We’ve been rolling fine with the name Light Work Blog, and it certainly doesn’t beat around the bush in terms of clarity! But we’re searching for something a little more creative, and we’re asking our readers to help us out.
The person who submits the winning idea wins a signed copy of the beautiful book Maggie by Emmet and Elijah Gowin for their trouble.
Post your suggestions in the comments or email me directly at magoodwi@syr.edu. —Mary Goodwin
June Light Work Artist-in-Residence Gerard Gaskin is video blogging his residency throughout the month on Facebook. Here, Gerard shows you around the apartment where our artists stay during their residencies. (Click here for more information about the residency program and what is included.) He then talks about his plans for his time in Syracuse, which are both ambitious and doable, with Digital Lab Manager John Mannion’s help.
Send Gerard a friend request on Facebook to follow his video blog.
Last weekend, Light Work had the pleasure of hosting the MARK10 closing event for the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). The three-day event brought together over one hundred artists, curators and arts administrators for coaching in professional practices, lectures, panel discussions and networking opportunities.
The NYFA group of artists, coaches, and presenters included a number of familiar faces, such as Ellen M. Blalock (AIR 2002), Lida Suchy (AIR 1994, LW Grant 2010), and Willson Cummer. But there were also a few surprises that reached further back into Light Work/Community Darkrooms history. Tatana Kellner was published in Light Work’s publications in the seventies, long before she participated in our residency program in 1992. Sylvia de Swaan completed residencies, received the LW Grant multiple times, and has served on our board. Carla Shapiro and Carlos Loret de Mola both were thrilled and surprised to see our state-of-the-art facility, that looked completely different from the modest darkrooms they worked in during their college years at Syracuse University many years ago. This made for a celebrated homecoming that was sweetened as they shared how formative their experience at Community Darkrooms was.
The MARK10 event was a sounding success and a pleasure to host due to the relentless efforts of NYFA MARK10 organizer and instructor Amber Hawk Swanson, and on a local side, the MARK10 liaison and CRC communication specialist Courtney Rile.
The MARK program is now in its third year and provides New York artists from all different disciplines with training in professional practices. It is a unique training and networking opportunity. The six-month program for 2010 was organized through partner organizations in five regions in New York State: Cultural Resources Council, Syracuse (Central New York), East End Arts Council, Riverhead (Long Island), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo (Western New York), The Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy (Capital Region), and Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale (Hudson Valley).
Image: Ellen Blalock, MARK10 participant, Skylar, 2002, from the series The Father Project
We’ve just added a comments feature to our blog, thanks to our dedicated and tireless web designer. So go ahead and tell us what you’ve wanted to say about any of our previous posts – the new feature is retroactive to all posts.
We hope that adding comments will help this blog better serve artists by being a place where we can share ideas. To get the ball rolling, I’d like to talk a little about portfolio reviews. I just got back from Review Santa Fe, a fantastic event that brought together over 100 photographers with curators, publishers, and art administrators. There was some quality work there, including Jody Ake‘s amazingly rich ambrotype portraits (yes, he really does bring the actual plates to portfolio review events as well as prints made from them). Former Light Work Artist-in-Residence Chad States got a lot of attention for his Cruising series, which many people were talking about. It’s a real testament to the organizers, Center, that the event still felt really intimate even with so many people involved.
The Santa Fe reviews are 20 minutes long per person, which is pretty standard for such events. I’ve heard this format compared to speed dating, and that is really no joke. As a reviewer, within 20 minutes time you have to get a sense of who the photographers is and what they want to accomplish, gauge whether that is actually happening in the photographs, and then communicate that feedback in a way that is constructive and helpful. Meanwhile, the reviewer is trying to show enough of the work and tell enough of the story to provide context while also attempting to get specific questions answered. Whew.
To maximize the opportunities afforded in these types of reviews, a good dynamic has to develop pretty quickly. In the comments, post your stories of portfolio review victories, plus any tips you have on what works and what doesn’t work both as a reviewer and a reviewee. I’ll post my own tips farther down in the comments. —Mary Goodwin, Associate Director
Image: Jody Ake
We’re coming up on the end of our 37th year supporting emerging and under-recognized artists at Light Work. The Light Work Annual Fund is a great way to help us in our mission, which over the years has made these other numbers possible:
25,000 artists, students, and patrons have made work at our state-of-the art imaging facility.
350 artists from all over the world have been hosted in our renowned Artist-in-Residence program.
400 exhibitions have been featured in our galleries.
