Media Archive: Photography

Carnegie Museum of Art to Reopen and Welcome Visitors on June 29

June 22, 20202020 Exhibitions, Announcements, Decorative Arts and Design, Hillman Photography Initiative, PhotographyTaia Pandolfi, Communications Manager

Carnegie Museum of Art to Reopen and Welcome Visitors on June 29

Contact
Taia Pandolfi
Carnegie Museum of Art
pandolfit@cmoa.org
412.688.8690

Pittsburgh, PA—Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) has announced it will reopen to the public on June 29, 2020, after a period of closure that began March 14 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum is reopening with CDC recommended safety protocols and timed ticketing in place, along with a new 2020 exhibition calendar, to warmly welcome visitors, staff, and volunteers. The museum invites Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh members a couple days early, starting on June 26.

“I am elated to reopen our doors and welcome the entire community into our museum,” says Eric Crosby, the Henry J. Heinz II Director. “Since we temporarily closed, our team has been working diligently to create an environment that is safe and welcoming for our visitors, staff, and volunteers. We want each person visiting the art museum to feel comfortable and confident that they will have a positive and meaningful experience as they connect with their favorite artworks and CMOA friends.”

Health & Safety
To protect visitors, staff, and volunteers, the museum has updated its health and safety procedures. It will be limiting admissions to 25% of building capacity through required timed ticketing for all visitors; clearly marking foot-traffic patterns in high-traffic areas; enhancing cleaning protocols; modifying interactive areas; providing additional hand sanitizer stations; and installing plexiglass shields at visitor services desks. Visitors, staff, and volunteers over the age of two will be required to wear masks and encouraged to practice safe social distancing by keeping six feet apart (visitors may stay close to their own group but should stay six feet away from other groups and individuals). The museum is also designating special hours for those visitors who are at a higher risk for severe illness due to age (65+) or a medical condition on Wednesday mornings from 10 a.m.–noon.

Discounts—including college student, Access card, and active military—will be available for visitors on a walk-up basis; eligible visitors are asked not to purchase a timed ticket but to request a discount from a Visitor Services staff member upon arrival at the museum.

At the Museum
While at CMOA, visitors can enjoy two on-site exhibitions that have been extended, in addition to the museum’s vast permanent collection and In Sharp Focus: Charles “Teenie” Harris. The first exhibition, Counterpressures, which will extend through January 3, 2021, features ten Pittsburgh-area artists who examine the fraught relationship between humans and the environment. The second exhibition, An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain, the largest career-spanning survey of Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê, will extend through January 18, 2021; earlier this year, this exhibition was described by acclaimed art critic Nancy Princenthal as “revelatory” in The New York Times.

Online
While CMOA is opening its doors, it will continue providing robust, inspiring online content and interactive programming for everyone who enjoys experiencing CMOA from home. Every three months, CMOA will continue sharing artworks as part of its new online exhibition series, which kicked off May 20 with Rachel Rose: Lake Valley. Every week, the museum will offer virtual programs and events, and every day, art-related content will be shared via the museum’s website, email, and Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook feeds.

Upcoming Exhibitions
Trevor Paglen: Opposite Geometries
Various Galleries
September 4, 2020–March 14, 2021

The third iteration of the Hillman Photography Initiative (HPI), a CMOA project committed to exploring new ideas about photography, launches this year. The initiative will present an exhibition of work by artist Trevor Paglen, a publication, and an interdisciplinary podcast.

With the development and advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been a radical change in the way that surveillance systems capture, categorize, and synthesize photographs. Mirror with a Memory explores the many ways artists probe the intersections of photography, surveillance, and AI—their past, present, and future—to underscore concerns about implicit bias, right to privacy, and police monitoring embedded in corporate, military, and law enforcement applications.

The exhibition will include a new site-specific commission as well as a sculpture that doubles as a WiFi hotspot and photographs that reveal how AI analyzes and labels photographs of people and places. These works will be placed in three areas within the museum, inviting visitors to encounter Paglen’s insightful perspective in different contexts.

Trevor Paglen: Opposite Geometries is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography, with Taylor Fisch, project curatorial assistant.

Locally Sourced
Charity Randall Gallery
November 20, 2020–March 27, 2022

Pittsburgh has a long tradition of artisans and industry. Today it is home to a growing cohort of independent designers and makers working in traditional media such as clay, glass, metal, fiber, wood, and paper, and with emergent materials and technologies. Locally Sourced: Contemporary Pittsburgh Products highlights new work by some of the region’s most talented artists and makers of functional goods and furnishings.

