BERNSTEIN GALLERY
RETROSPECTIVE
15 Years of
Political Art
Over the past 15 years, the Bernstein Gallery has emerged as an important contributor to the mission of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Exhibitions of contemporary paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and videos provide important perspectives on urgent problems of the day, ranging from poverty to guns to gender to genocide. The shows help all viewers, and especially students, deepen their understanding of why we gather together at the Woodrow Wilson School to study and attempt to solve
The Bernstein Gallery presents art exhibitions to stimulate thinking about contemporary policy issues and to enable understanding of the world beyond the power of words. The gallery is unique in featuring political art within the teaching space of a prominent school of public and international affairs. Our six curated shows each year are complemented by receptions and often by panel discussions with experts from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, other Princeton University
such domestic and international problems.
departments and elsewhere across the country. As curators, we have
Situated at the central corridor of the teaching floor of the School, the gallery
about important issues and provokes viewers to engage in thoughtful
was created to memorialize the School’s first dean, Marver Bernstein, and his wife, Sheva. The mission of the Gallery is being fulfilled through the many compelling shows organized by Kate Somers, founding curator, and Mary Hamill, co-director, as well as through the public discussions that accompany many of the shows.
sought artists whose aesthetically compelling work raises awareness reflection. Note that in this catalog we have kept the artists’ biographies brief, as they were at the time of their exhibitions. We hope that, like the gallery itself, the catalog showcases how these artists’ talent and commitment have created an abundance of fine art that is meaningful for our specific community and beyond.
Those of us who have collaborated in developing the gallery are pleased to present this catalog that briefly describes each of the exhibitions to date.
Katherine A. Somers, M.A. Founding Director, Bernstein Gallery, 2001 to Present
Stanley N. Katz Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University Chair, Bernstein Gallery Exhibition Committee Director, Princeton University Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies President Emeritus, American Council of Learned Societies
Mary Oestereicher Hamill, Ph.D. Co-Director, Bernstein Gallery, 2015 to Present
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11 Group Show SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 2002 On the occasion of the one-year anniversary of September 11, the Bernstein Gallery is featuring the work of 12 regional artists whose art reflects their emotional, spiritual and political reactions to the tragedy and its aftermath. Exhibiting artists are Robert Beck, Eleanor Burnette, Thom CooneyCrawford, Alan S. Goldstein, Margaret Kennard Johnson, Amy Kosh, Ken McIndoe, Margaret Rosen, Barbara Osterman, Ludvic Saleh, Sheba Sharrow, and Madelaine Shellaby.
Madelaine Shellaby, “Sending Them Stones,” pigmented ink jet print, 2002, 17 x 11”
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AFRICA’S LUNATICS Vincent Fougere JANUARY TO MARCH, 2003 The French photographer Vincent Fougere traveled across West Africa over a period of eight years photographing the seriously mentally ill. His portraits are from numerous societies in West Africa that are struggling in the transition from undeveloped and communal to industrial and urban. All lack the clinical, fiscal or social resources to care properly for their disabled citizens, often leaving them alone to fend for themselves. Fougere’s haunting images depict a range of places on the trajectory of treatment for mental illness. For centuries, communal villages tended to “take care of their own” with limited medical understanding but considerable compassion. Now, even with the pharmacological advances and greater civil rights for people with disabilities prevalent in many industrialized countries, the homeless schizophrenic seems commonplace. Vincent Fougere’s body of work, “Africa’s Lunatics” has established him as one of the best photographers of his time. This work was presented at the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France, in 2001. He became the youngest winner of the Golden Eye Award, the most prestigious French media award.
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RICANSTRUCTIONS: A SELECTION OF WORKS Juan Sánchez MARCH TO APRIL, 2003 “Ricanstructions” is a series of vibrant, mixed media paintings whose subject matter reflects the artist’s deep commitment to political activism, not only on behalf of Puerto Ricans, but for all people who have experienced racial discrimination, poverty and displacement. The surface of these paintings include a multitude of imagery from Caribbean Taíno petroglyphs, poems and text, Puerto Rican political icons and symbols, Spanish Catholicism, as well as images of contemporary American culture. The paintings’ loaded imagery, as well as the formal and compositional techniques the artist employs, suggests the complexity of the Puerto Rican people themselves. The artist states, “My art is the direct result of my experience and observation as a person of Puerto Rican descent, an artist and an activist. These visual expressions are created with the hope that they will influence the kinds of discourse that will inspire and promote an activism that will achieve change.” Juan Sánchez has received many prestigious awards including the John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His work is in the permanent collections of New York’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art.
Gallery installation
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CRISIS MINISTRY: CAN WE END POVERTY AS WE KNOW IT? Nancy Hodges and Chrissie Knight FEBRUARY TO MAY 2004 Photographs by Princeton community photographers Nancy Hodges and Chrissie Knight feature clients of The Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton, a nonprofit social service organization founded by two local churches in 1980. The images capture the everyday lives of low-income families and senior citizens as they struggle to make ends meet. The pictures also capture this faith-based organization’s efforts to assist with life’s most basic needs for food and shelter. Viewers of the photographs are invited to consider the local people living in poverty and are offered a glimpse of their strengths, their challenges and their relationship to The Crisis Ministry. Panel: “Pictures, Programs and Policies” Panelists include: Anu Rangarajan, associate director of research at Mathematica Policy Research; Zuline Wilkinson, executive director, Union Industrial Home for Children, Trenton, New Jersey; Sara S. McLanahan, professor of sociology and public affairs and director, Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing; Christina H. Paxson, professor of economics and public affairs and director, Center for Health and Wellbeing; W. Wilson Goode Sr., Public/Private Ventures, Working Group on Human Needs and Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and former mayor of Philadelphia. Nancy Hodges is the founder and director of “Focus In,” a photography program for inner city children. Chrissy Knight joined the organization as a teacher and Board of Director member. While volunteering for The Crisis Ministry, Hodges and Knight were asked to do a photography project depicting the work of this organization. This exhibit is the result of their efforts to portray the community in Trenton, New Jersey, which The Crisis Ministry serves.
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20TH CENTURY LEGACY Farhana Khan-Matthies SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2004 Khan-Matthies’ work depicts symbolic representations of human rights violations, as well as the obstacles to resolving those violations. Each hand-colored poster is in the shape of a large postage stamp. Because the postage stamp is universally used as a means to communicate messages around the world, the artist has used this format as a vehicle to ask questions that she believes all societies must attempt to answer about the health and well-being of all people. Khan-Matthies was born in what today is Bangladesh. Her father represented Pakistan in various countries, which meant extensive travels for her from the age of two. Very early in life she realized that she would become a painter. While still in school she had extra painting classes and took part in group exhibitions. On finishing school in Rome, she joined the Arts Council of Pakistan Karachi and had her first solo show at the age of 19 at the Pakistan American Cultural Center in Karachi. The following year, in 1970, she became a student at the Croydon School of Art in London under the guidance of the Brazilian artist Mauro Kunst. Khan-Matthies’ interest in the subject of human rights has been encouraged by the fact that she was born into one of the poorest countries of the world and then had the privilege to spend a great portion of her life in some of the richest countries. Khan-Matthies’ work has been exhibited in various countries, particularly in the United States, Germany and Central and South America.
