Join us “at home” with collectors Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, who will guide us on a virtual tour of their home and collection. The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art features a range of artworks by African American artists, with a special emphasis on emerging voices of the last twenty-five years. Their collection is the subject of the new book and traveling exhibition Young, Gifted and Black.

All Aperture members will receive a Zoom invite. Not a member? See here or email [email protected] for details. 

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In this second installment of the webinar-series ‘The Decolonising Lens’, hosted by the London College of Communication, Mark Sealy will be in conversation with Chris Boot and Deborah Willis to discuss how dialogue, personal relationships and a network of like-minded individuals are important in effecting change within academic and cultural institutions.

Whilst maintaining the importance of top-down policy in overturning bigotry and discrimination within in our institutions, the process of Decolonising can be conceived of as a horizontal rather than vertical alignment.

The Decolonial as a methodology of thought and action finds its force in the dialogues between ‘critical friends’, in the pressures and counter pressures of discussion within a network that seeks to challenge Eurocentric, phallocentric and heterocentric hegemony.

This event is organised by Photography and the Archive Research Centre at London College of Communication and hosted by its Director Brigitte Lardinois.

Please see here for more information and to register.

Mark Sealy is interested in the relationship between photography and social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has been Founder and Executive Director of photographic arts charity Autograph ABP since 1991. As such he has produced numerous publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide. Sealy has guest lectured and devised study programmes for arts and academic institutions around the world. In 2019 he was awarded the Outstanding Service to Photography Award by The Royal Photographic Society. In 2020 he joined the University of Arts London in the role of Principal Research Fellow Decolonising Photography and is a core member of PARC. His latest publication The Decolonising Camera (with accompanying exhibition at Houston Photofest) is hailed as a seminal work.

Professor Deborah Willis is an acclaimed photographer, artist, author and curator whose art and pioneering research has focused on cultural histories envisioning the black body, women and gender. She is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present amongst many other titles. She has lectured extensively on the history of photography, holds the Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and is director of the NYU Institute for African American Affairs and the Centre for Black Visual Culture. She is both a MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to these positions she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, and educational centres.

Chris Boot became executive director of Aperture Foundation in 2011. Previously he was director of London’s Photo Co-op (since renamed Photofusion), an independent photography education centre; Bureau Chief of Magnum Photos, both in London and in New York; and editorial director at Phaidon Press. His company Chris Boot Ltd., launched in 2001, published amongst others the award-winning photobooks Lodz Ghetto Album (2004) and Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955 (2005). He is the author and editor of many books, notably Magnum Stories (Phaidon, 2004)

Brigitte Lardinois is currently the Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC). She is a curator, writer and lecturer, specialising in photography and curation. Her current research focus is the Edward Reeves Archive in Lewes, established in 1855 and believed to be the oldest still operating photographic Studio in the world. Lardinois has curated numerous photography exhibitions both in her capacity as Photographic Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery and as the head of the Cultural Department at Magnum Photos. These include group exhibitions such as Magnum Ireland, as well as solo shows for Henri Cartier-Bresson and many others. Her published work includes editing Eve Arnold’s ‘People’ and Magnum Magnum.

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Join us for a conversation about the work of Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais, whose multidisciplinary approach rearticulates colonial memory and explores the ground on which contemporary Native art and communities might stand. This panel brings together writer and art historian Christopher Green, filmmaker Christina Wegs, and artist Will Wilson, all of who will discuss Metchewais’s life and continuing influence on the art world.

In a series of public programs that accompany the fall issue of Aperture magazine, “Native America,” photographers, historians, and writers discuss the historical relationships between and new perspectives on photography and Native representation.

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Christopher Green is a writer and art historian based in New York. His research and writing focus on modern and contemporary Indigenous art and primitivisms in history and the neo-avant-garde. His criticism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, and Brooklyn Rail, among other publications; his scholarly research has been published in ARTMargins, Winterthur Portfolio, ab-Original, and BC Studies. He is currently visiting assistant professor of art history at the University of North Texas, Denton.

Lead support of the “Native America” issue of Aperture magazine is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Further generous support is provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Significant support of Aperture magazine is provided by The Kanakia Foundation. Additional lead support is provided by Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović.

Pablo Ortíz Monasterio is a photographer, writer, and editor, internationally recognized as one of the most representative artists of Mexican contemporary photography. Aperture is pleased to call him a dear friend, a relationship that dates back many decades. Join us as we visit him at home to hear about his latest body of work and to see highlights from his collection.

All Aperture members will receive a Zoom invite. Not a member? See here or email [email protected] for details. 

