This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Stephanie M. Engelbrecht
with additional funding from the Pauline Reichmann Endowment Fund
About the Exhibition:
A philanthropic association of American photographers was established in 2012 by Californian photographers Robert von Sternberg and Darryl Curran, with the goal of expressing gratitude towards institutions that support the photographic art form. Through the project, participating artists or their representatives donate vintage and contemporary prints of their work to museum collections of their choice. The initial project consisted of a core group of seven artists which has increased to a group of 19. Since its origination in 2012, the group has donated 6,179 photographs to 220 institutional permanent collections of fine art in 50 states, Washington, DC Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
In 2021, the Evansville Museum was invited to participate in the donation project. Thirteen nationally and internationally recognized American photographers have donated 239 photographs to our permanent collection. Included in this exhibition are 136 works. The inventory of images reflects a multitude of contemporary perspectives and a rich assortment of styles, concepts, and photographic materials.
We thank the photographers for their generous gifts to the museum and we are grateful to Tory Schendel Cox, former Virginia G. Schroeder Curator of Art with the Evansville Museum, for her dedication to expanding our holdings of contemporary American photography.
Mary McNamee Bower
The John Streetman Executive Director
Artist Previews:
CONNEMARA MOUNTAINS, PEAT AND SKY, IRELAND
Archival ink jet print on Epson fiber paper, Taken 2004; printed 2021
Barry Andersen, 2021.017.0001
Barry Andersen, American, born 1945
"I have been making pictures of the land and sky for over 30 years. My landscape interest lies primarily with the impact of human activity on the land. Color and picture structure remain key interests in my work. My pictures on occasion take a form whose beauty is relatively easy to access, but often what takes shape stretches my sense of what beauty is in a pictorial and personal sense.
Digital photography has allowed me the freedom to play with the picture in ways that painters generally take for granted. I can readily remove objects from a scene and slightly alter the land before me to enhance the structure of the picture and clarify the visual experience I am seeking. Some of my pictures are straightforward photographic recordings of the scene in front of me. Some have small digital enhancements similar to traditional photography techniques of dodging and burning. Some of the pictures have a sky replaced, a common 19th-century darkroom practice. Still others depict scenes that do not exist as shown; none are meant to be documents, hopefully some delight the eye."
Andersen received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from California State University in 1973 and his Master of Fine Art degree from the University of Florida. He earned professor emeritus status for his distinguished scholarship while teaching art at Northern Kentucky University. Many of his works are placed in museum collections, such as Bibliotheque Nationale de Fance, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and Saint Louis University Museum of Art.
GHOST HAMMER, LEAVES, BLOSSOM
Scanogram, 2007
Darryl Curran, 2021.016.0034
Darryl Curran, American, born 1935
A native of Santa Barbara, California, Darryl Curran completed an associate degree from Ventura College in 1958, and both Bachelor and Master of Fine Art degrees from the University of California in 1960 and 1964. Curran has been active in the fine art photography field since 1965 as an exhibitor, curator, juror, and board member of several arts organizations. He joined the California State University, Fullerton, faculty in 1967 and initiated the Creative Photography program for both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and co-authored the Master of Fine Art curriculum. He served as Department Chair from 1989-1999 and retired in 2001.
Curran's creative work is housed in major public collections and has been included in numerous group shows such as Photography into Sculpture and Mirrors and Windows, Museum of Modern Art; Vision and Expression, George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography; Photography into Art, British Arts Council; Light and Substance, University of New Mexico; and Extending the Perimeters of Twentieth-Century Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In 1995, he was invited to Madrid, Spain to represent the United States at the opening of Empowered Images, an international traveling exhibition of contemporary photography.
ORANGE
Archival pigment print, 2011
Robert Fichter, 2021.014.0066
Robert Fichter, American, born 1939
Robet Fichter's interest in photography began in high school in Sarasota, Florida, where he was a yearbook editor. But he was well on his way to completing the requirements for a degree in anthropology at the University of Florida, Gainesville (Bachelor of Fine Art, 1963), when he decided to switch to the fine arts, studying painting, printmaking, and photography. After graduation, Fichter took the advice of photographer Jerry Uelsmann, his professor and mentor, and enrolled at Indiana University, Bloomington (Master of Fine Art, 1966), studying with Henry Holmes Smith. Both Uelsmann and Smith played central roles in Fichter's development as a photographer. Through Uelsmann, Fichter also met Nathan Lyons, who hired him as assistant curator of exhibitions at George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York (1966-1968).
