Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging | Book Launch

Wednesday, December 7, 2022
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Join us as we celebrate the book launch for Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging (Radius Books, 2022). The event includes an artist's talk by Binh Danh, as well as a panel discussion of the ways in which the physical form and creative content of Danh's work informed the book's design process with Radius Books Creative Director David Chickey. Joining Danh and Chickey are panelists Rachel Phillips from PhotoAlliance, Amanda Minami, co-founder of Camera Obscura (camerasobscura.io) and sponsor of the Minami Book Grant for Asian American Visual Artists at Radius Books, and moderator Anna Lee, Stanford Libraries Photography Curator. The event was co-sponsored by Stanford Libraries and ​PhotoAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the understanding, appreciation and creation of contemporary photography.

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

Credit: Stanford Video

ABOUT THE BOOK

Binh Danh was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US in 1979. Early in his career, Danh pioneered a technique of printing images directly onto plant matter, activating the plants' chlorophyll with sunlight. Using this process, Danh printed images associated with the war in Vietnam onto the leaves of tropical plants and grasses. Of this work, Danh explains, "This process deals with the idea of elemental transmigration: the decomposition and composition of matter into other forms. The images of war are part of the leaves, and live inside and outside of them." Known for his innovative approach to alternative photographic processes, Binh Danh extends and reconsiders the pursuit of pioneering nineteenth-century photographers. For almost a decade, Danh has traveled across the American West, making daguerreotypes of scenic vistas on silver plates. Danh imbues this scenery with a distinctly personal perspective, negotiating his connection as a Vietnamese American with the landscape and history of the United States. This inaugural monograph features two volumes in a slipcase, bringing together three bodies of work and a separate book of essays and memorabilia that serves to contextualize Danh's work.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Binh Danh is an Associate Professor of Art at San José State University's Photography Program. He received an MFA from Stanford and a BFA from San Jose State University and has emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. Danh produces socially engaged work that often involved community outreach and archival research that deals with mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality. His awards include a 2010 Eureka Fellowship and a 2019 Creative Work Fund. His work has been collected by the deYoung Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among others.

My Life in Art: A talk between artist Max Cole and art historian David Pagel

October 9, 2022

Presented as part of SITE Santa Fe’s exhibition Max Cole: Endless Journey, a My Life in Art talk with Max Cole in conversation with art historian, David Pagel.

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

As part of the opening weekend for Max Cole: Endless Journey at SITE Santa Fe, Cole took the stage alongside art historian David Pagel, who penned the artist's favorite review of her work. This special event was the first in-person meeting between Cole and Pagel.

Max Cole was born in Kansas in 1937, and she grew up in the Southwest. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1961 from Fort Hays University in Hays, Kansas, and three years later she earned her master’s degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she was awarded a Fellowship for the Graduate Study of Painting. Since then, she has developed artistically in Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. She now resides and works in northern New Mexico. Cole has received honors and fellowships from the University of Arizona, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollack/Krasner Foundation, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, The Roswell Museum and Art Center, and The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation.

In 1988, she received a grant from the State Department for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Fine Art in New Delhi, India, and she attended a Contemporary Artist’s Meeting with the Pope at the Sistine Chapel in 2009. Cole’s career commenced in 1976 with a four-person exhibition entitled New Abstract Painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Between 1979 and 1984, her work was featured in four exhibitions at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. She was a part of two exhibitions at Albright Knox, one in 1979 and the next in 2007. In 2004, she held a solo exhibition at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany. Her work was permanently installed in Italy’s Panza Collection in 2000, and it was included in The Splendor of Truth, the Beauty of Charity in the Vatican in 2011. She had a solo exhibition in 2012 at the Mies van der Rohe Haus in Berlin entitled To the Line. In 2013, her solo exhibition, Meditations, was held at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Cologne. Her work was also featured in Guiseppe Panza di Biumo: American Dialogs, Ca’ Pesare in 2015, for which the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Venice collaborated with The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Guggenheim in New York, and the Panza Collection in Italy. She has exhibited work in numerous other museums in Europe and the United States, and her work continues in an endless journey.

David Pagel is an art critic, curator, and professor of art theory and history at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. His reviews and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Brooklyn Rail, and Artforum. Recent publications include Jim Shaw, Lund Humphries, London, 2019 and Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity, Zero+, Claremont, 2018, as well as catalog essays on John Sonsini, Elliott Hundley, Bret Price, and Dane Goodman. Recently organized exhibitions include “re:Socializing—art out of quarantine” and “Kenneth Noland/August Rodin/Ian Trout,” both at Claremont Graduate University. A self-taught diorama builder and an avid cyclist, Pagel is a seven-time winner of the California Triple Crown.