These are the producers who are creating opportunities—developing their craft into a business. These are the innovators who are reinventing traditional handwork processes and manufacturing technologies to transform raw and reclaimed materials into products that have utility, durability, and good design. These are the locally sourced.

Locally Sourced is organized by Alyssa Velazquez, curatorial assistant for Decorative Arts & Design.

Carnegie Museum of Art Announces a Season of Socially Responsive Exhibitions

November 25, 20192020 Exhibitions, Contemporary Art, Heinz Architectural Center, PhotographyTaia Pandolfi, Communications Manager

Carnegie Museum of Art Announces a Season of Socially Responsive Exhibitions

Contact
Taia Pandolfi
Carnegie Museum of Art
pandolfit@cmoa.org
412.688.8690

Pittsburgh, PA—In 2020 Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) welcomes a dynamic range of exhibitions that explore the many ways artists respond to their social, cultural, and ecological contexts. This ambitious season presents visitors with opportunities to consider the ongoing and sometimes ambiguous role of the artist in some of the most crucial conversations of our time.

“Artists have always been vital contributors to debates in our public sphere,” says Eric Crosby, The Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “Whether channeling political attitudes of the moment or creating space for conversation, artists contribute essential nuance and complexity to the issues that shape our present moment. How cultural institutions will embrace them and foster their work is a challenge for our century.”

CMOA’s upcoming calendar begins with the opening of a new dedicated space in the permanent collection galleries for the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive, as well as a rotating gallery for photographs and works on paper. Read on to discover what lies in store for the museum’s visitors.

A young boy sits in a boxing ring with boxing gloves on, smiling at the camera

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Little boy boxer seated in boxing ring, ca. 1945, Carnegie Museum of Art, Teenie Harris Archive

Teenie Harris Gallery
Scaife Galleries
January 25, 2020–ongoing

CMOA is thrilled to announce the creation of a dedicated gallery for the Teenie Harris Archive. This space will feature iconic examples of Harris’s photographs and host a number of educational programs and community events inspired by this world-renowned collection.

Harris—who was a photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers—created an unparalleled chronicle of African American history and culture during the mid-twentieth century. As both a member and documentarian of the black community, Harris remains an iconic figure in Pittsburgh to this day. With this installation, the museum celebrates Harris’s legacy and looks forward to creating opportunities for creative collaboration with local partners.

The Teenie Harris Gallery is organized by Dominique Luster, archivist, and Charlene Foggie-Barnett, archive specialist, Teenie Harris Archive.

Photography and Works on Paper Gallery
Scaife Galleries
January 25, 2020–ongoing

Adjacent to the Teenie Harris Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art also debuts a dedicated space for the presentation of photography and works on paper from the permanent collection. Inaugurating this space will be a selection of recent acquisitions in photography, on view through June 14, 2020. Featuring 25 works acquired over the past four years, the installation will highlight new and significant additions to the collection by artists including Ansel Adams, James Casbere, Nona Faustine, Vivian Maier, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

This installation is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography, and Hannah Turpin, curatorial assistant for modern and contemporary art and photography.

A row of houses set behind a low wall with a colorful mural.

Christine Holtzer and Lauren S. Zadikow, 50 Greenspace Dumpsites, Forest Way, Site #2 (detail). Courtesy of the artists

Counterpressures
Forum Gallery
February 21–July 26, 2020

The 83rd installation of CMOA’s Forum series presents a thematic group exhibition that addresses the present urgency of global warming. The title, taken from a quotation in Pittsburgh environmentalist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), identifies the show’s specific focus on the fraught relationship between human impact and environmental response.

This exhibition features new and existing work by ten Pittsburgh-based artists who are acknowledging the transitory state of our environment, the ecological, economic, and public health consequences on the horizon, and how these conditions intersect with their own lived experiences. Through their selections of materials, the use of data and documentation, their surrealist imaginings, or references to urban development and disconnection from nature, these works grapple with the ecological present and its uncertain future.

Counterpressures has been developed in partnership with the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, the oldes continuously-exhibiting visual arts organization in the country. Artists include Allison Blair, Paper Buck, Seth Clark, Tara Fay Coleman, Christine Holtz, Stephanie Martin, Travis Mitzel, Njaimeh Njie, Su Su, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi.