In 1968 Fichter became an assistant professor at UCLA. From 1971-1975 he held visiting artist and teaching positions at UCLA, the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He joined the faculty at Florida State University in 1971 and continued to teach there until his retirement in 2006.
Fichter has been at the forefront of experimental photography and printmaking for decades. He has had more than 40 solo exhibitions, including a major retrospective exhibition originated at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography which traveled from 1982-1985.
Robert Fichter resides in Tallahassee, and, with his wife Nancy Smith Fichter, serves on the advisory board of The Lillian E. Smith Center for Creative Arts in Clayton, Georgia, a non-profit educational center and artist retreat.
LEDA
Photograph on Fuji crystal archive paper, Taken in 1984; printed 2021
Soda House, 2021.008.0003
Suda House, American, born 1951
Suda House is a photographer of national and international reputation living and working in San Diego. Since 1977, she has taught photography and in 1980 joined the art faculty at Grossmont College, where she has served as department chair and coordinated the Digital Media Arts Lab. House is a trustee with the Museum of Photographic Arts, where she leads the Visual Learning-Education Committee.
House received her Bachelor of Fine Art from University of Southern California in 1973 and a Master of Art from California State University Fullerton in 1976. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Emerging Photographer's Fellowship and has written extensively about photography, including her book Artistic Photographic Processes (Amphoto, 1981). During the past 45 years of image making, House's interest has been in portraying the plight and strength of women.
The works in the collection are from her series entitled Aqueous Myths. In 1983, she began taking photographs of women in tanks of water using either a 20 x 24 Polaroid camera or 4 x 5 film camera. The work considers the status of women in the 1980s through metaphors of the Goddess and mortal women's pursuit of both careers and motherhood swimming in the torrent waters of trying to have it all.
BOUQUET #14
Ultrachrome pigment print on Hahnemuhle William Turner paper, Taken in 2015; Printed 2021
Kenda North, 2021.010.0007
Kenda North, American, born 1951
Kenda North has been making fine art photographs for over 30 years and is currently represented by Craighead Green Gallery in Dallas. She is professor of art emerita at the University of Texas at Arlington and lives in Dallas.
North completed a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from Colorado College in 1972 and a Master of Fine Art degree from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York in I976. She began her teaching career at Colorado Mountain College in Breckenridge; served as visiting professor of photography at the University of California Riverside from 1979 to 1989; and was on the faculty at UT Arlington from 1989 to 2020. Her work has been featured in over 50 one-person exhibitions since 1977.
These images are part of the series Flora Aquatilis, 2015-2016. About the series, the photographer writes, "The works are inspired by floral still life painting. The French term for still life is 'nature morte' (dead nature) which has a rather sad inference, yet my bouquets are indeed dying. The flowers had been made into elaborate arrangements, carefully placed to provide a splash of color at an event and then returned to the florist who created them. I rescued them for a last hurrah, suspended in a pool and bathed in summer sunlight. While being photographed they are never still, they respond to my movements underwater and struggle to disengage from their tight arrangements to float away. Caught in an ambiguous space of water and light, their beauty is captured in a final moment of life."
PALMOS STEREO CAMERA
Archival ink jet print, 2012-2016
Sheila Pinkel, 2021.007.0009
Sheila Pinkel, American, born 1941
Sheila Pinkel's diverse body of work spans documentary photography to installation work, public art projects, environmental sculpture, and camera-less photography. Her work is united by a concern with revealing the unseen, both literally and figuratively, and accordingly, Pinkel has titled her entire oeuvre Sight Unseen.
She writes, "Since 1973, all of my work has been about making visible the invisible in nature and in culture. Initially, I used many light-sensitive emulsions and technologies to reveal the infinite potential for form in nature and the landscape of my imagination." Pinkel began her exploration of camera-less photography between 1977 and 1983 using xeroradiography, medically used for mammography, at the Xerox Medical Research Center in Pasadena.
In 1963, Pinkel completed a Bachelor of Art degree at the University of California, and her Master of Fine Art in Photography at the University of California in 1977. She has exhibited pationally and internationally, including in the United States, Canada, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Argentina, Spain, and the Czech Republic. Pinkel is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, the Hammer Award from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and the National Endowment forthe Arts Individual Artist Grants. Her work is held in many collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; George Eastman House; Visual Studies Workshop; Museum of Modern Art; and the International Center for Photography. Pinkel served on the faculty of Pomona College from 1986-2011 before retiring as emerita professor of art in 2012.