Richard Misrach: Notations | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, July 28, 2022
2 pm PT | 3 pm MT | 4 pm CT | 5 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join Richard Misrach in conversation with Darius Himes and David Chickey to celebrate the launch of Richard Misrach: Notations.

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

ABOUT THE BOOK

"Photography didn’t invent black-and-white imagery, but it certainly caused it to proliferate so widely that when color was introduced to the medium, it seemed almost unnatural. With his new work, Misrach appears determined to renew that sense of unfamiliarity—to revive the idea that color is unreliable, artificial. But he is careful not to put its seriousness at risk. It’s a tricky balance to strike.” — Nancy Princenthal, Art in America

Ansel Adams, a classical pianist as well as renowned photographer, compared the photographic negative to a musical score that can be interpreted/printed in numerous ways. John Cage, the avant-garde composer, compiled scores by numerous composers and artists and presented them as graphic art in the 1969 publication Notations. It is the merging of these two ideas, from these unlikely sources, that form the foundation for this project. Since 2006, coinciding with Richard Misrach's shift away from analog film to working exclusively with a digital camera, he has been interested in the negative image in photography as an aesthetic experience in its own right. This body of work, this book, is an homage to the end of the analog era in photography.

Photography by Richard Misrach
Text by Darius Himes

Hardcover / 16.75 x 13 inches
196 pages / 92 images
ISBN: 9781942185956
$85 Trade / $90 Signed

scott b. davis: sonora | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, May 26, 2022
3 pm PT | 4 pm MT | 5 pm CT | 6 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join photographer scott b. davis and curators Virginia Heckert and Joshua Chuang in conversation with publisher David Chickey to celebrate the launch of scott b. davis: sonora.

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

ABOUT THE BOOK

scott b. davis‘s recent work uses combinations of in-camera palladium paper negatives and traditional film-based platinum/palladium prints. The images explore the boundaries of visibility in the darkness and overwhelming light of the Sonoran Desert, creating pictures of landscapes that are both literal and abstract. The light and space found in the open desert are felt in these uniquely rendered images comprised of diptychs, triptychs, and occasional works that include as many as ten or twelve unique images in a series. By using exposure to intense UV light, Davis has pioneered a process that captures images invisible to the naked eye, creating prints rich in contrast to push the boundaries of the visible spectrum and the perceptual limits of human vision. His prints invite closer, deeper looking at landscapes that seem familiar to us in the daylight but evolve into something altogether different when rendered as abstract records of place. The aim is not to represent the desert as we think we know it, but to evoke an intimate connection with the desert through new perspectives.

Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb: Waves | Live Virtual Talk

Friday, May 13, 2022
11 am PT | 12 noon MT | 1 pm CT | 2 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join photographers Alex Webb, Rebecca Norris Webb, and publisher David Chickey in conversation about Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb: Waves.

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Far from the vibrant urban worlds where I’ve often photographed, I followed the subtle movements of time and tide, wind and water. Meanwhile, Rebecca photographed the waves of light as they washed through our house of many windows—and wrote spare text pieces to try to emotionally navigate this unsettling time, when so many we know have been caught in its undertow.”
—Alex Webb, May 2021

Inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Waves, this collaborative project brings together the work of creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. This intimate collection serves as a pandemic logbook in words and images, created while the couple was largely sequestered on Cape Cod from March 2020 through May 2021. Rebecca provides original, hand-written poetry that punctuates her lyrical photographs and Alex’s panoramic seascapes. Their images serve as poignant meditations on what it means to be both deeply connected to the world around us and profoundly isolated from much that we hold dear.

Odette England and Jennifer Garza-Cuen on “Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg”

Join ICP online for a conversation featuring Odette England and Jennifer Garza-Cuen on their new publication, “Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg.” 

The photographers spent a week in 2018 at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida, collaborating on a series of nearly 200 photograms that activated expired 1970s photo paper from Rauschenberg’s darkroom through piercing, folding, tearing and submerging the exposures in the residence pool. ICP Curator and contributor to the book, David Campany, will lead the conversation focused on the process of creating the photograms, activating Rauschenberg’s materials, and the making of their new photobook. 

WHEN

Tuesday, February 22, 2022, 6 - 8 pm ET

WHERE

This program will take place on Zoom. Those who register to attend will receive a confirmation email with a link located at the bottom of the email under ‘Important Information’ to join the lecture through a computer or mobile device. We recommend participants download the Zoom app on their device prior to the program. 

Jim Isermann | Reception + Book Signing | Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles

PRAZ-DEVALLADE invites you to meet Jim Isermann at a reception in their LA gallery for light refreshments and a book signing.