Counterpressures is organized by Hannah Turpin, curatorial assistant for modern and contemporary art and photography.

Major funding for the Forum series is generously provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation.

Viêt Nam Untitled Ho-Chi-Minh City 1995

An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City, from the series Viêt Nam, 1995, gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist. © An-My Lê

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain
Heinz Galleries
March 14–July 26, 2020

Carnegie Museum of Art presents the first comprehensive survey of the work of photographer An-My Lê (American, born Vietnam, 1960). Featuring photographs from each of the artist’s major bodies of work, An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain creates connections across Lê’s career and provides unprecedented insight into her subtle, evocative images, which draw on traditions of landscape photography to explore the complexity of war and conflict.

Born in the midst of the Vietnam War, Lê vividly remembers the sights, sounds, and smells of growing up in a war zone. She and her family were evacuated by the US military in 1975. It would take another 20 years for Lê to return to her homeland, this time with a large-format camera in tow. Since then, she has spent nearly twenty-five years recording the impact of the military on people, the landscape, and cultural memory.

The exhibition features selections from each of Lê’s seven series, including works from her latest series, Silent General, on view for the first time.

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography. Major support for this exhibition is provided by Lannan Foundation, Philip and Edith Leonian Foundation, and The Martin G. McGuinn Art Exhibition Fund. Additional support is provided by The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art.

The Fabricated Landscape
Heinz Architectural Center
May 9–September 13, 2020

This exhibition presents work by ten architectural practices from around the world, each represented by three projects that range from single houses to projects that operate at the scale of the natural terrain and urban infrastructure. All of these projects exhibit a sensibility toward the larger world to which they belong and contribute.

Each of these practices looks anew at architecture’s need to communicate with and augment the public sphere. These architects approach urban intervention and landscape with an alertness to sociopolitical issues and a renewed appreciation of craft. Several of the projects are specific to postindustrial communities and the Global South. Many of the objects have not been exhibited previously in the United States.

The Fabricated Landscape features projects by Assemble (England), Frida Escobedo (Mexico), Go Hasegawa and Associates (Japan), Studio Anna Heringer (Germany), Studio Anne Holtrop (Bahrain), LCLA office (Colombia/Norway), MAIO (Spain), OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (Belgium), SO–IL (USA), and UMWELT (Chile).

This exhibition is organized by Raymund Ryan, curator, Heinz Architectural Center.

Support for this exhibition was provided by the Drue Heinz Trust, which also provides generous support for the operations and other programs of the Heinz Architectural Center.

Support

General operating support for Carnegie Museum of Art is provided by The Heinz Endowments and Allegheny Regional Asset District. Carnegie Museum of Art receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Mission

Carnegie Museum of Art creates experiences that connect people to art, ideas, and one another. The museum is committed to global engagement and regional advancement. We champion creativity and its importance to society with experiences that welcome, inspire, challenge, and inform. Our core activities—collecting, conserving, presenting, and interpreting works of art—make those experiences possible. Our collection of over 30,000 works emphasizes art, architecture, photography, and design from the 19th century to the present. One of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art was founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895. To learn more, please call 412.622.3131 or visit cmoa.org.

Carnegie Museum Of Art Announces New Exhibitions That Explore Creativity In Its Many Forms

July 2, 20192019 Exhibitions, Contemporary Art, Decorative Arts and Design, Fine Art, PhotographyTaia Pandolfi, Communications Manager

Highlights Include a Survey of Prints by Influential American Artist Jasper Johns and a New Collection Gallery Dedicated to Art and Design from Pittsburgh

Contact
Taia Pandolfi
Carnegie Museum of Art
pandolfit@cmoa.org
412.688.8690

Pittsburgh, PA—Over the next six months, Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) will present a program of thought-provoking exhibitions that investigate the many facets of human creativity. From 17th-century still life paintings to vibrant, contemporary prints and a new commissioned sculpture, the offerings present visitors with a diverse range of artistic experiences and myriad opportunities for conversation.

“Where does creativity come from?” asks Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art. “How do our minds and hands give form to something new, unfamiliar, perhaps even strange? What, fundamentally, is the work of the artist? By posing these questions across our many exhibitions, we hope visitors will look closely, encounter new ideas, and unearth answers that are meaningful to them.”

