a Grammy nominee, it’s to my world like a Nobel award because the Grammys are all about music and recordings, which is what my life has been dedicated to,” he said.
I AM A MAN: Civil Rights Photographs, 1960–1970
Center for the Study of the American South
410 East Franklin Street
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
This spring, our Art @ the Center exhibit features photographs taken during the Civil Rights Movement between 1960 and 1970. The images in this collection offer a glimpse into the courage and brutality of the 1960s, a decade that unleashed hope for the future as well as profound and tumultuous changes. Viewers will recognize photographs of protesters carrying signs with messages such as “I AM A MAN” or sitting at segregated lunch counters as iconic, familiar images associated with the Civil Rights Movement.
Our exhibit is proud to emphasize the role of student activism in the Civil Rights Movement while also featuring organizers, journalists, and ordinary citizens who risked their lives to end Jim Crow segregation within the American South. Collected by an inter-institutional team of researchers led by Professor Emeritus and former Senior Associate Director of CSAS, Bill Ferris, these images were recently hosted at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, France.
Photographs will remain on display through May 2019.
NASHER MUSEUM OF ART AT DUKE UNIVERSITY EXHIBITION
ACROSS COUNTY LINES: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE PIEDMONT
Bill Bamberger, Alex Harris, Margaret Sartor, and Christopher Sims were featured in the Nasher Museum of Art exhibition Across County Lines: Contemporary Photography from the Piedmont, which was on view through February 10, 2019.
This group survey presents the striking crosscurrents of photographic work by thirty-nine artists with a strong connection to the Piedmont. It blends the imagery of both emerging and established photographers, and spans the 1970s to the present day. Some artists work within the genres of landscape, portraiture, and still life, while others take abstract and conceptual approaches. Themes touch on Durham and the South, immigration, cultural traditions, family history, gender, race, sexuality, music, and religion, among others. All the artists capture the immediacy and possibility of photography, while their images provide dynamic views of the world through wide-ranging methods and techniques.
Bill Bamberger, T. Cash and Betty, Downtown Durham from the series Durham County, 1982.
HAVERFORD COLLEGE EXHIBITION
EDNA LEWIS: CHEF AND HUMANITARIAN
Edna Lewis (1916–2006) was a leader of the revival and rediscovery of the regional culinary delights of the South. But before she became known as “the Grande Dame of Southern Cooking,” she was born the granddaughter of an emancipated slave who helped found Freetown, Virginia, the small farming community where she grew up and learned to cook. Despite a paucity of black female chefs, Lewis first made a name for herself in the food world in the late 1940s as chef of New York’s bohemian Café Nicholson, where she cooked roast chicken and cheese soufflés for William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Paul Robeson, Gore Vidal, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Jean Renoir. And, starting in 1971, she cemented her reputation beyond Manhattan’s East Side by penning several cookbooks, the most famous of which is 1976’s beloved The Taste of Country Cooking, which The New York Times once said “may well be the most entertaining regional cookbook in America.”
From October 27 until December 9, 2018, Haverford College celebrated Lewis’ legacy with Edna Lewis: Chef and Humanitarian, an exhibit of 40 black-and-white and color photos of Lewis by John T. Hill, a close friend and photographer who made the portrait that adorns her first cookbook, alongside Lewis’ own family photographs, articles on southern cooking, and her books. All of the visual material is accompanied by wall texts to complement the photographs, Lewis’s life, and her rural African and American roots—the effect of which is to show how her environment influenced her approaches to cooking and living.
Hill’s photographs offer documentary and interpretive views of this true American original and the culture she embodied. While her contribution to the world of food is well deserved, her generosity, tolerance, and sense of justice are equally worthy of note.
The exhibition was on display at Haverford College’s Atrium Gallery in the Marshall Fine Arts Center.
Edna Icing Cake for House and Garden Essay, 1973. Photograph by John T. Hill.
LARRY SCHWARM
EXHIBITIONS AND THE NEW YORKER
Larry Schwarm has recently been featured in exhibitions at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, the Wichita Art Museum, and the Annenberg Space for Photography.
His photograph, Fire and moon along Bloody Creek Road, Chase County, Kansas, 2005, was published in a full-page spread in The New Yorker to accompany an article by Ian Frazier.