WHEN

Saturday, November 13, 2021, 4:00 - 6:00 pm PT

WHERE

PRAZ-DEVALLADE
6150 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90048
760.416.2856

RSVP

losangeles@praz-delavallade.com

Jim Isermann | Book Launch | Live Virtual Talk

Tuesday, October 26, 2021
3 pm PT | 4 pm MT | 5 pm CT | 6 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join artist Jim Isermann and art critic Christopher Knight in conversation with publisher David Chickey to celebrate the launch of JIM ISERMANN.

"The domestic heart of Isermann’s design-oriented paintings, sculptures, and installations beats in ways not always immediately evident but nonetheless essential to the art’s success. Sometimes it sneaks up when least expected."
—Christopher Knight

WATCH THE FULL RECORDING HERE:

ABOUT THE BOOK

A comprehensive monograph spanning the forty-year career of Palm Springs–based, queer artist Jim Isermann (born 1955), this title shows the artist’s first twenty years of extensive, chronological research of postwar art and design filtered through popular culture and consumerism, followed by twenty years of site-specific public projects and a studio practice of labor-intensive painting, sculpture, and the occasional product design project.

In 1980, there were no guidebooks to California design or what we now call Midcentury Modern. Isermann constructed his own timeline, object by object, from thrift stores, flea markets and swap meets, making bodies of work that included latch hook rugs paired with painting, stained glass window panels, and handsewn fabric wall hangings. By 1999, Isermann had his first computer, and so began the second twenty years of his career, with complex digitally designed patterns that found their form in commercially manufactured modules. Isermann continues to be inspired by the unpredictable, serendipitous moments that breathe life into his work. Interview by John Burtle. Essay by Christopher Knight

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Jim Isermann (b. 1955) is an American artist based in Palm Springs, California. Since receiving an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1980, his artistic output has chronicled the conflation of postwar industrial design and fine art through popular culture. From functional installations to discrete objects, Isermann has maintained an unflagging belief in the beauty of utilitarian design. His current work is in formal discourse with its site-specific architectural setting addressing pragmatic issues of function and materials. Photo © Josh Shaedel.

Christopher Knight is art critic for the Los Angeles Times. He received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, after being a finalist in 1991, 2001 and 2007. Knight also received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Journalism from the Rabkin Foundation in 2020, and the 1997 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association, the first journalist to win the award in more than 25 years. Knight has appeared on CBS' “60 Minutes,” PBS' “NewsHour,” NPR's “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” and CNN and was featured in the 2009 documentary movie, “The Art of the Steal.”

Trina Turk to Host Palm Springs Artist, Jim Isermann’s Book Signing

WHAT

California designer Trina Turk is excited to host a book signing for longtime friend and artist Jim Isermann for his book JIM ISERMANN at the Trina Turk | Mr Turk flagship boutique in Palm Springs. The book signing will be open to the public.

“Jim and I met 20 years ago through our interest in mid-century architecture in Palm Springs. We both purchased homes here way back in the late 1990’s. We’re honored to host to celebrate Jim’s career and his brand new book.”
-Trina Turk

"After twenty years in LA and twenty in Palm Springs, everything California is embedded in my work. Buying a house in PS in 1997, for the first time I had a circle of friends, including Trina, whose shared interest was architecture and preservation. I can’t think of a more appropriate place to share this Radius Books monograph than at TT!"
-Jim Isermann

"Working on this book with Jim was such a great experience—at Radius we strive to make each book a unique amplification of the artist's vision, and in Jim's case I think the extension of his art and aesthetic shows in every detail."
-David Chickey

WHEN

Saturday, October 23rd from 3 p.m. - 5 p.m.

WHERE

Trina Turk | Mr Turk Boutique, 891 N Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs, CA 92262

RSVP

palmsprings@trinaturk.com

American Geography | Borders + Territories | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, July 29, 2021
3 pm PT | 4 pm MT | 5 pm CT | 6 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join photographers Miguel Fernández de Castro and Edward Ranney in conversation with curators Sally Martin Katz, John Rohrbach, and Sandra S. Phillips about American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, with a focus on the theme of borders and territories, in both a historical and contemporary context.

Watch the full recording here:

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ DE CASTRO (b. Sonora, 1986) is a visual artist whose work examines how extractive and criminal economies materially transform a territory. Through long-term projects he has developed a body of work through photography, video, sculpture, archives and writing. His work has been shown at Frac Centre-Val de Loire, Orleans; Laika e-flux, New York; Museo de Geología, UNAM, Mexico City; Spazio Veda, Florence; The Wren Library, Cambridge; Museo Artium, Vitoria; Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico City; Casa del Lago, Mexico City; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico City; Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver; Bikini Wax, Mexico City; Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles; among others. He has been resident at PAOS, Guadalajara, and at Casa Gallina-InSite, Mexico City, among others. Recently, his short film Grammar of Gates was selected by Ballroom Marfa to be shown in Artists’ Film International (AFI) 2020, organized in conjunction with Whitechapel Gallery.

