Light Work has the greatest pleasure in announcing that Whitney Hubbs will be our new associate director. Hubbs begins on August 16, 2022.  Hubbs joins Light Work from Alfred University in Western New York, where she served as associate professor of Photography in the School of Art and Design.  In addition to her administrative and curatorial work, Hubbs will manage the Light Work artist-in-residence program as well as a range of program initiatives. 

“The Board and Light Work’s staff are very excited to welcome Whitney,” said Dan Boardman, director of Light Work. “Whitney brings enormous enthusiasm for photography and deeply understands our mission to support emerging and underrepresented artists. Whitney’s leadership and substantive knowledge of photography will be an invaluable asset as the organization prepares to celebrate its fifty-year anniversary and works to imagine and realize the next fifty years of practice-centered support for artists working in photography and digital imaging.”

Hubbs noted, “I am honored and excited to join the Light Work team as the new associate director. Through this role, I will integrate my knowledge, experience, network, and commitment, alongside my new colleagues, to support Light Work’s mission. I look forward to getting to know and collaborating with local, national, and international communities that Light Work has supported for decades while building future collaborations with artists from all over the globe.” 

Whitney Hubbs was born in Los Angeles, CA, and lives in Syracuse, NY. Hubbs received her BFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts in 2005 and an MFA in Photography from University of California in Los Angeles in 2009.  She has exhibited both nationally and internationally in commercial galleries, artist-run spaces, non-profits, and institutions. These include Arturo Bandini (Los Angeles), California Museum of Photography (Riverside), Fahrenheit Madrid (Madrid, Spain), Karl Marx Studio (Paris, France), M+B Gallery (Los Angeles), No Gallery (New York City), P. Bibeau (New York City), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh), Situations Gallery (New York City), and The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles). Public collections holding Hubbs’ work include the California Museum of Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The J. Paul Getty Museum. Hesse Press published her first book, Woman in Motion, in 2017 and she published her second book, Say So, with Self Publish Be Happy Editions in 2021. Publications featuring her work include Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Frieze, The New Yorker, and most recently in Charlotte Cotton’s seminal book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Hubbs is represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in New York City.

Hubbs was an associate professor of Photography at Alfred University, Faculty Fellow with Image Text Ithaca’s MFA Program, and Visiting Critic and Lecturer at University of California in San Diego, University of Oregon, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Yale.

Light Work announces the 48th annual Light Work Grants in Photography. The 2022 award recipients are Carlton Daniel, Jr., Lacey McKinney, and Sarah Phyllis Smith. Additionally, judges awarded Honorable Mentions to Bridget Badore, Christine Chin, and Joshua Ives. The Light Work Grants in Photography are part of Light Work’s ongoing effort to provide support and encouragement to Central New York artists working in photography within a fifty-mile radius of Syracuse. Daniel and McKinney hail from Syracuse in Onondaga County and Smith from Utica in Oneida County.

Established in 1975, the Light Work Grants program is one of the longest-running photography fellowships in the country. Each recipient receives a $3,000 stipend and appears in Contact Sheet: The Light Work Annual.  A group exhibition of grant recipients’ work will be on view in the Hallway Gallery as part of the opening exhibition for the Fall 2022 season. This year’s judges were Ryan Arthurs (visual artist, curator, and founder of Rivalry Projects) and Tara Johnson  (Visuals Director at Vanity Fair).

Light Work is pleased to announce this year’s grant recipients:

Carlton Daniel, Jr. imagines Black futurity through his lens as a queer storyteller. Daniel’s multidisciplinary approach engages, interrogates, and is grounded in Afro-diasporic identity, sexuality, and Black love. He navigates storytelling through film, photography, and innovative technologies, using the camera to document the lived experiences of Black Americans. By using the past to inform our present, and the present to inform our future, he envisions worlds that center joy, healing, and care. 

Lacey McKinney’s solo and duo exhibitions include the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ), and The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has shown her work throughout New York State, Virginia, and Washington, notably at NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), Novado Gallery (Jersey City, NJ), Pen & Brush (New York City), Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center (Auburn, NY), and Urban Zen (New York City). Numerous private collections hold her work, which has also appeared in ARTnews, Art Zealous, Cultured Magazine, and Huffington Post. Her residencies include Fremantle Arts Centre (Fremantle, Western Australia), McColl Center for Art + Innovation (Charlotte, NC), and Post Contemporary (Troy, NY). In 2020 the New York Foundation for the Arts awarded her a Keep NYS Creating grant.

