Photo Review Newsletter April/May 2020

Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory is featured in this spring’s Photo Newsletter as the cover image and in the Around and About section by Stephen Perloff.

Artist, Mother, Educator WEBINAR May 2, 2020

From the Eastman Museum’s descriptive:

As an artist-mother-educator, Bea Nettles has investigated universal themes such as family, childhood, and aging throughout her fifty-year career. These concepts are brought to light in the retrospective exhibition Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory, currently on view in the main galleries. The Eastman Museum will host a multigenerational panel discussion with Nettles, Rania Matar, and Jessica Todd Harper. Nettles, Matar, and Harper will discuss how family life, motherhood, and self-exploration have played a role in their bodies of work. Additionally, the panelists will address the impact of being working artists and educators on their individual careers. The discussion will be led by Jamie M. Allen, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Associate Curator, Department of Photography.

Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory is co‑organized by the George Eastman Museum and the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, and generously supported by the Rubens Family Foundation and Susan and Nathan Robfogel, and made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Free to all. 

Registration required via Zoom, spaces limited: Register now. 

About the Panelists
Bea Nettles (American, b. 1946) completed her graduate studies in the late 1960s, surrounded by male faculty members who relished traditional black-and-white photographic printing techniques. She incorporated hand-coloring, stitching, and collage into her nontraditional landscapes and self-portraits inspired by mythology, and she found herself locked out of the darkroom at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). As she began her photographic career in the early 1970s, she was the sole woman among the thirteen photographers in the first exhibition at LIGHT Gallery in New York. In 1980, Nettles joined the faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)—and was only one of two women among the fifty faculty members in the photography program. Nettles consistently pushed forward despite these factors. Her work was included in the landmark exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and that same year she had her first solo exhibition, at the George Eastman Museum. Along with teaching countless workshops, Nettles has held positions at Nazareth College, Visual Studies Workshop, the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, RIT, and UIUC, where she established the undergraduate photography program and taught for 24 years. Balancing her roles of artist, mother, and educator, Nettles found new paths of creativity as she battled time constraints and limited access to darkroom spaces or specific printing materials.

Rania Matar (American, b. Lebanon, b. 1964) is a photographer who investigates cross-cultural personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood. She is currently associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and regularly conducts workshops and gives talks. Matar is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and has published three books, L’Enfant-Femme (2016), A Girl and Her Room (2012), and Ordinary Lives (2009).

Jessica Todd Harper (American, b. 1975) is a photographer who records intimate landscapes of family life in beautifully lit photographs akin to paintings by Mary Cassatt or John Singer Sargent. She has taught at Swarthmore College and Haverford College in Pennsylvania and at the International Center for Photography in New York. A graduate of RIT and Bryn Mawr College, Harper has published two books, The Home Stage (2014) and Interior Exposure (2008).

A link to this webinar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-OxodyXgms&t=927s

Virtual Tour of Harvest of Memory at GEM

The Eastman Museum has designed a virtual way to navigate through my exhibition which is currently closed because of the pandemic. Visit their website and follow the link to Bea Nettles Harvest of Memory.

In addition there are certain images that are tagged with activities and questions to spark discussion of the works. The tour would best be supplemented by a copy of the monograph for the show so that images can be viewed in better detail and resolution.

Painting the Dreamscape: An Interview with Bea Nettles

This interview on Lomography Magazine’s online site has just gone live:

https://www.lomography.com/magazine/344074-painting-the-dreamscape-an-interview-with-bea-nettles 

Lensculture blog post now online.

Barefoot from Close to Home, 1981, 16 x 20 bichromate print made from a pinhole negative.

This interview was conducted by Cat Lachowskyj in conjunction with my show Harvest of Memory, currently at the Eastman Museum in Rochester. Although the museum is currently closed due to the Corona virus outbreak, the work and three essays can still be viewed in the accompanying book.‭

“A Wealth of Work” article in City Newspaper, Rochester, NY

Prior to the opening of Harvest of Memory at the Eastman Museum, I was interviewed by Amanda Chestnut.

https://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/a-wealth-of-work/Content?oid=11498773&fbclid=IwAR3Ch6gUtGg36T5i02Uaw_gMYfYg__ZC7fHpTA5qk1c183oP5UASNzeWGi4

Harvest of Memory review online at Photobook Magazine

The Eastman Museum has closed until future notice, but you can read this review of my show online and view selected images.