Join Aperture and the International Center of Photography for a virtual book program celebrating the release of photographer Diana Markosian’s first monograph, Santa Barbara. Blending imagined and actual histories to form a visual storytelling style completely her own, Markosian explores her family’s final days in post-Soviet Russia, before her mother became a mail-order bride and moved her family to California—in pursuit of an American utopia depicted in the 1980s soap opera Santa Barbara. For this project, Markosian collaborated with a screenwriter for the original TV show to create a script based on her family’s migration story, and filmed staged reenactments in her original homes in both Moscow and Santa Barbara, California. Through the staged scenes, stills from the original TV show, and family pictures, Markosian explores the American dream and her own family history in this immersive documentary-based project. Erin O’Toole, Baker Street Foundation Associate Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, will join Markosian in conversation on the making of the book and correlating short film.

For more information and to register for the event, please visit ICP’s website.

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Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with Parsons School of Design at The New School, is pleased to present a conversation between photographer Martine Gutierrez and curator Nadiah Rivera Fellah. In Gutierrez’s 2018 project Indigenous Woman, she created a 124-page art publication, playing the roles of photographer, stylist, creative director, editor in chief, and featured model. Throughout its pages, Gutierrez transforms herself into a revolving roster of identities—in some spreads, wearing go-go boots; and in others, appearing in Indigenous textiles belonging to her Mayan grandmother. In this discussion, Gutierrez and Fellah will take an in-depth look at the project and navigating contemporary Indigeneity.

In a series of public programs that accompany the fall issue of Aperture magazine, “Native America,” photographers, historians, and writers discuss the historical relationships between and new perspectives on photography and Native representation.

REGISTER HERE

Martine Gutierrez (born in Berkeley, California, 1989) is an American visual and performance artist. She is known for creating works that interrogate the formation, expression, and perception of identity. Acting as subject and producer, the artist has created music videos, billboard campaigns, episodic films, live performances, and satirical advertisements that juxtapose the consumable with the genuine. Gutierrez’s most recent undertaking, Indigenous Woman, is a glossy magazine replete with beauty advertisements, fashion spreads, and a letter from the editor—all featuring Gutierrez herself as model, stylist, photographer, writer, and editor. Her artworks have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including in the Central Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Nadiah Rivera Fellah is a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Previously, she served in various capacities at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, where she curated the celebrated exhibition Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth and served as the primary author and editor of the accompanying catalogue. Fellah specializes in Latin American and global contemporary art. Her other published works include “Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/as Series: Images of Cross-Border Identities” in the journal History of Photography (2019), and “Mining ‘The Maniacs’” in Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (2018). Fellah received her BA in art history at Oberlin College, Ohio; and in 2019, she completed a PhD at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Lead support of the “Native America” issue of Aperture magazine is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Further generous support is provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Significant support of Aperture magazine is provided by The Kanakia Foundation. Additional lead support is provided by Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović.

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For more than thirty years, New York–based artist Alan Michelson has produced evocative, influential works that excavate colonial histories of invasion and eviction. A Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Michelson uses photography, painting, video, and installation to create dynamic spaces of visual and auditory immersion. In this discussion, Michelson sits down with Chrissie Iles—who cocurated his 2019 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—to discuss his career and the power of contemporary Indigenous art.

In a series of public programs that accompany the fall issue of Aperture magazine, “Native America,” photographers, historians, and writers discuss the historical relationships between and new perspectives on photography and Native representation.

REGISTER HERE

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her curating, collection-building, and research is focused on decentering the white subject in contemporary American art, particularly in time-based, moving-image work. She is a member of the graduate committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; faculty member at the School of Visual Arts; member of the integrated media arts advisory board at Hunter College; and professor at Columbia University. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in art history by her alma mater, the University of Bristol, England, in 2015. 

Lead support of the “Native America” issue of Aperture magazine is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Further generous support is provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Significant support of Aperture magazine is provided by The Kanakia Foundation. Additional lead support is provided by Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović.

Register Here

Join Photoworks and Aperture for a conversation with Shoair Mavlian, Director, Photoworks and Diana Markosian, as the discuss the artist’s upcoming first monograph Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara is the debut monograph by Diana Markosian, a talented artist who works at the intersection of photography and film. Intertwining the notion of the American dream, the romance of captivating 1990s soap operas, and her own personal history, the book is a compelling reconstruction of Markosian’s family’s first years in the United States after leaving Russia in the 1990s. The book features more than one hundred images, including staged scenes, film stills, and family pictures, in which the photographer reenacts the story of how her mother, Svetlana, became a mail-order bride in 1996, moving to the US with her two young children. Markosian follows this journey, from the disillusionment of post-Soviet Moscow to her own upbringing in Santa Barbara, California.

A solo exhibition of the same name will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in February 2021.

Diana Markosian (born in Moscow, 1989) holds an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic, New Yorker, and New York Times. Her most recent awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2019) and a World Press Photo award (2019). Her work is represented by Galerie Les filles du calvaire, Paris.