“Big Brother’s Here,” ink and color pencil on paper, 133 x 102 centimeters
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SEASONS OF LIFE AND LAND Subhankar Banerjee OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER 2004 The exhibition presents epic photographs taken by Subhankar Banerjee of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences. Subhankar Banerjee’s two-year photographic journey in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge encompassed 4,000 miles by foot, raft, kayak and snowmobile. When not exploring the vast wilderness with his friend and Iñupiat guide, Robert Thompson, Banerjee lived with native Gwich’in Athabascan and Iñupiat families, where he came to understand their ways of life and their relationship to the land and its wild animals. His experience through all four seasons resulted in a deep love for this landscape pulsing with life, even during winter’s raging blizzards with occasional windchill factors of –100 degrees Fahrenheit. Subhankar Banerjee’s photographic career stems from his childhood passion for painting, coupled with a deep love and concern for the wilderness and for disappearing indigenous cultures. Born in 1967 in Baharampur (formerly Berhampore), India, Banerjee received a bachelor’s degree in engineering before moving to the United States and earning master’s degrees in physics and computer science. Solo exhibits of Banerjee’s photographs have been displayed in museums in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Banerjee’s images have appeared in GEO, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Discover, Outside, Audubon, National Wildlife, Natural History, Sierra, El Semanal, Corriere della Sera, Airone and Outlook India. His first professional photographic project culminated in a book, “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land.” Banerjee is the first recipient of the Fellowship for Cultural Freedom from Lannan Foundation, and has received national achievement awards from the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. This exhibition is provided courtesy of the Open Society Foundations.
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“Caribou Migration 1” from the series “Oil and the Caribou” (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), 2002
THE WILL TO LIVE Torben Eskerod and João Biehl NOVEMBER 2004 TO FEBRUARY 2005 Professor João Biehl, of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton, and the Danish photographer Torben Eskerod did field work in 1995, 1997 and 2001 in CAASAH, a community-run hospital and hospice for AIDS patients in the city of Salvador in northeastern Brazil. This exhibition includes a series of portraits and life histories from the patients at CAASAH. Torben Eskerod lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a Master of Science degree in engineering from Aalborg University and has also studied architecture and photography. He published two books: “Ansigter” (“Faces”), which won the Danish Ministry of Culture Prize for Best Photographic Book, and “Register.” Eskerod’s photographic works are in such major collections as Denmark’s Royal Library and Museum of National History; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan; the Accademia di Danimarca, Rome; the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, Florida; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has been awarded numerous international prizes and fellowships and is represented by the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City. João Biehl is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he holds the Harold Willis Dodds Presidential University Preceptorship. He earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley and a PhD in religion from the Graduate Theological Union. He is the author of “Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment” (with photographs by Torben Eskerod). He is working on a book examining the politics and ethics of the control of the AIDS epidemic in Brazil. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the MacArthur Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Lecture: “Global Equity and the Future of Public Health” In conjunction with this exhibition, medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer is giving a lecture on “Global Equity and the Future of Public Health.” His focus is on the challenges and possibilities for delivery of quality health care in resource-poor areas, particularly in the context of AIDS.
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WORKS ON PAPER Selma Bortner FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2005 Selma Bortner’s works on paper at the Bernstein Gallery focus on the subject of women. The art is about the complex relationship women have with their own bodies. Bortner explores illness, aging and the potential constraints and abuse of a woman’s body. Her vision often seems hallucinatory, a dreamscape of universal themes is approached with a palpable personal touch, and the works resonate with vulnerability. Bortner, a native of Cleveland, studied at the Tyler School of Art and the Philadelphia College of Art. She has been awarded several prizes for her work including the Pennell Memorial Medal in 1970 and 1971, and first prize from the American Color Print Society in 1995. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and James A. Michener Art Museum.
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Selma Bortner, “The Red Boat,” 2002, collagraph and linoleum, 49 x 37 inches
UNINSURED AMERICANS Ed Kashi and Julie Winokur SPRING 2005 Living without health insurance can be devastating, putting both physical and financial well-being at risk. These photographs by Ed Kashi tell the stories of just four of the 45 million Americans who are uninsured. They were first exhibited in communities across the country during Cover the Uninsured Week, 2003. This set of photographs, together with the text by Julie Winokur, is being presented now in preparation for Cover the Uninsured Week, 2005. The exhibition has been provided to the Bernstein Gallery courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ed Kashi is a regular contributor to National Geographic magazine and his photo-essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, GEO, LIFE, Smithsonian, and U.S. News & World Report, among others. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship in 1991 and has won awards from such institutions as Pictures of the Year, Sunday Magazine Awards, World Press Foundation and the World Affairs Council. Julie Winokur’s stories have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Natural History, Travel & Leisure and the Sunday magazines of the Seattle Times and the San Jose Mercury News, among others. She was also managing editor of “Inside the L.A. Riots,” a book that examines the roots of racial conflict in Los Angeles.
Ed Kashi, “A woman panhandles for spare change along a highway,” 2003
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CIVILIZING WAR APRIL TO MAY 2005 Within the context of the Geneva Convention, this show explores issues relevant to our times, especially terrorism, genocide and international law. Photos include an image by Ansel Adams from the Manzanar Internment Camp in 1949, up through a 2004 wire photo of the Abu Ghraib prison. Panel: “Civilizing War” Panelists include: Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter; Gary Bass, Princeton Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor; Roy Gutman, Washington-based correspondent for Newsday and Jennings Randolph senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace; and Ron Haviv, photojournalist and contract photographer for Newsweek magazine.
Ron Haviv, “Arkan’s Tigers with just shot Bosnian Muslim civilians as they lay dying during the first battle for Bosnia in Bijeljina, Bosnia, March 31, 1992.”
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A PERFECT WORLD Words and Paintings by Over 50 of America’s Most Powerful People MAY TO AUGUST 2005 “A Perfect World” is the name of a traveling exhibition produced by Debra Trione, as well as the book based on it. Beginning in 1997, Trione asked more than 50 influential leaders in America three things: to name the two things you hope will be true about the world in 50 years; to write about an environment in which you personally thrive; and to paint a picture of your ideal world. Among the respondents are three Princeton affiliates: Paul Krugman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Norman Augustine. Debra Trione began work on “A Perfect World” after serving on the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. During the 1980s, she worked at Harvard University Press and as an editor at Harvard Medical School.
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VALENTIN C’EST MOI Thibaud Thiercelin AUGUST TO SEPTEMBER 2005 Since coming to the United States in 2003, the French painter Thibaud Thiercelin has produced a body of work whose subject matter is both personal and universal: the birth of his first child. Unlike the focus of his two earlier series of paintings about his experience of travel in India in 1999 (“Suites Indiennes”), and his expression of the event of September 11, 2001 (“11 Septembre et Autres Jours”), this series is primarily an intimate family portrait. At the same time, the work taps into our collective memory and goes far beyond one artist’s experience of the world. The paintings on view move between figuration and abstraction, narration and non sequiturs. The series began before Thiercelin’s son, Valentin, was diagnosed with autism at three years of age. As Thiercelin painted his way through his understanding of his son’s disability, passages of both ecstasy and despair were expressed in the art, occasionally sharing the same canvas. As a self-taught artist, Thiercelin makes work that is spontaneous, unpremeditated and immediate. Like outsider art, the work has a childlike, naïve quality, as if the expression were unfiltered. Thiercelin has exhibited broadly in Europe and the United States, including participation in the 14th Grand Prix de Peinture de la Ville de Saint-Grégoire (Saint-Grégoire, France), the Salon de Mai (Paris), Les Visages de Notre Humanité at Grand Halle de la Villette (Paris), Galerie Allaire-Aigret (Paris), Salon de Montrouge (France), The Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie (New Jersey) and the WPA Gallery in Princeton, New Jersey. He will be returning to France with his family after being an artist-in-residence at the Arts Council of Princeton. This show is supported by the Eden Family of Services, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide lifespan services for children and adults with autism, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy of the United States in New York and the French Consulates of Princeton and Philadelphia.