EDWARD RANNEY (American, b. 1942), was raised in Illinois and has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his family since 1970. He began photographing seriously while on a post-graduate Fulbright fellowship in Cuzco from 1964-65. Since then he has travelled on more than 20 occasions to photograph at ancient sites around Cuzco and on the coastal deserts of Peru and Chile. His initial work from the 1970s was published in 1982 as Monuments of the Incas, now in its third printing. Publication in 2014 of The Lines represents the first significant presentation of the body of work he calls The Andean Desert Survey, which includes pictures of monumental architecture dating from as early as 4000 BC, of extensive later sites along Peru and Chile's desert coasts, and terminates in the early 16th century with structures associated with the Inca occupation of western South America. Ranney has also photographed in the American Southwest, particularly in New Mexico, where he lives. (Courtesy WSJ Magazine)

SALLY MARTIN KATZ is Curatorial Assistant of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Concurrently, she is a PhD candidate in art history, specializing in history of photography, at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, under the supervision of Michel Poivert. With Clément Chéroux she co-edited the books Louis Stettner: Traveling Light (2018) and snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks (2019), which accompanied the exhibitions at SFMOMA. She earned an MA in art history and an MFA in Photography from the Sorbonne. While living in Paris, she worked as curatorial assistant at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and worked on the photographic archive of the Greek, Roman & Etruscan Antiquities Department at the Musée du Louvre. Her earliest work experiences in the museum field were at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and International Center of Photography Museum. She received a BA magna cum laude in art history and French literature from Brown University.

SANDRA S. PHILLIPS is Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she was appointed Curator of Photography in 1987, and Senior Curator of Photography in 1999. She retired from the museum in 2016, and since then has worked as Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and has contributed to various publications. In 2000 she was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and she has organized numerous exhibitions and monographs.

JOHN ROHRBACH is Senior Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, where he has been employed since 1992. Dr. Rohrbach started his career at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and was director of the Paul Strand Archive before gaining his doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Delaware in 1993. In addition to numerous exhibitions related to American photography, he has published many books, including Eliot Porter: The Color of Wildness, Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, Reframing the New Topographics, and Color: American Photography Transformed.

American Geography | The West | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, July 15, 2021
2 pm PT | 3 pm MT | 4 pm CT | 5 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join photographer Dannielle Bowman, author Hilary Green, and curator Gregory Harris in conversation with curator Sandra S. Phillipsand publisher David Chickey about American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, with a focus on the South. 

Watch the full recording here:

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

DANNIELLE BOWMAN is a visual artist working with photography. Bowman received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. In 2019, she was a contributor to the New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project. Bowman has been an artist in residence at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York; the Center for Photography at Woodstock; and PICTURE BERLIN. She was awarded the 2020 Aperture Portfolio Prize and was a recipient of the 2020 PHMuseum Women Photographers Grant. In 2021 she will participate in the Light Work Artist-In-Residence program. Bowman has exhibited in the US and internationally. She lives and works in New York.

DR. HILARY N. GREEN is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies and serves as the co-program director of the African American Studies program at the University of Alabama. She also has a partial appointment in American Studies. She earned her B.A. in History with minors in Africana Studies and Pre-Healing Arts from Franklin and Marshall College; M.A. in History from Tufts University; and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil War Memory, the US South, 19th Century America, and the Black Atlantic.

GREGORY HARRIS is the High Museum of Art’s Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography. He is a specialist in documentary photography best known for his work with emerging artists. Harris was previously the Associate Curator at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, where he curated exhibitions including Sonja Thomsen: Glowing Wavelengths in Between (2015), The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus (2014), and Studio Malick: Portraits from Mali (2012). He also organized and authored catalogues for the exhibitions We Shall: Photographs by Paul D’Amato (2013), Matt Siber: Idol Structures (2015), and Liminal Infrastructure (2015).

SANDRA S. PHILLIPS is Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she was appointed Curator of Photography in 1987, and Senior Curator of Photography in 1999. She retired from the museum in 2016, and since then has worked as Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and has contributed to various publications. In 2000 she was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and she has organized numerous exhibitions and monographs.

American Geography | The West | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, June 17, 2021
3 pm PT | 4 pm MT | 5 pm CT | 6 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join Mitch Epstein, Mark Ruwedel, and Richard White in conversation with curator Sandra S. Phillips and publisher David Chickey about American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present with a focus on the West.

Watch full recording here:

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

MITCH EPSTEIN (born 1952, Holyoke, Massachusetts) is a photographer who helped pioneer fine-art color photography in the 1970s. His photographs are in numerous major museum collections, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art; The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Tate Modern in London. In 2020, Mitch Epstein was inducted as an Academician to the National Academy of Design. In 2011, Epstein won the Prix Pictet for American Power. Among his other awards are the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin (2008), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003).