“All of them Witches” opens at Jeffrey Deitch, LA.

Three Frogs, Flyin’ Princess, and Let me Paddle Your Canoe

I attended the opening of this group show curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons at the Los Angeles Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Two of my prints from Flamingo in the Dark, and a VanDyke Brown print were included. To find out more about the process involved in making these prints, watch this video.

Harvest of Memory opens at Eastman Museum

This major retrospective opened on January 30, 2020, almost fifty years since my first exhibition at the George Eastman Museum when I first moved to Rochester, NY. The street banner incorporates the announcement for that 1970 show.

Work at Jeffrey Deitch LA Gallery

Three of my early works will be shown in “All of them Witches,” a show co-curated by Laurie Simmons and Dan Nadel. It opens on Saturday Feb 8, 2020 and I’ll be there.

Interview in January 2020 Photograph Magazine

An interview with me by Lyle Rexer has just been published in this issue of Photograph Magazine.

https://www.facebook.com/photographmagazine/posts/10156481174627721

Ace Lifetime Achievement Award

Recently I was selected for the Lifetime Achievement Award by 40 North, and arts advocacy organization in Champaign-Urbana. As part of the awards ceremony they prepared excellent videos introducing each of the recipients.

Worlds Motherway, the deluxe edition is half sold out.

My latest project, a poetry book is called Worlds Motherway. During my travels to cemeteries, I have photographed thousands of last names on gravestones that are parts of speech. With these words I have created books that investigate language, history, and some of life’s events. Gathering these names it became apparent how difficult it would be to tell women’s stories, as most of the occupations and many of the physical characteristics that feature as surnames reflect our patriarchal method of naming. In the English language, names with the suffix son or man abound. I have selected three surnames that are traditionally women’s first names: Eve, Judy, and Hester. Motherhood was the common link I found in each story plus a degree of guilt, blame or shame, which I have tried to address in this interpretation. Worlds Motherway came from Adam’s naming of Eve as the “mother of all the living.”

Worlds Motherway, a new book for 2019.

I have just completed both versions of my latest project, a poetry book called Worlds Motherway. During my travels to cemeteries, I have photographed thousands of last names on gravestones that are parts of speech. With these words I have created books that investigate language, history, and some of life’s events. Gathering these names it became apparent how difficult it would be to tell women’s stories, as most of the occupations and many of the physical characteristics that feature as surnames reflect our patriarchal method of naming. In the English language, names with the suffix son or man abound. I have selected three surnames that are traditionally women’s first names: Eve, Judy, and Hester. Motherhood was the common link I found in each story plus a degree of guilt, blame or shame, which I have tried to address in this interpretation. Worlds Motherway came from Adam’s naming of Eve as the “mother of all the living.”

The open edition version has three double sided accordions that are 4.75” x 11” opening to 17.”

Harvest of Memory opens in St Louis at the Sheldon Gallery

My retrospective exhibition Harvest of Memory has now officially begun its travels. It opened on October 4th with a lecture and gallery walkthrough on the 5th. The show will come down by December 30th.

Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory has been published.

Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory book is now shipping from the University of Texas Press website. It is also available from Amazon. This monograph was co-published by the University of Texas and the Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY.

"Art Since 1948" Installation at the Krannert Museum, UIUC.

Star…my van, a collage made while I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, has made its way back to the Krannert Museum in the town where the van used to park on Church Street. It is part of a rotating exhibition from the permanent collection called Art since 1948.

Return to Penland School, where Mountain Dream Tarot began in 1970.

During my recent visit to Penland I had a photo taken on the front steps of Horner Hall. It was here that my Mountain Dream Tarot deck began in July 1970, so this photo marks the 49th year since that all began.

"Photography and Memory" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

One of my unique prints from Flamingo in the Dark will be in this show in Philadelphia this fall. Martinique is part of their permanent collection.

https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/photography-and-memory

Bruce Springsteen's Guitar features my Mountain Dream Tarot card: Three of Swords

It was a great surprise to see my Three of Swords on Springsteen’s guitar used in Springsteen on Broadway. He had already used the image before as the disc icon on his CD Magic in 2008. Here’s a video that describe the experience of having the image on his cd.