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“Dans le bleu du ciel,” 2005, oil on canvas, 66 x 66 inches
THE MIGRANT PROJECT Rick Nahmias SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2005 More than half a million farm workers pick California’s fruits and vegetables, providing most of the produce consumed in the United States. Yet these workers are among the state’s poorest people, with the highest percentages of uninsured and the lowest literacy rates. “The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers” is an in-depth photojournalistic portrait detailing the daily lives and struggles of the state’s migrant workers. It was shot during the 2002-03 harvest in more than 40 towns across the state by Rick Nahmias. As a photographer, writer and filmmaker, Rick Nahmias has been deeply involved both in creative endeavors and in a wide array of public policy and community service work. This exhibit marks his first step towards merging the two. Earlier he explored the world of the migrant farm worker while writing “Good Night and Good Luck,” a screenplay based on the life of Edward R. Murrow, whose 1960 farm worker documentary “Harvest of Shame” was a seminal piece of broadcast journalism. The photography and writing of Nahmias have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Bon Appétit and Written By magazine, among other places, and his photography has been included in numerous group shows. His photo essays on Central Europe, children of Asia, deserts of the Southwest and Carnival of Venice are in several private and public collections throughout the United States. In 2000, he wrote, directed and co-produced the 35 mm narrative short “A Fate Foretold,” an official selection in many international film festivals. He holds a double major in film and religious studies from New York University and lives in Los Angeles. Panel: “Migrant Workers — Global Citizens in a Local Economy”
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Panelists include: Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Marta Tienda, Maurice P. During ‘22 Professor of Demographic Studies and Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Nelson Carrasquillo, executive director, El Comité de Apoya a los Trabajadores Agrícolas; Rick Nahmias, writer and photographer; Keith Talbot, director, Legal Services of the New Jersey Farmworker Project. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Tomato Pickers,” Stockton, California, 2002, silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 inches
HOW WE LOOK Mark Kessell and Ariel Ruiz i Altaba OCTOBER TO DECEMBER 2005 “How We Look” is a two-person exhibition in which Mark Kessell and Ariel Ruiz i Altaba use the medium of photography to explore issues of human identity. These are unusually beautiful images, exquisitely crafted to bring visual pleasure. Moreover, their multiple levels of meaning challenge viewers to ask questions about how we develop as individuals and as a species, inviting entry into realms of ambiguity and mystery. Mark Kessell, born in Australia, was trained as a physician and is currently a New York City-based artist. These photographs are from a series on children, titled “To Be Determined.” Alone in contemplation or playing with their friends, many of these children are blind. Kessell is interested in how these children, who have none of the visual cues of sighted children, seem to develop a strong sense of identity at the same rate as their sighted peers. The artist says, “These children cannot look at themselves in the mirror, cannot see the faces of their parents, siblings or peers, and are unable to compare their own appearance with others. […] Despite the profound differences in their experiences, blind children commonly develop into adults who have as much ‘sense of self’ as other people. How do they do it? […] Does this have something more general to say about the way we look at and become … ourselves?” The images themselves are mesmerizing and suggest an interiority that seems to stop time. Ariel Ruiz i Altaba is an artist and molecular embryologist at the Medical School at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In his photographic portraits, we find ourselves under the human skin. Layers of scientific identifiers, including DNA sequencing ladders, fingerprints and molecular components are embedded in the faces or on full body skeletal figures. As a developmental neuroscientist, he explores the subject of identity with a strong interest in how individuals look at the world around them, and how what they see is largely determined by how they look: do we look “openly” or with a blind eye? In describing this series of works, the artist says, “‘Genome and Identity’ presents an exploration of how we see ourselves and others, and how science molds our very essence. Through new ways of seeing we can try to free ourselves from stereotypes, enriching our communal experience.”
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Both artists have exhibited widely in this country and abroad, and have their work in major museum collections. Major collections, which either own or have exhibited Kessell’s work, include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The New York Academy of Sciences. Ruiz i Altaba’s work is in the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Mark Kessell, “The Strangeness of Gravity,” 2003. Ed. 7/20 From the series “To Be Determined”
ALARM ME Francis Heinrich DECEMBER 2005 TO FEBRUARY 2006 The ideas in “Alarm Me” focus on the insecurities of today’s world. The artist questions the role of the media and technology, particularly in how we respond emotionally to daily events. The artist writes, “In sensitive observation of life’s shifting uncertainties, I am fascinated by the efforts of technology to better our existence. While incessant growth and change continue combining with technology to reinvent the details of life, these ‘improvements’ seem only to exacerbate essential human frailty. Within an ever shifting practical frame, human nature’s dark side remains constant and centuries old, and the negative effects of worldwide political machination on daily life have never seemed more unnerving and palpable.” Heinrich holds a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in studio art from Rutgers University and a master’s degree with high honors in art history from Columbia University. While at Rutgers University, Heinrich studied with Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Watts, Geoffrey Hendricks and George Segal. Selected exhibitions have been at the Newark Museum, Noyes Museum of Art, Monmouth Museum, Grounds for Sculpture, the Borowsky Gallery (Philadelphia), Hebrew Union College Museum (New York City) and New Century Artists, Inc. (New York City). Heinrich maintains an active studio in Princeton, New Jersey, and teaches several uniquely designed art and art history classes.
“ORANGE ALERT/THE FALSE MIRROR” (detail), 2005 phototransfer and resin on working TV screens, installation, size variable
Panel: “Alarm Me” Panelists include: Susan T. Fiske, professor of psychology, Princeton University; Donna M. Lieu, executive director, University Channel. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“ORANGE ALERT/THE FALSE MIRROR” (detail), 2005 phototransfer and resin on working TV screens, installation, size variable
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THE FUTURE OF CHILDREN: CHILDHOOD OBESITY Joan Liftin and Craig Terry FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2006 Photographers Joan Liftin and Craig Terry were asked to capture the different environments that contribute to childhood obesity based on the occasion of the publication of The Future of Children journal, Childhood Obesity, to be released on March 14, 2006. The exhibit tracks trends in adult and childhood obesity rates in the United States over time, and matches those trends to factors in our society that are likely contributors to childhood obesity, such as: the changed food environment that encourages overconsumption of calorie-dense foods and sugary beverages; the changed physical environment at school where physical education and recess time have been reduced, and at home where increased TV and computer use, as well as safety concerns, reduce outdoor play time; the influence of parental behaviors; and media campaigns with tie-ins to characters familiar to children. The exhibit also explores the likely health and economic consequences of the childhood obesity “epidemic” and highlights some promising programs and possible pathways through which policy makers and others can address the issue. Joan Liftin, a freelance photographer and photo editor, began her career in 1971 as UNICEF’s chief photographer and photo editor. She has gone on to become the director of documentary photography and photojournalism at the International Center of Photography in New York City. Liftin’s work has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums, and published in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Creative Photography and Der Spiegel International, among others. Craig Terry has worked as a staff and freelance photojournalist since 1971. His work has appeared in numerous national and international publications, including Mid-Atlantic Country, Preservation Magazine, The Vacationer, New Jersey Monthly Magazine, Atlantic City Weekly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Reader’s Digest and American Illustrated. Panels: “Diet in Decline: Can America’s Overnutrition Crisis Be Reversed?” and “Childhood Wellness and Obesity — Tools to Help Schools Take Action”
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Panelists and keynote speakers include: Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders and author of “Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It”; Roger Platt, director of School Health for New York City; James S. Marks, senior vice president of the Health Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Craig Terry, “Trix”
IN THE NATION’S SERVICE Seventy-Five Years at the Woodrow Wilson School MAY TO AUGUST 2006 This exhibition celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Woodrow Wilson School. It consists of photographic and textual highlights taken from the commemorative book published on the occasion, “In the Nation’s Service: Seventy-Five Years at the Woodrow Wilson School,” by Barton Gellman and Beth English.