MARK RUWEDEL is a Photographer and Professor Emeritus at California State University. He is represented in museums throughout the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Canada, and many others. Recent publications include Dog Houses, 2017; Ouarzazate, 2018; seventy-two Miles Across Los Angeles, 2020; and Palms/Capri, 2020. His work has been reproduced in over 75 books and catalogs. Mark Ruwedel’s Archive has been acquired by the Stanford Libraries, Department of Special Collections.

RICHARD WHITE is an Emeritus Professor of American History at Stanford. He is a historian of the United States specializing in the American West, the history of capitalism, environmental history, history and memory, and Native American history. His work has won numerous academic prizes, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has written several books, articles, and chapters, including California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History (2020), and many others.

SANDRA S. PHILLIPS is Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she was appointed Curator of Photography in 1987, and Senior Curator of Photography in 1999. She retired from the museum in 2016, and since then has worked as Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and has contributed to various publications. In 2000 she was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and she has organized numerous exhibitions and monographs.

American Geography | Industrialization | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, June 3, 2021
3 pm PT | 4 pm MT | 5 pm CT | 6 pm ET

Radius Books invites you to join photographer Gregory Halpern, and curators Keith Davis and Sandra S. Phillips in a conversation with publisher David Chickey about American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, with a focus on the history of industrialization in the United States.

Watch full recording here:

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

KEITH DAVIS has been a photography curator and historian for over forty years. After an internship at the George Eastman House, he oversaw the Hallmark Photographic Collection from 1979 to 2005. He was senior curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Missouri, until 2020. ⁠

GREGORY HALPERN was born in Buffalo, New York. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is an Associate Member of Magnum Photos. He has published seven books of photographs. He teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology.⁠

SANDRA S. PHILLIPS is Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she was appointed Curator of Photography in 1987, and Senior Curator of Photography in 1999. She retired from the museum in 2016, and since then has worked as Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and has contributed to various publications. In 2000 she was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and she has organized numerous exhibitions and monographs.

Rania Matar: SHE | Photo London Book Club

Thursday, May 27
6.30 pm BST | 7.30 pm CET | 1.30 pm ET | 11.30 am MT

Rania Matar will present her work and new book ‘SHE’ with Mark Alice Durant, one of the writers, and David Chickey, the book’s designer of the book.

Watch the full recording here.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. She has received several grants and awards including a 2019 CENTER First Place Choice Award, 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. Matar’s work has been exhibited in museums worldwide. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition. She had mid-career retrospectives at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut Museum. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Mark Alice Durant is an artist and writer living in Baltimore. He is author of 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, Robert Heinecken: A Material History and McDermott and McGough: A History of Photography, and co-author of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal.  His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Art in America, Aperture, Dear Dave, FOAM Magazine, Photograph, and many catalogs and anthologies, including Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing, Jimmie Durham, Marco Breuer: Early Recordings and The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. He is founder, publisher, and editor of Saint Lucy Books.

Orin Zahra is the Assistant Curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Zahra was lead curator on the 2019 exhibition Live Dangerously, a collection presentation of over 120 photographs that revealed the bold and dynamic ways in which female bodies inhabit and activate the natural world. In spring 2020, she was the liaison curator for the major exhibition Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Currently, she is co-curating the international group exhibition Paper Routes—Women to Watch 2020 (opening October 2020), part of the museum’s Women to Watch series that serves to highlight emerging and underrepresented contemporary women artists. Zahra’s ongoing dissertation project is titled “Race and Space in Impressionist-Era Paris.”

American Geography | The Plains | Live Virtual Talk

Thursday, May 20, 2021
3 pm PT | 4 pm MT | 5 pm CT | 6 pm ET

THE ETHICS OF THE NEGATIVE: PHOTOGRAPHIC VISIONS OF THE PLAINS

The Great Plains of the United States are often portrayed through the lens of a colonial imaginary, as “nowhere” lands where vast stretches of “nothing” dominates. Yet photographs can serve as powerful tools to raise awareness about the complex subtleties that abound. One famous example is Dorothea Lange’s images produced in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration that called attention to rural poverty. While highlighting some critical social issues, however, others historically have fallen outside of the photographer’s gaze. Join Terry Evans, Jenny Reardon, and Wendy Red Star for a conversation about the ethics of photography and its role in mediating our understandings of land and lives. Part of a series of conversations celebrating the launch of American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, this event will focus on the Plains, with an emphasis on the unseen, the unrecognized, and what falls outside the frame. What relations is the photograph a trace of, and what relations does it fail to comprehend? How can photography respond to the ethics of the negative—what was cut, or never conceived—and thus learn to see more complexly?