CMOA’s upcoming calendar is anchored by two special exhibitions, each presenting a detailed investigation of a single mode of creative expression. In the Heinz Galleries, An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, surveys the influential American artist’s career long fascination with printmaking. In Gallery One, A Delight for the Senses: The Still Life celebrates an often-overlooked genre of painting that for centuries has harnessed the power of close observation to spark creativity.

Elsewhere in the museum, visitors will have a surprising encounter with a meticulously rendered, lifelike sculpture by Los Angeles–based artist Margaret Honda in the Forum Gallery. A selection of iconic photographs by Charles “Teenie” Harris—staff favorites from past exhibitions—will greet visitors in the Lobby Gallery. Finally, in the Scaife Collection Galleries, A Pittsburgh Anthology will explore Pittsburgh’s special place in history as a city of creativity and artistic innovation by featuring a rotating selection of objects from CMOA’s collections.

Duane Michals, A Gursky Gherkin is Just a Very Large Pickle, 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Henry L. Hillman Fund. © Duane Michals

A Pittsburgh Anthology
Scaife Gallery 17
August 15, 2019–ongoing

A Pittsburgh Anthology celebrates stories of creative life in Pittsburgh as prompted by Carnegie Museum of Art’s collections across time and media. Since its inception in 1895, the museum has collected works by, about, and for Pittsburgh. Each object sheds light on the many ways that artists, whether local or passing through, engage with the city, its people, communities, landscape, and built environment. While some objects reveal the creative impulse to map or document the city, others speak to Pittsburgh’s unique cultural character.

With this project, CMOA will dedicate Scaife Gallery 17 to exploring these stories, relayed by a multitude of voices from inside and outside the museum. Each story will unfold on printed cards displayed near the artworks, which will be free for the taking. For those wishing to create their own anthology, customizable binders will be available for purchase in the museum store.

A Pittsburgh Anthology is organized by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art; Rachel Delphia, The Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts & Design; and Hannah Turpin, Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art and Photography, Carnegie Museum of Art.

A young woman sits on top of a large old-school car in front of a smoky city landscape

Charles “Teenie” Harris, Doris Clark (Moody) seated on Buick car with steel mill in background, Clairton, ca. 1945, Teenie Harris Archive, Carnegie Museum of Art

Iconic: The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris
Lobby Gallery
Ongoing starting this summer

The next exhibition of photographs by Charles “Teenie” Harris will look back at some of the Hill District native’s most iconic images of Pittsburgh. For more than four decades, Harris photographed the city’s African American community for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers. Since 2011, Carnegie Museum of Art has been showcasing his indelible work through a series of focused exhibitions spanning a number of themes, topics, and histories—Hair (2013), Civil Rights (2015) and Jazz from the Hill (2018)—to name a few. The museum’s collection of nearly 80,000 Harris images is one of the most detailed and intimate records of the black urban experience known today.

This installment celebrates Harris’s work with a selection of staff favorites from past exhibitions. From portraits of Pirates pitching ace Al McBean at Forbes Field and a haunting double exposure of Nina Simone to a pair of Tuskegee Airmen standing at attention and three young boys witnessing the demolition of the Lower Hill, Harris documented cultural moments that were at once hyper-local and nationally resonant. CMOA is currently preparing a gallery in the Scaife Collection Galleries dedicated to the Archive, which will open in early 2020.

The exhibition is organized by Charlene Foggie-Barnett and Dominique Luster, Teenie Harris Archive, Carnegie Museum of Art.

Margaret Honda
Forum Gallery
September 20, 2019–January 26, 2020

The 82nd installment of CMOA’s Forum series debuts a new commission by Los Angeles–based artist Margaret Honda (b. 1961, San Diego, California). For this exhibition, Honda has created a singular, enigmatic sculpture. Painstakingly rendered in lifelike detail including internal organs, and measuring nearly five feet long, the work is modeled after a frog-like form Honda observed in a Renaissance painting at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The painting, Bramantino’s Madonna delle Torri (1520), depicts the Madonna and Child enthroned; at their feet lies a slain man and a gargantuan frog with anthropomorphic features. At once material and philosophical, Honda’s sculpture prompts us to ponder our relationship to art and the world we make.

Margaret Honda is organized by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art.

Major funding for the Forum series is generously provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition is provided by the Ruth Levine Memorial Fund.