Installation view
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A FRAGILE UTOPIA: STUDIOS AND SPACES OF 111 FIRST STREET Edward Fausty SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2006 The story of 111 First Street, an old factory building in Jersey City, New Jersey, is of the tension between 200 artists and a billionaire landlord. When it became clear that the artists might be forced to leave their homes and studio space, one of these artists, Edward Fausty, felt compelled to photograph the studios and public space in the building, in order to record the “fragile utopia” that had been his home and community. It is a classic story between speculative absentee landlord/developers and the local citizens impacted by their projects. “A Fragile Utopia: Studios and Spaces of 111 First Street” is more than a record of the demise of a special building and community. Each picture is like a visual equivalent of a William Trevor short story set in New Jersey. Whether Fausty focuses his lens on objects in a storage cabinet, or a ripped poster on a bathroom wall, or the gaping hole in the ground where a building once stood, there is a palpable sense of nostalgia, mixed with the gothic and comic. The scenes are depicted with pitch-perfect sparseness. However, unlike in a Trevor story, there are usually no people in Fausty’s photographic narrative. But their presence is felt nonetheless. The mood is one of compassion for eccentric individuals who have domesticated an inhospitable environment. After completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Fausty earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art. There he became interested in ink on paper, influenced by Richard Benson. Fausty then explored collotype and over the next 12 years perfected this technique, eventually buying his own press. The images in this exhibition are made on medium format color film and then scanned and printed on Arches rag paper using wide format digital inkjet technology.
“Dog Sleeping,” 2004, Eric Lowenstein/Sandra Malak Studio, digital print on Arches rag paper
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UNACCEPTABLE LOSSES Arthur Robinson Williams DECEMBER 2006 TO JANUARY 2007 “Unacceptable Losses” is a photo-documentary exhibition examining current US drug policies. It presents the stories of everyday Americans who have been impacted by drugs and addiction. From July 2004 through July 2005, Arthur Robinson Williams toured the country visiting treatment facilities, outreach programs and homeless shelters as an advocate. He argues for a public health approach rather than a law enforcement emphasis to address substance abuse. “Unacceptable Losses” specifically focuses on issues surrounding access to treatment, sentencing, syringe access, harm reduction and medical marijuana. The exhibition consists of large format color and black and white silver gelatin print portraiture. The portraits are accompanied by text panels of lengthy excerpts from interviews with project participants.
“Freddy,” 2005, C-print, 20 x 24 inches
Arthur Robinson Williams has a Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. While at Princeton, he studied photography with Emmet Gowin, Lois Conner and Mary Berridge. He completed photography projects involving HIV/AIDS and the people of Ghana, the Cuban health system, homosexuality in the Netherlands, anthroposophical farming communes and injection drug use in New Jersey. A Jack Kent Cooke graduate scholar and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow, he is currently at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania working on public health initiatives and taking photographs.
“Elaine,” 2005, C-print, 20 x 24 inches
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“Paula,” 2005, C-print, 20 x 24 inches
LONG-TERM CARE FOR THE DEPENDENT ELDERLY: LESSONS FROM MEXICO, THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN Cathy Stein Greenblat JANUARY TO MARCH 2007 This documentary examination of institutional care for the dependent elderly consists of 50 photographs taken in facilities in three different countries: Silverado Senior Living, an assisted living community in Escondido, California; an “asilo,” or old age home, in Oaxaca, Mexico; and several group homes in Kyoto, Japan. The images show the variation in resources, commitment and understanding of the particular needs of the dependent elderly. The photographs illustrate across cultural differences the great power in touch, music and the maintenance of dignity. Around the world, as a result of medical advances and nutritional improvements, longevity is increasing. As the number of aged is increasing, it is estimated that more than 18 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease; this number is expected to double by 2025. Greenblat’s photographs show us that these individuals are fully alive, even if they have lost some of their cognitive abilities. These tender photographs remind us of the need for policy to enable elderly people everywhere to live with dignity and grace. Cathy Stein Greenblat, born in New York, is a sociologist with a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a doctoral degree from Columbia University. She is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Rutgers University. Greenblat was a visiting professor in Princeton University’s graduate sociology department in 1985 to 1986, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School in 1987 to 1988. She is the author of 13 books and more than 100 journal articles. Her photographic work evolved from her research, her travels and her desire to illustrate some of her sociological writing. Long a teacher of an advanced seminar at Rutgers in visual sociology, she retired early from the university at the end of 2002 to pursue her photographic projects. This resulted in the publication of “Alive with Alzheimer’s,” the first book of photography to focus solely on one form of dementia. Photographs from the book have been in traveling exhibits throughout Europe, the United States and Japan.
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“Mrs. Morimoto Sings”
AFTER UTOPIA Elidor Mëhilli MARCH TO APRIL 2007 This exhibition presents a collection of visual investigations of the legacy of socialist cities. It includes a large, wall-size photo collage on the urban transformation of post-socialist Tirana, Albania. The media included are collages of various materials from street posters, newspapers and photographs. These relate to the actual layers of the materials of post-socialist urban development. Smaller pieces in the show are investigations of particular urban moments: prefabricated housing, crumbling concrete and urban decay. These derive from the urban landscapes of Sarajevo, Bosnia; Budapest, Hungary; Prague and Berlin. Born in Fier, Albania, Elidor Mëhilli received undergraduate degrees in the history of architecture and urbanism and modern European studies from Cornell University. He has also studied and lived for short periods of time in Budapest, Hungary; Berlin and London. In 2004, he had the opportunity to join the initial efforts of setting up the offices of the War Crimes Chamber in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previous installations have been exhibited at Brown University (2005) and Cornell University (2005), including some of the works shown here. He is currently a doctoral student in the department of history at Princeton University, where he focuses on modern European history. Panel: “After Utopia: The Landscape of Socialist Cities” Panelists include: Christine Boyer, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture and director of the program in urban studies, Princeton University; Hal Foster, the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology, chair of the department of art and archaeology and director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, Princeton University; Stephen Kotkin, professor of history and director of the program in Russian and Eurasian studies, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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TURNING ON NATURE Susan Hockaday MAY TO SEPTEMBER 2007 Susan Hockaday’s work focuses on the patterns and structures of the natural world. Recently, her work has delved into issues of human encroachment on our fragile natural world: the destruction of open space, the degradation of waterways and the flow of chemical pollutants across the landscape. Her photographs of nature are augmented with overlays of ink and other media to introduce the notions of invasion and destruction. She took most of the photographs in Nova Scotia with a handheld 35 mm camera, often making two exposures on each negative frame. After graduating from Vassar College, Hockaday studied at Yale University, Pratt Graphics Center in New York City, Princeton University, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She also worked and exhibited at the Amsterdam Graphics Atelier. She was awarded the W. K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College and two fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Hockaday has had more than 20 solo exhibits in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. She is currently affiliated with SOHO20 Gallery in New York City, and her work is in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.
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“Turning on Nature,” 2007, photograph with ink, 20 x 24 inches
PHILANI: IMPROVING HEALTH IN POOR COUNTRIES Joan Needham and Kate Somers SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2007 This photography exhibition tells the story of one health care model in South Africa. The Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Project is a community-based health and nutrition nongovernmental organization operating in the overcrowded and unsanitary settlements outside Cape Town, where 750,000 people live in makeshift dwellings without water or basic services. They have widespread unemployment, concentrated poverty, high rates of HIV/AIDS, extensive malnutrition and poor health. Since 1979, under Founder/Director Dr. Ingrid le Roux, Philani has been assisting thousands of mothers, pregnant women and children through a network of community outreach workers and nutrition centers and an income-generating art and craft program. Joan D. Needham’s career as an arts educator spans more than 36 years and includes Artworks in Trenton, The Princeton Art Association, The Trenton After School Program, and 36 years as a professor of art at Mercer County Community College. Needham is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship and is part of the New Jersey Public Arts Program. The artist has exhibited her paintings, works on paper and sculpture locally and internationally throughout the United States, Japan, China, Spain, England, Beijing and France. Her public art includes a lobby installation at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex in Trenton, New Jersey. Needham earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. Katherine A. Somers has been an independent consultant in the fine arts since 1995. She is currently curator for the Bernstein Gallery at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and has been a consultant to the Princeton University Art Museum in Campus Arts and to the Borough of Princeton on public art. She earned a master’s and bachelor’s degree, respectively, in art history from Rutgers University and George Washington University. Panel: “Improving Health in Poor Countries: What Works?”