Sarah Phyllis Smith is a photographer, educator, and assistant professor of photography at PrattMWP in Utica. Recent notable solo exhibitions include Respite at Whitespace in Atlanta, GA, and Where the Great Lakes Leap to the Sea at The Shed Space in Brooklyn, NY. She has also recently shown her work at Ground Floor Gallery (Nashville), Perspectives Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Roman Susan Gallery (Chicago), Space 204 at Vanderbilt University (Nashville), Wedge Projects (Chicago), and Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta). Online and print publications featuring her work include Don’t Take Pictures Magazine, From Here On Out, Incandescent Magazine, Lenscratch, Light Leaked, Musée Magazine, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and Vulgaris Magazine. The Iranian literary magazine, Dastan, featured her work on their cover. Smith also curates Study Hall, a pedagogical project and contemporary photography gallery at PrattMWP, where she recently presented at the national conference for the Society for Photographic Education. Smith has been invited to give a workshop at the Tasmeem 2022: Radical Futures conference in Doha Qatar.

Five Light Work Artists-in-Residence among 2022 Guggenheim Fellows

Light Work offers enthusiastic congratulations to current Light Work artist-in-residence Gary Burnley (2022), former residency participants Kelli Connell (2008), Odette England (2021), Nancy Floyd (1998), and former AIR and Kathleen Ellis Gallery exhibiting artist Keliy Anderson-Staley (2010, 2011) for being named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows. The Guggenheim is one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for scholarly and artistic achievement, honoring individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

In all, this year’s recipients represent fifty-one scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, eighty-one academic institutions, thirty-one states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces. Many Guggenheim recipients respond directly to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism in their projects. The exceptionally rigorous application and peer review process selects each year’s recipients from almost 2,500 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

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“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

We can proudly offer a signed fine print, photobook, and Contact Sheet volumes that feature works by this year’s Guggenheim recipients. Proceeds benefit and champion Light Work’s ongoing support of emerging and under-represented artists working in photography through residencies, publications, exhibitions, educational programming, and a community-access digital lab facility. Search all our offerings at lightwork.org/shop.

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Odette England
2021 Residency / 2021 Photobook Award Recipient

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Odette England, Dairy Character
Saint Lucy Books / Light Work
188 pages / First Editon
Signed by the artist

Odette England is an artist and writer who uses photography, performance, writing, and the archive to explore themes of autobiography, land, gender, and ritual. She edited the critically acclaimed book, Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph (Schilt, 2020). Public collections holding England’s work include the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Texas A&M University. In 2021, Radius Books published her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg. England was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2021.

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Keliy Anderson-Staley
2010 Residency / 2011 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

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Keliy Anderson-Staley, Kevin, 2010
Pigmented inkjet print (from a wet-plate collodion tintype), 10 x 8″
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist

[Hyphen] Americans
Contact Sheet 163: Keliy Anderson-Staley
Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Light Work (September 1, 2011)

For her series [Hyphen] Americans, Keliy Anderson-Staley created a vast, broadly diverse collection of portraits with the wet-plate collodion process, using nineteenth-century chemical recipes, period brass lenses, and large wooden view cameras. Each individual—identified only by a first name—asserts his or her self, resisting any imposed external categorizing system. At once contemporary and timeless, these portraits raise questions about our place as individuals in history and the role that photographic technologies have played over time in defining identity.

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You can find works by and essays about 2022 Guggenheim recipients in Contact Sheet Annuals 102, 152, 162, and 163. Light Work designs and prints Contact Sheet in the tradition of fine art photography monographs and is completely commercial-free. We invite you to see first-hand the innovative and creative work of artists who are making important contributions to the field of photography.

Over Light Work’s nearly fifty year history, thirty-six of our artists-in-residence, photobook award recipients, and exhibiting artists have received the Guggenheim Fellowship. These include Sama Al Shaibi, Dawoud Bey, Doug DuBois, John Gossage, Elijah Gowin, Deana Lawson, Christian Patterson, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Cindy Sherman, Cauleen Smith, Mark Steinmetz, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Hank Willis Thomas. We are humbled and honored to provide time, space, and resources for so many of these artists early in—and throughout—their careers. We extend our congratulations to all the 2022 Guggenheim recipients on joining this illustrious body of artists and the legacy that represents. 