An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018
Heinz Galleries
October 12, 2019–January 19, 2020

When Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and targets debuted in 1958, they brought him instant acclaim and established him as a critical link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In the ensuing 60 years, Johns has continued to astonish viewers with the beauty and complexity of his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Today, he is widely considered one of America’s most influential artists.

An Art of Changes is a rare opportunity to survey six decades of Johns’s work in printmaking through a selection of some 90 works in intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screenprinting, and lead relief. Organized in four thematic, roughly chronological sections, the exhibition follows Johns as he revises and recycles key motifs over time. Viewers will see examples of his familiar flags and targets as well as images that explore artists’ tools, materials, and techniques of mark-making; abstract works based on motifs known as flagstones and hatch marks; and later works that teem with autobiographical and personal imagery.

An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018 is organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Major support is provided by Judy Dayton and the Prospect Creek Foundation.

The exhibition is curated by Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center. Carnegie Museum of Art’s presentation is organized by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art.

A bowl of ripe lemons, some peeled, with greenery in the background.

Jacob Fopsen van Es, Still Life with Lemons, Carnegie Museum of Art, Gift of the Drue Heinz Charitable Trust

A Delight for the Senses: The Still Life
Gallery One
November 2, 2019–March 15, 2020

Once considered the lowliest of the painting genres, the still life has long been overshadowed in the history of art. A Delight for the Senses: The Still Life is a celebration of this humble genre, exploring nearly 250 years of the tradition from the Dutch Golden Age to America’s Gilded Age.

On the surface, these picturesque arrangements are easy to appreciate for their aesthetic beauty and skillful rendering. A closer look at these sumptuous arrays of objects ranging from the mundane to the luxurious reveals moral undertones and allusions to the transience of life. Loans from the Detroit Institute of Arts and several local collectors will be featured, along with recent bequests from the late Drue Heinz, including the only Dutch Golden Age still life in the museum’s collection on view for the first time.

A Delight for the Senses: The Still Life is curated by Akemi May, Assistant Curator, Fine Arts, Carnegie Museum of Art.

Major support for this exhibition is provided by Elizabeth Hurtt Branson and Douglas Branson.

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Carnegie Museum of Art Spotlights Politically Charged Work of Photographer An-My Lê in 2020 Exhibition

June 12, 20192020 Exhibitions, PhotographyTaia Pandolfi, Communications Manager

Contact
Taia Pandolfi
Carnegie Museum of Art
pandolfit@cmoa.org
412.688.8690

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain
March 14–July 26
Heinz Galleries

Pittsburgh, PA—Next year, Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) will present the first comprehensive survey of the work of photographer An-My Lê (American, born Vietnam, 1960). Featuring photographs from each of the artist’s major bodies of work, An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain will draw connections across Lê’s career and provide unprecedented insight into her subtle, evocative images that draw on a landscape tradition to explore the complexity of war and conflict.

A group of people crouch in a trench, holding guns, in a dirty and chaotic environment. There are film crew members at the front of the image holding boom microphones.

An-My Lê (American, b. Vietnam, 1960), Film Set, “Free State of Jones,” Battle of Corinth, Bush Louisiana, 2015, from the series Silent General, 2017, inkjet print. Courtesy the artist and STXfilms. © An-My Lê

Born in the midst of the Vietnam War, Lê vividly remembers the sights, sounds, and smells of growing up in a warzone. She and her family were eventually evacuated by the US military in 1975. It would take another 20 years for Lê to return to her homeland, this time with a large-format camera in tow. Since then, she has spent nearly twenty-five years recording the impact of the military on people, the landscape, and cultural memory.

A black and white photo of a river with two small boats afloat on top, with various large advertisement signs in the background.

An-My Lê, Untitled, Ho Chi Minh City, from the series Viêt Nam, 1995, gelatin silver print. Courtesy the artist. © An-My Lê

“An-My Lê creates her photographs from the unique perspective of someone who has experienced civil war from multiple sides,” says Dan Leers, curator of photography at CMOA. “As a woman photographer of Vietnamese descent, Lê also brings a critical viewpoint to a field historically dominated by men. Through her lens, we are exposed to military training, maneuvers, and reenactments which, in turn, invite us to question our own relationship to, and involvement in, conflict and war.”

A man sits in the center wearing a Naval dress uniform in front of a portrait backdrop and the U.S. flag; a woman fixes his tie.