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Panelists include: Dr. Ingrid le Roux, director, Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Project, South Africa; Professor Christina Paxson, director, Center for Health and Wellbeing, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Angus Deaton, professor of economics and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Moderator: Anne C. Case, professor of economics and public affairs and director, Research Program in Development Studies, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Khayelitsha, South Africa, 2007”
THE FACES OF CHECHNYA: THE HUMAN STORIES WARS CRAFT Adam Borowski OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER 2007 Begun in 1994 and then again in 1999, two full-scale wars, along with continuous violent conflict in Chechnya, wreaked devastation on its land and on its people. Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, was razed to the ground. Rural areas and small villages met with similar ruin from blanket bombings and indiscriminate artillery attacks. Nearly one-fifth of Chechnya’s population disappeared — killed or otherwise cast out from a terrain shorn of buildings, trees and the most basic elements of civilization. Today, as refugee camps are closed down and tens of thousands of displaced persons make their way across the ruined Chechen landscape to Grozny, the first steps toward reconstruction are visible. Yet crimes targeting both Chechens and Russians not only endure, but are of bewildering cruelty. The absence of an operative political infrastructure keeps the region in a volatile and violent limbo, while misappropriated funds, war profiteering and insufficient resources diminish the potential for progress. Excerpted from text by guest curator Olivia Andrzejczak, October, 2007. Panel: “Forgotten, not Frozen: A Roundtable on Violent Conflict in Chechnya and the North Caucasus” Panelists include: Valeriy Dzutsev, Muskie Fellow, University of Maryland; Jason M.K. Lyall, assistant professor of politics and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School; Michael Reynolds, assistant professor of Near Eastern studies, Princeton University; Fatima Tilsova, fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School; Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. This event was co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination and the Program of Near Eastern Studies.
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BURMESE DAYS Mary Cross DECEMBER 2007 TO JANUARY 2008 “Burmese Days” is an exhibition of photographs Mary Cross made in Myanmar (formerly Burma) in the fall of 2004. As with all of her photography from different parts of the world, “Burmese Days” shows the photographer’s ability to capture both the timeless icons and the daily ephemera of life in another culture. Current events in Myanmar have made clear to the world that this once peaceful Buddhist country is at the mercy of a murderous government. These pictures do not show signs of its abusive military and that makes them all the more disturbingly beautiful. Mary Cross is the author of “Behind the Great Wall: A Photographic Essay on China”; “Morocco: Sahara to the Sea”; and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth. She had numerous solo exhibitions in this country including at Harvard University, University of California-Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. As a young woman, Cross studied philosophy and literature at the University of Paris and later studied photography under the late Philippe Halsman.
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LOOKING AT THE SEQUENTIAL DIALECTIC Michael LaRiccia FEBRUARY TO APRIL 2008 With this exhibition Michael LaRiccia, a printmaker, presents pages of his acclaimed graphic novel “Black Mane.” Both humorous and somber, the narrative work focuses on racial and gender politics as they affect individual identity. While critically examining the theme of masculinity, the novel follows three characters that find themselves trapped in situations from which they desperately want to escape. Original comic book pages are exhibited, as well as large, in-process pages showcasing digital enhancements and lettering.
Michael LaRiccia, an Italian-American native of Massachusetts, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Massachusetts in 2001, and a Master of Fine Arts degree at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2005. His concentration for both degrees was printmaking. In December 2004, he was awarded the prestigious Xeric grant, the only comic book self-publishing grant in America, to print his first book “Black Mane.” He works for the Arts Council of Princeton as the program and public relations manager.
Comic book page from “The Death of Black Mane and the Feared Self”
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ART OF THE TIMES (TIMES FOUR) APRIL TO MAY 2008 The Bernstein Gallery is pleased to present “Art of the Times (times four),” a series of political works by four artists whose work has appeared in various publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker magazine. The Op-Ed drawings of Douglas Florian, Brad Holland, Frances Jetter and Mark Podwal begin during the Nixon era and Watergate, and continue right up through the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan. These Op-Ed artists illustrate domestic and international public policy issues under deadline. As Frances Jetter says, “There was a passion in the making of these images, with their political and social subject matter, and their connection to what was going on in the world: arms sales, genocide, abuses of free speech, the Supreme Court’s shift to the right. I thought that there was no better place for art than crudely printed, widely distributed newsprint.” Douglas Florian draws for The New York Times and for The New Yorker magazine and has written and illustrated several children’s books, including the national bestseller, “insectlopedia.” He is represented by Gallery Joe in Philadelphia. Brad Holland’s work has appeared in publications such as Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy and The New York Times. He is a Pulitzer Prize nominee, a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, co-founder of the Illustrators’ Partnership of America and was inducted into the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame. Frances Jetter’s prints have appeared over the last 30 years in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Progressive, The Village Voice, Time magazine, and The Nation. She shows across the world and has work in major museum collections. She is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. Mark Podwal, “Zarqawi’s Life After Death”
Mark Podwal draws for The New York Times Op-Ed page and is also the author and illustrator of numerous books including “Doctored Drawings.” A practicing physician, he has drawings in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fogg Museum and the Library of Congress.
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from The New York Times Op-Ed page, June 9, 2006
HUMAN EVIDENCE: THE IRAQ WAR Daniel Heyman and Michael Kamber SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2008 This exhibition on the Iraq War features the photographs of Michael Kamber and the works on paper of Daniel Heyman. On view are 17 color photographs, each 16 x 20 inches, taken when Kamber was on patrol for The New York Times with U.S. soldiers watching what he describes as a “slow-motion descent into what I can only call madness.” The drypoint prints by Heyman are from work the artist made about the abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. He sat in as a witness in Jordan and Turkey to make portraits of the victims as they were interviewed by their lawyers about torture. (Eight of the prints are a gift of William J. Salmon, a 1955 alumnus, to the Princeton University Art Museum). Daniel Heyman holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, and currently teaches at Swarthmore College and the Rhode Island School of Design. His portfolios are in the Library of Congress, Yale University Art Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art and the Free Library of Philadelphia, among others. Heyman’s work has been shown widely in Philadelphia and beyond, currently at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; DePaul University Museum of Art, Chicago; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY at New Paltz; the New York Public Library, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. His work was featured in “Male Desire: The Homoerotic in American Art” by Jonathan Weinberg. Michael Kamber, born in Maine in 1963, has been a photojournalist and journalist since 1986, when he began covering social unrest in New York City. He photographed extensively in the Caribbean, Mexico and the southwestern United States to complete a long-term project on immigration to New York, winning three national reporting awards. Since 2002, Kamber has worked primarily for The New York Times covering conflicts in Iraq, Liberia, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Somalia, Haiti, Israel, Nigeria, Chad and the Congo; he is now chief photographer for their Baghdad Bureau. He has also written numerous articles from Haiti, Iraq and West Africa. Kamber, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, is a former Revson Fellow at Columbia University and a member of The New York Times team that won the 2003 Overseas Press Club award. He was a finalist for the 2007 Visa d’Or, and the winner of American Photo’s Images of the Year in 2007. Panel: “Human Evidence: The Iraq War”
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Panelists include: Daniel Heyman, artist; Michael Kamber, photojournalist, Baghdad Bureau for The New York Times; Susan Burke, lead counsel, Abu Ghraib torture litigation, Burke O’Neil, LLC; Steve Simon, formerly the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and recently appointed as the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
Daniel Heyman, Blackwater Portfolio, 2008, One of a set of seven drypoints on Rives BFK paper Printed at C.R. Ettinger Studio, Philadelphia Ed. of 15
THE PROMISE: THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP — A LOOK AT THE ABBOTT DISTRICTS Randall Hagadorn OCTOBER TO DECEMBER 2008 “The Promise: The Achievement Gap — A Look at the Abbott Districts” is a collaboration with the Educational Testing Service on educational equality. Using the state of New Jersey as an example of both the progress and the challenges still to be faced in closing the achievement gap across the country, the show depicts a broad array of issues in educational equality. Among them, the topics include: regional disparities in early childhood, secondary and college education; public versus private schools; economic/racial and disability disparities; and the impact of recent court decisions (Abbott v. Burke). Randall Hagadorn has been a professional photographer for more than 40 years, working for TIME Magazine, Newsweek and The New York Times. His images have appeared in Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, American Heritage, Time Out New York and the original Life Magazine, as well as every major daily U.S. newspaper. For four years he was the principal publicity photographer for the Children’s Television Workshop (“Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company”), and for two years had his own segment on a national monthly CBS News broadcast, where he produced black and white photo essays that were seen by more than 17 million viewers each show. Panel: “The Promise of Abbott v. Burke” Panelists include: Thomas Corcoran, director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University; Nathan B. Scovronick, director of the undergraduate program and lecturer in educational policy, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Deborah Yaffe, journalist and author of “Other People’s Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools.” Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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Randall Hagadorn, “Special Needs Recess”
IMAGINED LANDSCAPES Ernestine Ruben DECEMBER 2008 TO FEBRUARY 2009 “Imagined Landscapes” is an exhibition of an expansive and inventive set of artwork about the Chinese landscape by photographer Ernestine Ruben. The artist traveled the countryside with a young university student who acted as her assistant and translator. Ruben’s focus was on the environmental degradation she saw, especially the impact of pollution, which became a rich source for visual inquiry. Ruben writes, “I decided I would intervene as an artist. Where there was pollution, I would inject clean air. Where there was decomposition, I would repair and further deconstruct.” Combining photography with painting, drawing and digital work, Ruben has composed mysterious, brooding landscapes of China’s countryside and rural villages. Ernestine Ruben is internationally known through extensive exhibitions, books and workshops. She has photographed the human body for years and now focuses her eye on landscapes and architecture. Her work is included in many major museums and private collections. Published work includes “In Human Touch: Photographs by Ernestine Ruben”; “Ruben on Rodin”; and “Ernestine Ruben: A Retrospective Exhibition of Photography.” She lives and works in Princeton, New Jersey, and New York City.