Watch the full recording here:

Radius Books invites you to join photographers Stephen Shore and Wendel White, and author Richard B. Woodward in a conversation with curators Joshua Chuang and Sandra S. Phillips about American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, with a focus on the Northeast region of the United States.

Originally aired live on Thursday, May 6, 2021, at 2 pm PT | 3 pm MT | 4 pm CT | 5 pm ET

WATCH THE COMPLETE EVENT HERE:

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Joshua Chuang is head of the Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs at the New York Public Library, where he also serves as the Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography. His past projects include Robert Adams: The Place We Live, Santu Mofokeng: Stories, Mark Ruwedel's Westward the Course of Empire, and Sun Gardens: The Cyanotypes of Anna Atkins.

Sandra S. Phillips editor of American Geography is Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she was appointed Curator of Photography in 1987, and Senior Curator of Photography in 1999. She retired from the museum in 2016, and since then has worked as Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and has contributed to various publications. In 2000 she was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and she has organized countless exhibitions and monographs.

Interested in photography from an early age, Stephen Shore received a Kodak Junior darkroom set for his sixth birthday and began to use a 35 mm camera three years later. Shore’s career began at fourteen, when he presented his photographs to Edward Steichen, Director of Photography at MoMA. Recognizing Shore's talent, Steichen bought three of his photographs. At seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began photographing Warhol and his circle. In 1971, at the age of 23, he became the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. In 2017, MoMA opened a major retrospective spanning 50 years of Shore's career. His work is represented by 303 Gallery and Sprüth Magers. Since 1982 he has been director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts. 

Wendel A. White was awarded a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. White taught photography at the School of Visual Arts; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the International Center for Photography; Rochester Institute of Technology; and is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University. His work has received various awards and fellowships including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, a photography grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in various museums and corporate collections, and recent projects include: Red Summer; Manifest; Schools for the Colored; Village of Peace: An African American Community in Israel; and Small Towns, Black Lives.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York. His essays on photography have been published in more than 20 books, including catalogs for the exhibitions Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities (2008) and Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera since 1870 (2010). He has written for numerous magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and is a regular contributor to the Wall St. Journal and New York Times. 

Radius Books and The Green Arcade invite you to join Sandra S. Phillips, Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to celebrate the launch of American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present in honor of Barry Lopez, with Debra Gwartney, author and educator; Toby Jurovics, Director of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment; and poet Beverly Dahlen, including live readings of recent work from Robert Adams and Barry Lopez.

WATCH THE COMPLETE EVENT HERE:

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

SANDRA S. PHILLIPS is Curator Emerita of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she was appointed Curator of Photography in 1987, and Senior Curator of Photography in 1999. She retired from the museum in 2016, and since then has worked as Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and has contributed to various publications. In 2000 she was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome, later that year she was awarded a residency in Tokyo to study Japanese photography by the Japanese government, and in 2019 she was a scholar at the Getty Research Institute. She has organized many exhibitions, some of them monographic, including Diane Arbus Revelations (1995) and Ansel Adams at 100 (2001), and examinations of the role of photography in policing and surveillance, including Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera since 1870. In 1996, she organized Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, which traveled widely. The present volume is an expansion of this earlier exhibition catalogue. 

Born in Salmon, Idaho, a fifth generation Idahoan, DEBRA GWARTNEY is the winner of the 2018 RiverTeeth Nonfiction Prize, judged by Gretel Ehrlich. Her hybrid memoir-history, called I Am a Stranger Here Myself, was published in March of 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Debra’s first book is a memoir, Live Through This, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Oregon Book Award. Debra has published widely, with work included in such journals as Granta, Tin House, American Scholar, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square Review, Kenyon Review, Salon, Triquarterly Review, the NYT “Modern Love” column, among others. She is the 2018 winner of the Real Simple essay contest. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writersmagazine and in 2015 won the Crab Orchard Review prize for nonfiction. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Playa, UCross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation.

TOBY JUROVICS is founding director of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, which works with contemporary artists to create installations about climate change and our relationship with the land in a time of environmental crisis. Prior to this, he was chief curator and curator of American western art at Joslyn Art Museum, and a curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Princeton University Art Museum. A specialist in nineteenth and twentieth century photographic surveys of the American West, he has organized over fifty exhibitions on artists including Robert Adams, Barbara Bosworth, Emmet Gowin, A.J. Russell, Timothy H. O'Sullivan and William Wylie as well as numerous group exhibitions, and has published essays on Karl Bodmer, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Steve Fitch, John Gossage and the New Topographics. He lives in New Mexico.