COALESENCE - 05
Digital print on paper, 2004
Douglas Prince, 2021.012.0003
Douglas D. Prince, American, born 1943
Born in Des Moines, lowa, Doug Prince studied at the University of lowa, receiving his Bachelor of Art in 1965, followed by a Master of Fine Art degree in photography in 1968. He has had a 50-year teaching career and since 2008 has been on the faculty of the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester.
Prince's work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and is held in many private and museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Currier Museum of Art and the National Gallery, Canberra, Australia. Beginning as a traditional photographer with medium format film cameras, Prince son began to explore alternative visions: combining images in the darkroom and making photo-sculptures with images on film. In the late 1990s, his photo explorations led him into digital image-making.
"Working in a digital media has impacted my photography in a number of areas. As a pre-digital photographer, I was interested in expanding the creative process beyond the camera. The push to expand the creative potential of image making has led me to appreciate the possibilities of digital image management. The vastness of images available and the facility in which they can be manipulated and combined makes the digital processes a most responsive and intuitive process for me."
GEORGE BURNS (1896-1996) AND BOB HOPE (1903-2003)
American and British-American comedians, actors, singers, and authors
Artist's proof, Taken 1989; printed 2017
Bonnie Schiffman, 2021.018.0011
Bonnie Schiffman, American
Over the past three decades, Bonnie Schiffman has photographed hundreds of celebrities from George Burns to Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Child to Joni Mitchell, and Muhammad Ali to Warren Buffet for publication in American and international magazines. The energy and spontaneity Schiffman brings to her work give rise to her unique images; viewers receive a new, direct, and honest perspective on her subjects, often characterized by a lightness of touch that is the apparent result of spontaneous interaction between photographer and subject.
Lauri Kratochvil, former photo director for Rolling Stone and InStyle magazine, stated: "Bonnie doesn't put herself in the picture. She lets people do what they do so you don't get the celebrity, you get the person."
Currently, Schiffman shares on her website a series of portraits whose importance lies in the way they capture her signature style of photography and collectively enhance and expand the chronicles of American cultural history. She is represented in the permanent collections of the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, Racine Art Museum, and the David Owsley Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana.
ANZA-BORREGO#3
Photograph, 2017
Michael Stone, 2021.011.0021
Michael Stone, American, born 1945
Based in Roslyn, Washington, Michael Stone combines photographic images with sculptural, painted, digital, and non-traditional elements and media. Stone received his Bachelor of Art, Master of Art, and Master of Fine Art degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles. He taught photography at Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University) in Ellensburg.
While Stone studied industrial design at UCLA in the late 1960s, he shifted his focus to photography and became part of the burgeoning photography community in Southern California. He developed artistically alongside local photographers and educators such as Robert Heinecken and Fred Parker and was equally influenced by filmmaking and sculpture. Like many artists of his generation, Stone became increasingly interested in the impact television made on consumer culture.
CIGARETTE, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Silver gelatin print, artist's proof, 1994
Robert Von Sternberg, 2021.014.0002
Robert Von Sternberg, American, born 1939
Robert von Sternberg was born in Glendale, California and has lived and worked in Los Angeles throughout his life. Its landscape heavily influences his work and human encroachment into the natural world is a recurring theme in his photographs. Avid travelers, von Sternberg and his wife Patricia are especially fond of road trips, where the photographer captures the offbeat side of American tourist traditions. The surreal artificial lighting illuminating the scenes often provide the definitive photographic images von Sternberg seeks in his travels, and he seizes on the visual possibilities of overlooked roadside attractions and chance conjunctions.
After earning an Associate in Art degree from El Camino College, von Sternberg received his Bachelor and Master of Art degrees from California State University Long Beach in 1965 and 1969. He continued post-graduate studies at California State University Fullerton for an additional year. With a career beginning as staff photographer for Surfer Magazine in the early 1960s, freelancing as a photographer in Europe, and serving as artist in residence at multiple universities, von Sternberg became a distinguished professor. He was a faculty member at California State University Northridge for 35 years and became emeritus professor of art in 2006.