“Cleansing Beam,” 2006, archival pigmented print, 14 x 21 inches
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BOUGHT AND SOLD: FACES OF MODERN DAY SLAVERY Kay Chernush FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2009 “Bought and Sold: Faces of Modern Day Slavery� is an unflinching photographic essay on human trafficking. One of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world, the sale of human beings is the third most profitable criminal activity after drug and arms trafficking. And Chernush captures it as it unfolds both in the hidden shadows of the underworld and in broad daylight across several continents. Images include exploited women in brothels, bonded child laborers in textile and brick factories, enslaved children on fishing vessels, as well as images of parents in search of their stolen children from Europe, Africa and India. Other images depict abused women who have begun to rebuild their lives with the help of nongovernmental organizations, and victimized children attending special schools where they receive counseling and education. The exhibition is on loan from the World Bank. Kay Chernush is a leading U.S. photographer with 25 years of experience in commercial and fine art photography. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and recipient of a Fulbright grant to India, she started out as a writer but became hooked on photography while working for the Peace Corps in West Africa. Her work on human trafficking began with an assignment for the U.S. Department of State in 2005. She has photographed more than 50 feature stories for Smithsonian Magazine and shoots for many other major publications and corporations. Her photographs have been exhibited in New York City, Washington, D.C., Vienna and Amsterdam.
Nine-year old girl toils at a brick kiln, a virtual slave because of generations of family indebtedness. Uttar Pradesh, India.
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GUNS IN AMERICA Kyle Cassidy MARCH TO MAY 2009 Kyle Cassidy spent two years and 15,000 miles crisscrossing the United States meeting American gun owners, photographing them in their homes and asking them all one question: “Why do you own a gun?” This exhibition presents 37 photographs, each accompanied by a written statement in which the gun owner explains why he or she owns guns. They are a diverse group with a wide range of reasons for owning weapons. “Few things tell our stories as quickly and succinctly as our homes — our living spaces, our books, our movies, our pets and our teacup collections,” says the photographer. The United States has higher levels of gun violence than any country in the world, and Americans are deeply divided about how to understand this violence. The photographs and statements are from Cassidy’s best-selling book “Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes,” which was chosen as one of the 10 best art books of 2007 by the editors at Amazon. Kyle Cassidy has been documenting American culture for more than two decades; his work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times of London, Marie Claire and Photographer’s Forum. He has photographed goths, punks, politicians, metal heads, dominatrices and scholars. Recently his projects have extended abroad to explore homelessness in Romania and archaeology in Egypt. He has published several books on information technology and is a contributing editor for Videomaker Magazine. His photo-a-week blog was one of the first photo blogs on the internet.
“Jessica, Gregg and Ben with Bubba (Wisconsin)”
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NAMED FOR… Kate Javens MAY TO AUGUST 2009 In the work of Kate Javens, each painting of a bull or horse, a swallow or moth, represents an unsung hero from American history. The artist writes, “In researching American social history, I’m often surprised by the obscurity of the most altruistic figures. How could people who were so extreme in their humanity, and so influential in defining who we are at our best, be so obscure?” Inspired by these individuals, the artist has chosen animals to reflect their noble characters. For example, we can find Benjamin Drew, the Boston abolitionist, as a horse, or Lucy Parsons, a tireless advocate for the poor, represented by a sparrow. Often larger than life and executed on wood, linen and muslin, the paintings are imbued with nobility and exquisitely rendered with feathered brushstrokes. Kate Javens was born in Missouri and spent her childhood in Japan, Mexico and the bicoastal United States. She attended Pennsylvania State University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Javens is a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Painting Fellow, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts disciplinary winner in painting, and a MacDowell Fellow. Her works are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University, the Telfair Museum of Art and the Blanden Art Museum. She lives and works in New York City.
“Named for Lucy Parsons, No. 3,” 2008, oil on theater muslin, 66” x 106” Collection: Elizabeth Gilbert
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INTENDED CONSEQUENCES: RWANDAN CHILDREN BORN OF RAPE Jonathan Torgovnik SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER 2009 “Intended Consequences,” photographs by Jonathan Torgovnik, is an extraordinary series of portraits made in Rwanda. It shows both the women who were brutally raped during the genocide, and the children they bore from their assailants. Traveling to Rwanda over the course of three years, Torgovnik photographed and interviewed survivors. Through the exhibition of these striking images, accompanied with selected texts from the women’s interviews, Torgovnik provides an opportunity for their stories to be known. Torgovnik has created a social justice campaign with this work partnering with Amnesty International to give voice to the women, a matter that he feels is particularly pressing as history repeats itself in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Jonathan Torgovnik’s photographs have been widely exhibited and published in numerous international publications, including Newsweek, Aperture, GEO, Sunday Times Magazine, and Stern. A contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005, he is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography. Torgovnik won the National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from “Intended Consequences” and co-founded the nonprofit organization Foundation Rwanda. He is the author of “Bollywood Dreams,” an exploration of the motion picture industry and its culture in India. Aperture, the nonprofit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, has organized this traveling exhibition. It is presented with support from Amnesty International, the Open Society Foundation and Foundation Rwanda.