See the list of new Fellows here.

In 1995 I started working for Light Work a couple of days a week as an office assistant. Mostly I entered new Contact Sheet subscribers into a simple database on a computer the size of a mini-fridge. The office was cramped and pretty dodgy, filled with mismatched, used furniture and rickety, metal shelving. I remember the swivel chair I sat in no longer swiveled and the upholstery stuffing was bursting through the worn and shabby gold fabric of the seat and arms. After recording new subscriber names that came through the mail weekly, I stamped the back of the checks and then walked to the bank and handed them to a teller. Then I swung back around the block to Cosmo’s, a greasy diner and pizza shop, long gone, and purchased a grilled cheese sandwich for my quirky office mate, the director.

Next to the office was the Community Darkroom, also cobbled together with used equipment and furniture. Literally carved out of a former cafeteria in the basement of a dorm, the space included a black-and-white wet darkroom, a color processor, lighting studio, and a computer lab. The best thing about the Community Darkroom was its incongruous mix of members—professionals, amateurs, artists, professors, students—all coming together to create and celebrate the magic of photography. The buzz and energy of the space was palpable. The artists often seemed genuinely surprised and delighted by their contact sheets, humbly acknowledging their luck. They used the words “capture” or “take” while also hoping for the grace of being in the right place at the right time, as though a photograph is at least partially a gift or a collaboration with something capricious. They shared the disappointments and frustrations of a swing and a miss, an elusive and sometimes frustrating creative process that artists never give up on. And there were always the “happy accidents,” a chemical process gone wrong or a light leak that only enhanced or added deeper meaning to an image. But for all of us, there was the energy of making.

In this funky DIY space, a few things really stood out to me that I remember recognizing and puzzling over. Those rickety shelves in the disheveled office held pristine piles of Contact Sheets and Menschel Gallery catalogues. Exquisitely printed, these shiny, colorful publications were pure joy to thumb through. And the essays were accessible, sincere, unpretentious. When I looked through the publications, I understood the shabby upholstery. When we mailed Contact Sheet out to the gate-keepers of the art world (gallery directors, museum curators, collectors, educators, journalists), I understood the broken swivel chair—I admired this rag-tag organization and thought this might actually work.

The most dramatic thing about Light Work was the way we treated the artists as honored guests. Every month another artist arrived with a suitcase and a camera. Light Work gave each one a check (in the 90’s it was $3,000), a furnished apartment to stay in, keys to the building, and 24-hour access. I remember many of artists arriving and attempting to express gratitude for the precious gift of time, an entire month ahead of them—the luxury of it was overwhelming. And the financial support made it possible. The artists, who arrived after a highly competitive process from among hundreds of applicants, all had an intense work ethic. Coming up for air only occasionally, they disappeared into the Community Darkroom and/or the community. They understood the gift they had earned and made the most of it.

The residency program, the community space (now called the Light Work Lab), the publications, and the galleries all flowed from the same simple idea that art is important, life-affirming, essential. And that artists need to run this space, for artists. All the talented employees, lab members, students, and artists I’ve met and worked with over the years have

been in on this truth and worked hard to make this mode of expression accessible. We have endured many high points and struggles over the past twenty-seven years—to quote my former office mate/director, “That’s why they call it work.” Light Work has had to reinvent itself many times over (and so have I), but I still feel the same way about it that I did in the beginning. That it works to give to these artists, to elevate them instead of ourselves. To honor them for the risk they take and the truth they tell. Also, I now sit on a Herman Miller Aeron chair with the lumbar roll.

Jeffrey Hoone, the recently retired executive director, hired me twenty-seven years ago and then continued to offer me and the rest of the staff many more exciting opportunities to participate in pulling this off. He insisted on listening to artists, responding to their needs, giving generously to them, encouraging them. He insisted on a steady dedication to diversity, refusing to water down the mission or build something self-serving. I hope that Light Work will always be artist-run, because resourceful, undaunted, determined, and impossible artists always seem to find a way.

Mary Lee Hodgens
Associate Director
Retired 2022