BEVERLY DAHLEN, a native of Portland, Oregon, has lived and worked in San Francisco for many years. Her first three books (Out of the Third; A Letter at Easter; The Egyptian Poems) were republished by Little Red Leaves Editions in 2012. Parts of her long open ended work called A Readinghave been published over the years by various presses. She has recently published work in the anthology ATTN: July 31, 2015 published by Further Other Book Works. Dahlen is a recipient of a 2013 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.

PATRICK MARKS is the proprietor of The Green Arcade, since 2008 a bookstore and event space in San Francisco. The Green Arcade specializes in the natural and the built environment, with an emphasis on social justice issues.

Radius Books invites you to join photographer, Tanya Marcuse, and writer, Francine Prose, in conversation with David Chickey.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Radius Books invites you to join photographer, Tanya Marcuse, and writer, Francine Prose, in conversation with David Chickey. This three-volume triptych traces the arc of Tanya Marcuse's work from the iconic trees of FRUITLESS to the lush, allegorical compositions of FALLEN and WOVEN. In FRUITLESS, Marcuse repeatedly photographs particular trees from the same vantage point, cataloguing their seasonal transformations. For FALLEN, Marcuse uses frozen, decayed fruit from the same trees to depict an ordered paradise becoming wild and untended, a mixture of rot and growth where malevolent as well as beautiful creatures abound. WOVEN expands FALLEN's dense arrangements to immersive, 5 x 10-foot tableaux that interweave wildness and order, beauty and terror.

Marcuse and Prose will answer questions from the audience at the end of the event.

WATCH THE COMPLETE EVENT HERE:

Radius Books invites you to join photographer, Steven B. Smith, and writer, Lydia Millet, in conversation with David Chickey.

The photographs in YOUR MOUNTAIN IS WAITING document the accelerating suburbanization of Steven B. Smith’s native Utah. Peeling back the layers of westward expansion with equal parts subtlety and irony, Smith captures the new McMansions springing up against the rocky, rust-red mountains and deep blue skies of the West. Smith is equally attentive to the cast of characters that fill these new landscapes—the people that build them, and the people that live in them. An essay by Lydia Millet contextualizes Smith’s photos within a narrative of an American empire in decline.

Smith and Millet will answer questions from the audience at the end of the event.

Watch the complete recording here:

Radius Books invites you to join photographer and poet, Rebecca Norris Webb, in conversation with David Chickey.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Studying at the International Center of Photography in New York, Rebecca Norris Webb first came across W. Eugene Smith’s "Country Doctor," his famous Life Magazine photo essay.

She was immediately drawn to the subject of Smith’s essay, Dr. Ernest Ceriani, a Colorado country doctor who was just a few years older than her father. She wondered: How would a woman tell this story, especially if she happened to be the doctor’s daughter?

In light of this, for the past six years Norris Webb has retraced the route of her 100-year-old father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana, the rural county where they both were born. Following his work rhythms, she photographed often at night and in the early morning, when many people arrive into the world—her father delivered some one thousand babies—and when many people leave it.

Accompanying the photographs, lyrical text pieces addressed to her father create a series of handwritten letters told at a slant.

Norris Webb will answer questions from the audience at the end of the event.

Watch the complete recording here:

Radius Books and CCA invite you to join a conversation about ELLSWORTH KELLY: AUSTIN, with Carter E. Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, Jeanne Klein, Collector and Blanton Leadership Board Member, and David Chickey, Publisher at Radius Books. Panelists will answer questions from the audience at the end of the event.

Watch a recording of the complete event here:

Carter E. Foster
Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at Blanton Museum of Art

Carter E. Foster is the Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. He has held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Jeanne Klein
Collector, Board Member at the Blanton Museum of Art

Jeanne and Michael Klein are among the nation’s foremost supporters and collectors of contemporary art. Jeanne is Founding Chair Emeritus of Artpace in San Antonio and is on the Board of Directors for United States Artists, SITE Santa Fe, and Radius Books. She is on the Advisory Council of the College of Education at UT, the Advisory Board of the Harry Ransom Center, the Development Board of The University of Texas at Austin, and the Blanton Museum of Art National Leadership Board. She was a founder of the Menil Contemporaries of Houston.

David Chickey
Publisher, Radius Books

David Chickey is Publisher, Designer, and Editorial Director for Radius Books, a non-profit publishing company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 2007, Radius Books’ mission is to encourage, promote, and publish books of artistic and cultural value. He is the former board chair of the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, and a graduate of Sussex University, England, and UNC, Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Fine art book store owner, Michael Delgado interviews the most interesting artists, musicians, performers, poets, writers and other malcontents prowling the Los Angeles cultural landscape. In this episode he speaks with Debi Cornwall about her recent release Necessary Fictions, as well as her practice and upcoming projects.

Produced in cooperation with the Mayfair Hotel and music and artist management company Regime 72, "A.G. Geiger Presents" comes to you weekly from the Library Bar of the historic Mayfair Hotel. 