3,500 pieces currently comprise The Light Work Collection, almost all donated by former Artists-in-Residence.
155 issues of Contact Sheet published, plus 50 exhibition catalogues for the Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery.
110 artists have received the Light Work Grants in Photography.
You can make a donation to The Light Work Annual Fund online any time day or night by clicking here. Please note that Light Work’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30. To maximize the impact of your support, please make your donation before June 30, 2010.
Thank you for your support, which will help us to continue our good work into the new year and beyond.
Image: Lenard Smith (May 2010 Artist-in-Residence), AIR, 2010.
We had a great preview yesterday at Art Chicago/NEXT. The booth was full all day with hundreds of people interested in our mission and the beautiful prints and books we’re selling in support of our programming.
The Eatonville Portfolio attracted a lot of attention in the booth during the preview. This amazing set of four images explores the history, geography, and people of Eatonville, FL, the oldest incorporated African American town in America. The portfolio features work by Carrie Mae Weems, Lonnie Graham, Deborah Willis, and Chicago artist Dawoud Bey.
Bey’s other print in our Fine Print Program, Five Children, Syracuse, New York, 1985, has also been very popular with Chicago collectors. The gorgeous prints by fellow Chicago artists Judy Natal and Ben Gest are drawing a lot of people into the booth as well.
If you’re in Chicago, definitely stop by the Light Work booth at 7-8034. We have some great neighbors in our corner of the fair, including Jon Feinstein and Amani Olu from Humble Arts Foundation. We’ll be here through Monday.
Our entire selection of fine art prints and books, all of them donated by the artists who made them, is also available online at our website.
Light Work will be at NEXT at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago from April 30 to May 3. Along with a great list of exhibitors, NEXT is presenting a fantastic slate of programming to sweeten the experience.
Many of our former Artists-in-Residence will have work represented at NEXT. For example, we’re looking forward to seeing the Barry Anderson (Light Work AIR 2006) installation at the Cara and Cabezas Contemporary booth. In a brief interview with Anderson this morning, the artist talked about the installation, which will be a new piece called Starchild. The two-channel video is shown on two separate screens with special frames around them, so the work offers a sculptural element not seen in previous installations by the artist. The imagery, Anderson explained, hints at religion and magic and references one of his influences, the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Above, a still from Starchild.
2008 Light Work AIR Deana Lawson will be represented in the exhibition Partisan, which will be in Booth 12-561/563 of Art Chicago. Her image Family Portrait, a print of which is in the Light Work Collection, will be featured prominently in the exhibition, which focuses on politically-motivated art.
Please stop by Booth 7-8034 and check out the latest prints from our Fine Print Program, which includes work by Elijah Gowin, Suzanne Opton, Doug Dubois, and Stanley Greenberg. We’ll also have several of our signed books available in the booth.
Sometimes just looking at books you love yields great ideas when you’re thinking about a book for your own work. April Artist-in-Residence Brian Ulrich knew when he arrived that he wanted to work on a book dummy for his project Copia during his residency. Syracuse University’s Bird Library, right next door to Light Work, has a great collection of photobooks both in the stacks and in their Special Collections.
While doing some roaming in the stacks, Brian came across one of his favorites, What We Bought by Robert Adams. It’s a classic that definitely resonates with Ulrich and his work: “What We Bought was one of the first books I started thinking about when I began Copia. It’s a great example of diverse work developed over time around an idea. What Adams was seeing in Colorado at that time was all new when he made those pictures. I liked the idea of sort of bringing that trajectory of thought into the 21st Century.”
Image: Brian Ulrich, Westland Mall, 2009, from the series Copia
The Light Work Artists-in-Residence for April are Ayana V. Jackson and Brian Ulrich. Both artists are using part of their residency time to edit work, scan film on our high-resolution Imacon scanners, and work on book dummies. Read more about each of their projects, as well as more info on Ayana and Brian, in the Artists-in-Residence page of the Light Work website. There you can also find details on the residency program and how to apply.
The image at left, La Reina de la Primanera, is by Ayana V. Jackson.
Syracuse art historian, critic, and writer Nancy Keefe Rhodes has posted a great article about the exhibition Stephen Chalmers: Unmarked, which is currently on view in the Light Work Main Gallery. Having come upon the opening for the exhibition by chance, she appears to have been pleasantly surprised by the series, the photographer, who gave a talk in the gallery, and Contact Sheet 156, which features the work.
Fractionmag also has an article about the show, which will run through May 29, 2010.