From 2012 to 2020, von Sternberg was the executive director of The Museum Project, a philanthropic association of American photographers. Through the Project, participating artists have donated vintage and contemporary prints of their work to over 220 institutional permanent collections of fine art in 50 states, Washington, DC, Australia, Canada, France, Great Britain Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
BARREL CACTUS
Color photograph, 1981
Melanie Walker, 2021.013.0007
Melanie Walker, American, born 1949
Melanie Walker is an artist based in Boulder, Colorado. She works nearly equally in the worlds of photostaphy and public art, with each realm informing the other. She is widely known for her collaborative projects with her partner, George Peters, that involve fantastical kites and extensive installation works. Her most recent solo project, song for My Father: A Posthumous Collaboration, is a photo-based project rooted in the archives of her father Todd Walker's 1950s career as an advertisement photographer-the job with which he supported not only his family but his personal practice as an artist.
Walker attended San Francisco State University for her Bachelor of Art degree and Florida State University for a Master of Fine Art. During her 50-year career as an artist, she has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship, and an Aaron Siskind Award. She has taught at several universities including San Francisco State University, SUNY Albany, Alfred University, and the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Currently, she teaches in the Media Arts Area at the University of Colorado Boulder.
MARGARET'S WEDDING #5
Archival pigment print
Taken by Todd Walker in 1955; Printed by Melanie Walker in 2019
Todd Walker, 2021.013.0005
Todd Walker, American, 1917-1998
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Walker grew up in Los Angeles. His father was a draughtsman and an architect for movie studios and provided Walker with his first exposure to photography and darkroom practices as a child. After graduating from high school, Walker worked as an apprentice scene painter in Hollywood and took a few photography classes before embarking on a career as a photographer in the 1930s. With the outbreak of World War Il, he went to work as a flight instructor for the U.S. Army Air Corps. During the 1950s and 1960s, Walker found increased success in Los Angeles as a commercial photographer, and his advertising photographs were featured in national magazines such as Life and the Saturday Evening Post.
Walker also pursued a range of personal projects, researching the traditional collotype printing process and began to experiment with techniques like solarization. In the mid-1960s he worked with an offset press, printing his images as photolithographs in large editions and producing small runs of artists' books.
In 1966, Walker worked part-time as an instructor at Art Center College in Pasadena, California. In 1969, he closed his studio joining Robert Heinecken and Robert Fichter as instructors at UCLA. Heinecken and Fichter shared Walker's interest in alternative processes and experimental techniques and these artists-along with professors at a few other programs throughout the United States--played a significant role in fostering a change in photographic practice in the United States.
Walker relocated to Gainesville, Florida in 1970 to teach alongside Jerry Velsmann at the University of Florida. During the seven years he taught there, Walker delved deeper into explorations of photo-printmaking, in part inspired by his contact with printmaking professor Ken Kerslake.
PORTRAIT OF KING HENRY VIII. HANS HOLBEIN, JIM MCGOVERN
Black and white photograph, 1980
Nancy Webber, 2021.006.0005
Nancy Webber, American, born 1937
What began as a childhood game for Nancy Webber has developed into a body of work, which has been her main creative focus for the past 20 years. A guide at the Saint Louis Art Museum gave five-year-old Webber a card with a detail from a painting and challenged her to find the work in the gallery. Webber recalled the game years later when, as an art student visiting Florence, she observed similarities between the portraits in the museums and the faces on the streets.
The marriage of art and life is Webber's theme as she creates artistic reincarnations using ordinary people with striking resemblances to famous portraits. Her series includes over 200 likenesses and covers all periods and styles of art history. Webber focuses on her subjects and their features, providing minimal intervention in reconstructing the scene. The deliberately subtle humor that underlies her portraits works to underscore her purpose, which is to demystify art. «Too often, we lock art up in intimidating edifices like museums," says Webber. "I see art on the street all the time, and by showing what I see, I am making the older work more alive and accessible.”
By literally drawing analogies between subjects like Frida Kahlo and a contemporary young woman, Webber reminds the viewer that the masterpieces we now see as objects of art began as portraits of real people. The diptychs, each consisting of a photograph of the living person juxtaposed with the work of art, have been reproduced worldwide.
Webber received her Master of Fine Art degree from Mills College in Oakland, California. She taught for many years at Los Angeles Harbor college and received a J. Paul Getty Fellowship in Visual Arts in 1990, which allowed her to work as a full-time studio artist.