Listen to the conversation HERE

Join J. Sybylla Smith in for an unscripted conversation with Kyle Meyer about his new release, Interwoven.

Episode Summary:

Kyle Meyer’s process-driven art practice is a multimedia exploration of the tactile potential of the photograph with an end goal of creating meaning and conveying presence in a blend of handmade craft and technology. 

Episode Notes:

The result of a post college grant landed Meyer in Swaziland, now Eswatini, as a journalist  exploring the reality of a country with the world’s largest HIV population. He began with a job in a candle factory, spending two years without access to the internet. Led by curiosity and his ability to create community Meyer developed the framework to honor and amplify the visibility of the African gay man. 

In this book group, Meyer discusses, among other things:

• blending craft and technology 

• allowing process to drive concept develop

• the process of creating a book

• the African LGBTQ community 

• Millhook Residency 

• a glimpse into his next project

Watch the complete talk HERE.

Radius Books invites you to celebrate the U.S. launch of Debi Cornwall: Necessary Fictions. Cornwall will be in conversation with Yasufumi Nakamori, Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at the Tate Modern, and Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums, along with several special guests, in a talk moderated by David Chickey. Panelists will answer questions from the audience at the end of the event.

Order the book HERE.

Watch the complete recording here:

Debi Cornwall, Conceptual Documentary Artist and Filmmaker

Debi Cornwall returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Marrying dark humor and empathy with structural critique, she employs photographs along with archival material, testimony, sound, and video to examine American state-created realities in the post-9/11 era. Cornwall studied photography at RISD while completing a degree in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. After working for photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Sylvia Plachy, as an AP stringer, and as an investigator for the federal public defender’s office, she attended Harvard Law School and practiced for more than a decade as an attorney. Exhaustive research and negotiation were critical to her advocacy and remain integral to her work as an artist. Her first book, Welcome to Camp America (Radius Books, 2017) received numerous awards and honors.

Yasufumi Nakamori, Senior Curator of International Art (Photography), Tate Modern

Yasufumi Nakamori is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at the Tate Modern, London. Originally from Osaka, Nakamori initially studied law at the University of Wisconsin and practiced in New York City before undertaking a second career in art history following 9/11, going on to obtain his PhD in art history from Cornell University. Prior to joining Tate Modern, Nakamori was head of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. From 2008-2016 he was curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where his exhibitions included Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2010) and For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 (2015). His award-winning catalogue Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, traces the collaboration between photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Pritzker prize-winning architect Kenzo Tange.

Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums

Makeda Best is the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. Her previous exhibitions include: Time is Now – Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America (2018) and Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art (2019). Her upcoming exhibition is Devour the Land: War and AMerican Landscape Photography since 1970. She also teaches courses in the history of photography at the university. She has written for numerous catalogs and journals, most recently for the National Gallery of Poland, the Kunsthalle Mannheim, The Archives of American Art Journal, The James Baldwin Review and the Rhode Island School of the Design’s Manual. Her forthcoming book is Elevate the Masses – Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in Nineteenth Century America (2020). She is co-editor of Conflict, Identity and Protest in American Art (2016). Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds an MFA in studio photography from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD from Harvard University.

David Chickey, Publisher, Radius Books

David Chickey is Publisher, Designer, and Editorial Director for Radius Books, a non-profit publishing company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Founded in 2007, Radius Books’ mission is to encourage, promote, and publish books of artistic and cultural value. Radius titles have received national recognition, including multiple awards from AIGA, American Association of Museums Publishing, and best book nominations from The New Yorker, TIME, PDN, Independent Publisher, and The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation. Chickey also owns a private design firm, with clients including Aperture, Abrams, Harvard University, The Lannan Foundation, SITE Santa Fe, and David Zwirner, among others. He is the former board chair of the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, and a graduate of Sussex University, England, and UNC, Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.

Radius Books invites you to join David Chickey, Publisher, and Gay Block, photographer, for a conversation about the new Radius release, RESCUERS: PORTRAITS OF MORAL COURAGE IN THE HOLOCAUST. The talk will be moderated by Laura Carpenter of The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe. Following the talk, panelists will answer questions from the audience.

Order the book here.

Watch the complete recording of the talk here:

Radius Books invites you to join David Chickey, Publisher, Veronica Roberts, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Blanton Museum of Art, and Jason Rulnick, Senior Specialist, Post-War and Contemporary Specialist at Artnet for a lively conversation about the new Radius release, SOL LEWITT: NOT TO BE SOLD FOR MORE THAN $100. Following the talk, panelists will answer questions from the audience. The event is FREE, but registration is required and donations are appreciated.

Order the book here.

Watch the complete recording here: