Place: Selections from the Light Work Collection

August 29, 2016 – March 3, 2017
Robert B. Menschel Gallery
Schine Student Center

Light Work is pleased to present Place: Selections from the Light Work Collection. In sync with the Syracuse Symposium™ 2016-2017 theme of Place, this exhibition explores how “thinking about place, then, entails questions of cementing, contesting, and crossing boundaries, devising frameworks yet also disrupting them, setting and upsetting expectations.” The photographs in this exhibition aim to comprehend the ever-evolving histories and relationships of a location, and the new understandings a photograph offers.

Place: Selections from the Light Work Collection brings together photographs by former Light Work Artists-in-Residence and Light Work Grant Recipients that have been generously donated by the artists we have supported. Featuring over 4,000 works of art, the Light Work Collection consists primarily of work made by artists who have participated in the Artist-in-Residence Program and past Light Work Grant recipients.

Pulled from the Light Work Collection, the exhibition highlights work by Admas Habteslasie, Amy Stein, Andrea Robbin and Max Becher, Beatrix Reinhardt, Brian Ulrich, Deborah Willis, Irina Rozovsky, James Casebere, Linda Connor, Margaret Stratton, Peter Finnemore, Robert Benjamin, Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris, Sylvia de Swaan, Viktor Lugansky, and William Earle WIlliams.

The Light Work Collection consists primarily of work made by artists who have participated in the Artist-in-Residence Program and past Light Work Grant recipients. Because we encourage participation by a variety of emerging and under-represented artists, Light Work’s collection is an extensive and diverse archive for the mapping of trends and developments in contemporary photography. This noteworthy collection includes all genres of expression found in contemporary photography, including documentary, abstract, experimental, and conceptual work. Many of the images capture and document the social history of the Central and Upstate New York regions. The collection also serves as an important document of Light Work’s history of support for artists and their creative process.