An-My Lê, Portrait Studio, USS Ronald Reagan, North Arabian Gulf, from the series Events Ashore, 2009, inkjet print. Courtesy the artist. © An-My Lê

The exhibition presents selections from all seven of Lê’s major series. The first, Viêt-Nam (1994–1998), is a meditation on her homeland, twenty years after she was forced to flee. In Small Wars (1999–2002), Lê documents Vietnam War reenactors in North Carolina and Virginia, exploring the fantasy and mythology of armed combat. 29 Palms (2003–2004) depicts real soldiers experiencing a dramatized version of the Iraq War as they perform training exercises in California. In Events Ashore (2005–2014), Lê photographs life aboard U.S. Naval ships for the better part of 10 years. Two unpublished series, Sculpture and Trap Rock (1991 and 2006, respectively), examine the effects of human incursion on the landscape.

Finally, CMOA presents Lê’s newest series, Silent General (2015–ongoing), which grapples with the legacy of America’s Civil War. These photographs respond to the complexities of our current socio-political moment with its unsettling echoes of the Vietnam war. Taking inspiration from Walt Whitman’s autobiographical Specimen Days, the series probes the ways in which past conflicts influence and shape the present landscape.

A black and white photo of tall trees and an explosion emanating from the ground.

While Lê is represented in many major museum collections, An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain will be the first ever survey of her work in an American museum. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring many never-before-published images.

“An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is part of a broader effort by the museum to exhibit the work of diverse, talented photographers who have too often been overlooked,” says Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Acting Director and Richard Armstrong Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “We are committed to creating a world-class program of photography here in Pittsburgh that will resonate globally.”

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography at Carnegie Museum of Art.

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Acclaimed photographer Deana Lawson shows never-before-seen works in new exhibition

February 6, 20182018 Exhibitions, PhotographyJonathan Gaugler, Media Relations Manager

Contact: Jonathan Gaugler | gauglerj@cmoa.org | 412.688.8690 / 412.216.7909

Deana Lawson
March 15–July 15, 2018
Forum Gallery

Pittsburgh, PA…Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) presents Deana Lawson, a new exhibition of never-before-shown photographs by Lawson (b. 1979). The Brooklyn-based artist’s growing body of work addresses critical issues surrounding representations of African Americans and the African diaspora. The exhibition is the 80th edition of CMOA’s dynamic Forum series, uninterrupted since 1990, bringing the work of extraordinary artists to Pittsburgh.

Deana Lawson, 'Nation,' 2017, © 2018 Deana Lawson

Few photographers working today unpack complexities of race and identity like Deana Lawson. Her strikingly-arranged portraits are packed with details that invite contemplation and close inspection. Lawson depicts people and interiors she encounters in her daily routines and travels, from her own neighborhood in Brooklyn to Soweto, South Africa, and beyond. She also appropriates photographs from other sources to address depictions of African Americans in media and visual culture. The exhibition includes 10 photographs, printed in the largest size ever for the artist. Their life-size scale affords scrutiny of the carpeting, clothing, furniture, hair, and jewelry that impact our perceptions—and perhaps biases—about people and their stories.

Deana Lawson also features photographic installations that burst out of the traditional picture frame and onto the exhibition walls. Lawson taps a variety of sources, including mass media and photo libraries, to explore how images in contemporary visual culture shape perceptions and stereotypes of people and communities. Each one is site-specific to CMOA and meticulously assembled by the artist in response to the museum and its local context.

We invite everyone to meet Deana Lawson and exhibition curator Dan Leers at the opening reception. The event is on March 15 at 7 p.m., and is free to the public. The museum’s monthly Third Thursday series follows from 8–11 p.m.

CMOA’s Forum series hosts diverse artists working on innovative projects in our Forum Gallery, located in the main lobby of the museum. For over 25 years, the series has offered our curators a dynamic space to show new developments in contemporary art.

Deana Lawson is organized by Dan Leers, curator of photography at Carnegie Museum of Art.

Major funding for the Forum series is generously provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition is provided by the Marty McGuinn Art Exhibition Fund.

Carnegie Museum of Art creates experiences that connect people to art, ideas, and one another.
We believe creativity is a defining human characteristic to which everyone should have access. CMOA collects, preserves, and presents artworks from around the world to inspire, sustain, and provoke discussion, and to engage and reflect multiple audiences.

Our world-class collection of over 30,000 works emphasizes art, architecture, photography, and design from the 19th century to the present. One of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum of Art was founded by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1895. Learn more: call 412.622.3131 or visit cmoa.org.