“Isabelle with her son, Jean-Paul”
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THE OTHER PAKISTAN DECEMBER 2009 TO JANUARY 2010 This is an exhibition of 34 photographs by 19 members of the Pakistan Photographers Group (PPG). “The Other Pakistan” is meant to provide rich images to supplement those of political turbulence that have recently saturated the international media. The photographs exhibited here help to tell the multilayered story of a complex country. The exhibition showcases images that reflect the texture, beauty and dignity of everyday life in Pakistan, some paying tribute to centuries-old traditions, others depicting unadorned ordinariness. Panel: “Pakistan: Dilemmas of a Troubled Democracy” Panelists include: Ambassador Robert Finn, senior research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan; Zia Mian, research scientist and director of the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson School’s Program on Science and Global Security; Paula Newberg, director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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AS THE WORLD TURNS THEN & NOW Rhonda Wall JANUARY TO APRIL 2010 This exhibition of 30 life-sized mixed media works presents Rhonda Wall’s comments on contemporary conflict in the Middle East. The compositions combine iconic imagery with wit, irony and decorative pattern, turning an editorial eye on the visual material that has flooded our media in the aftermath of 9/11. Combining found imagery and paint, the series confronts the viewer with both its formal rigor and its emotional punch. Here is a narrative that reflects the Middle East as a seesaw, repeatedly shifting its balance between hope and peace, between despair and violence. Wall’s method of creating these works begins with capturing the cacophony of current event images as they tumble over our transoms. She proceeds to form these into collages on paper, which she then scans, manipulates digitally and prints on canvas. Rhonda Wall holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been creating wide-ranging art pieces since 1978. Her solo exhibitions have been at Accola Contemporary, Allentown Art Museum, Lafayette College, Lehigh University, Northampton Community College, Cedar Crest College, Mississippi State University, Sensory Evolution Gallery, and B-Side Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in ARTNews, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Arts Magazine, The Star-Ledger, The Morning Call and The Express-Times. Wall’s artwork is in the collections of The City College of New York, the City University of New York; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, McGraw Hill, Needham Harper & Steers, University of North Carolina and Keith Haring Foundation. Wall is a professor of art at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.
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“Hope in the World?” 2003, digital collage on canvas, 62 x 44 inches
HOW YOU SEE ME HomeFront Artists APRIL TO JUNE 2010 The art and poetry on display explore societal stereotyping of homeless women in Mercer County, New Jersey. Artists from ArtSpace at HomeFront take this opportunity to share their experiences of poverty and homelessness, with a focus on their reactions to how other people perceive them. HomeFront is a nonprofit agency providing a comprehensive network of services for the poor and homeless in Mercer County. Its mission is to meet the immediate needs of food, shelter and safety for families in crisis and then to help them break the cycle of poverty through a holistic array of services. The ArtSpace at HomeFront program uses the creative process involved in self-expression to help people resolve problems, develop interpersonal skills, manage behavior, reduce stress and increase self-awareness. HomeFront artists are a large group of racially, ethnically, socially and economically diverse people of many ages. They have a range of prior experience in making art and they work in many different media. Panel: “How You See Me� Panelists include: Amy Cuddy, assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School; Connie Mercer, executive director of HomeFront; and Stacey A. Sinclair, associate professor of psychology and African American studies, Princeton University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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PROJECT GLOBAL UNDERGROUND Valera Cherkashin and Natasha Cherkashin SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2010 “Project Global Underground” with digital works by artists Valera Cherkashin and Natasha Cherkashin is a shimmering, kaleidoscopic presentation of underground transportation systems around the globe, including New York City; Washington, DC; Moscow; Paris; Stockholm; and Beijing. When the project is completed, 33 subway systems will be featured. While each metro system reflects the unique historic, cultural and technical attributes of the city that it serves, the overall impression is that of a global network of similar human endeavor that crosses social, political and geographic boundaries. Having met in the Moscow metro in 1982, the artists have collaborated on many art projects, including performance pieces, commenting on the social dynamics of the human condition. The Cherkashins have lectured at colleges, including Swarthmore College, Vassar College, Columbia University, Harvard University and New York University in the United States, as well as in Tokyo, Moscow and London. Their work is in the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The State Russian Museum; and the International Center of Photography in Tokyo.
“Moscow Metro, Kiyevskaya Station,” 2006, Lambda print, Kodak Professional metallic paper, 45 x 110 cm
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PURPLE HEARTS Nina Berman OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER 2010 “Purple Hearts” is Nina Berman’s poignant series of portraits and interviews of seven wounded American soldiers who have returned from the Iraq War. Each portrait is accompanied by a description of the injury and a statement from her interview. Nina Berman conducted this work across the country in soldiers’ homes and backyards, in military hospitals and on army bases. Berman says: “I encounter them at a particularly unsettling moment of separation and transformation from able-bodied warrior dedicated to a military livelihood to disabled veteran with no clear future.” Nina Berman is a documentary photographer of the American political and social landscape. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago (1982) and a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1985). Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time, The New York Times Magazine and The Sunday Times. Berman has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Press Photo Foundation and the Open Society Institute Documentary Fund. In 2010 she was an artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art and exhibited at the museum’s 2010 Biennial. She is the author of two monographs, “Purple Hearts — Back from Iraq” and “Homeland.” She is a member of the NOOR photo collective based in Amsterdam. Panel: “Purple Hearts” Panelists include: Major Berghaus, chaplain, United States Military Academy, West Point; Col. John Stark, director ROTC, Princeton University; Lt. Commander Kevin Cady, graduate student, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Spc. Adam Zaremba, Ft. Riley, Kansas,” 2004, archival inkjet print, 28 x 28 inches
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SCHOOLS FOR THE COLORED Wendel A. White JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 2011 “Schools for the Colored” is a series of photographs depicting the buildings and landscapes of what were racially segregated schools at the southern boundaries of the northern United States. As a metaphor for their isolation within a larger educational system, White has separated the crisp, fully defined school buildings from their immediate environment by white washing the landscape in which the schools were situated. They appear to float within a veiled landscape. Wendel A. White was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from the University of TexasAustin. Maintaining a focus on community in the African American experience, he has been awarded two fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography, a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco. In 2003, the Noyes Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of his “Small Towns, Black Lives,” which traveled through 2007. His work has been included in “Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present ” by Deborah Willis, exposure magazine, Nueva Luz, The Photo Review and Transition.
“Manitou Park School, Berkeley, New Jersey” 2006/2010, Pigment inkjet print on paper, 18 x 24 inches
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RETROSPECT Damien Schumann FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2011 “Retrospect” is a powerful presentation of 52 large format color photographs, and integrates social documentary and art to explore how lives unfold for patients with tuberculosis in South Africa today. Combining photography and life stories, South African documentary photographer Damien Schumann demonstrates an effective role for the arts in community activism. Over a four-year period, Schumann produced annual portraits of project participants to accompany their handwritten testimonials about living with tuberculosis; the work was regularly presented to the local community to foster involvement. Damien Schumann found his interest in photography while working and traveling through the Middle East and Asia during 2001 to 2003. He then returned to South Africa with the express intent of portraying emerging Africa. He photographed as he hitchhiked from Cape Town in South Africa to Ramallah, Palestine, and presented his first exhibition on his return. He was awarded a scholarship to study photography at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town, South Africa, and began to combine the art with advocacy. His clients include the World Health Organization, Desmond Tutu TB Centre and Project Concern International. Panel: “The Arts in Global Health” Panelists include: Damien Schumann, photographer; Joseph Amon, director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch and lecturer in public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; João Moreira Salles, documentary filmmaker and visiting lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University. Moderator: João Biehl, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Program in Global Health and Health Policy, Princeton University. In the Bernstein Annex Gallery, students in Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy and the Health Grand Challenges Initiative present a people-centered approach to global health with photographs, found objects, collages and ethnographic stories contextualizing their research about large-scale interventions.
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“Hendrick’s Family”
POLITICS OF SNOW II Diane Burko APRIL TO MAY 2011 “Politics of Snow II” is a series of sweeping views of majestic glaciers and mountains by Philadelphia artist Diane Burko. Her mission is to wake us out of reverie in order to bear witness to the impact of global warming on our natural world. Using archival photographs of glaciers as starting points, Burko combines these images in diptychs and triptychs and other multiple configurations, with contemporary views of the same landscape 10, 50 or 100 years later. Painting on canvas, she crops the images and adjusts the palette to convey the dramatic and accelerating effects of climate change over time. Diane Burko has received numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two individual artists grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation Residency Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Residency Fellowship, and the Bessie Berman $50,000 Grant. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women’s Caucus for the Arts. Her works are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, De Cordova Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, Reading Public Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia. Lecture: “Politics of Snow” Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Department of Geosciences and Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
#1/#2 Main Rongbuk Glacier, after Mallory, 1921, and after David Breashears, 2007, oil on canvas, 48 x 74 inches
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INSIDE THE BOX MOVIS MAY TO AUGUST 2011 The Bernstein Gallery is pleased to host “Inside the Box,” a show about using the box, breaking the box and boxing in. MOVIS members Rita Z. Asch, Berendina Buist, John Goodyear, Susan Hockaday, Marsha Levin-Rojer, Frank Magalhães, Margaret Kennard Johnson, and guest artists Hans Haacke and Martha Rosler exhibit photography, mixed media and site-specific works whose connection to the box is nuanced and surprising. MOVIS is a small group of Princeton area artists who have been meeting since 2006 to discuss art and especially art theory. Rosler and Haacke (whose works they obtained for this exhibition) are internationally acclaimed for their political art and for articulating their interconnections with society.
Martha Rosler, “The Gray Drape,” 2008 photomontage, 20 x 16 inches
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SITED MEMORY/UNDERGROUND SHADOWS Eve Ingalls AUGUST TO OCTOBER 2011 Ingalls uses the surface of the raw canvas as if it is the surface of the earth. Through her markings, layers of the imprint of humans and nature over time are revealed as traces or shadows. The edges of the drawings serve as the boundaries of an archaeological dig. There are shards of pots and evocations of ancient burial grounds and shifting landscape through the ages. Alongside the modern world is presented too — by scientific charts, graphs and maps. Thus, each work of art positions the viewer simultaneously in the past and in the present to experience visually what the artist terms “a persistent palimpsest.” “Sited Memory/Underground Shadows” is part of a collaborative investigation into the arts and cultural memory, organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, with participating venues across the University campus and throughout the larger Princeton community. Eve Ingalls attended the Skowhegan School of Art and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Art. She represented the United States at the Holland Paper Biennial 2006. Her sculpture was exhibited at the Art Forum in Kyoto in 2007, and at the Museum Schokland in the Netherlands in 2003. Her work has been exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Bruce Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Jersey State Museum, Hunterdon Art Museum and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Arts Magazine, Art and Antiques, Art New England, de Volkskrant, Beeldende kunst, De Courant Amsterdam, and La Nacion. Her work is in the collection of the Museum Schokland, Noyes Museum of Art, Zimmerli Art Museum, Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey State Museum, and the G.D. Searle Collection. She was a New Jersey Printmaking Fellow at the Brodsky Center, Mason Gross School of the Arts, and a recipient of a Cultural Grant from the Netherland-America Foundation. Panel: “Architecture as Memorial”
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Panelists include: Lucia Allais, assistant professor of architecture, Princeton University: Joel Smith, curator of photography, Princeton University Art Museum. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Folded Time,” 1982-2009, ink and graphite on raw canvas 80 x 60 inches
ISHQ Siona Benjamin OCTOBER 2011 TO JANUARY 2012 The artist Siona Benjamin explores issues of identity, gender and ethnicity from her perspective as a Jewish woman who grew up in a Muslim and Hindu community while attending Catholic and Zoroastrian schools in suburban Mumbai, India. “Ishq” is a special term in Urdu for divine love, referencing the artist’s fundamental concern for embracing diversity in our multicultural world. Benjamin’s sources range from the Torah to Persian miniatures to American Pop art, as she paints colorful bold hybrid heroines in her commentary on contemporary unrest. Benjamin attended art school in Mumbai before coming to study in the United States in 1986. She earned two master’s degrees, one in painting (Southern Illinois University) and the other in theater design (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). She has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, and has received several awards. Her work was featured in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Art in America. In 2010, Benjamin was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India and made paintings, which she exhibited at Flomenhaft Gallery in New York City.
“Finding Home #79,” (Fereshteh), 2006, Gouache and gold leaf on paper, 17 x 15 inches, collection of Joel Bluestein
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ASARO: ART AND ACTIVISM IN OAXACA, MEXICO JANUARY TO MARCH 2012 The exhibit features protest prints that a collective of Mexican artists made during the 2006 antigovernment uprising in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. A conflict emerged in May, 2006, with federal police attacking nonviolent protesters involved in a strike by the local teachers’ trade union. The uprising resulted in the creation of ASARO — the Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca, founded to support the movement titled Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca. This set of artwork is on loan from the Princeton University Library. Panel: “Born in the Zócalo: Art and Protest in Oaxaca, Mexico” Panelists include: Douglas Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Kevin McCloskey, professor of communication design, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Calveras with Helicopter,” woodblock print, 27 1/4 x 39 1/8 inches
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BODIES OF RIGHTS AND MEDICINES Torben Eskerod and João Biehl MARCH TO APRIL 2012 Combining photography and life stories, this exhibition documents how a growing number of patients across Brazil are suing the government to obtain medicines in the name of their constitutional right to health. It is the work of Danish artist Torben Eskerod and anthropologist João Biehl, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and co-director of Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy. The exhibition displays patient-litigants and kin, as well as the physicians, medical researchers, public defenders and judges in this complex quest for health and dignity. Eskerod and Biehl present the dynamics of global medicine in holding governments accountable for the needs of citizens. Torben Eskerod’s architectural photographs and portraits have been published widely in several different projects like “Statens Museum for Kunst,” “Vita,” “The Club” and “Will to Live,” among others. Eskerod has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland; Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and elsewhere. He has received several prices and grants and is represented in a wide range of private and public collections like the National Portrait Gallery in London; Brandts Museum of Photographic Art in Odense, Denmark; The National Museum of Photography, Denmark; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Portland Art Museum, Oregon. Torben Eskerod is represented by Peter Lav Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark. Panel: “Bodies of Rights and Medicines” Panelists include: Torben Eskerod and João Biehl in conversation with Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor, Institute for Advanced Study; Purcell Carson, documentary filmmaker, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; and Joseph Amon, Human Rights Watch and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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“Alexandre & Cleonice”
THE FERTILE CRESCENT: GENDER, ART AND SOCIETY AUGUST TO OCTOBER 2012 “The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art and Society” is part of a region-wide, multidimensional project focusing on contemporary women artists, writers, filmmakers, composers and performers from the Middle East and Middle East diaspora, who explore matters of gender, homeland, geopolitics, theology, the environment and transnationalism. The project and five-site exhibition were conceived, curated and produced by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, co-directors of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers University. The work of seven artists from the Middle East and the Middle East diaspora will be on view at the Bernstein Gallery: Negar Ahkami (Iranian American); Ghada Amer (Egyptian American); Zeina Barakeh (Lebanese-Palestinian); Reza Farkhondeh (Iranian); Ofri Cnaani (Israeli); Parastou Forouhar (Iranian); and Shadi Ghadirian (Iranian). Panel: “The Middle East: Gender, Art and Politics” Panelists include: Zeina Barakeh, a Lebanese-Palestinian artist based in San Francisco; Sylvia Chan-Malik, assistant professor of American and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University; Amaney A. Jamal, associate professor of politics and director, Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, Princeton University; Max D. Weiss, assistant professor of history and Near Eastern studies, Princeton University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
Parastou Forouhar, “Freitag (Friday),” 2003, Alucobond, four panels, each 66 7/8 x 33 7/8 inches, courtesy of the RH Contemporary Art, New York, and the artist
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ARC Paul Stopforth APRIL TO AUGUST 2012 Paul Stopforth was one of the first and most significant visual artists to confront directly the injustices of South Africa’s apartheid system. This exhibition presents work that he began during his 2003 artist residency on Robben Island, the island just off Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela and other foes of the government were imprisoned. As the artist writes, “It may be the most significant historical site in South Africa as it paradoxically symbolizes the repressiveness of the apartheid state and the strength of those who opposed it.” The paintings and installations in “ARC” explore the roles of history, memory and loss. Relics from Robben Island — a bar of soap, a blanket, a safety pin — appear in the paintings as iconic images “drawn out of a field of enormous complexity…” Paul Stopforth, originally from South Africa, immigrated to the United States in 1988. He had studied at the Johannesburg College of Art and been awarded a British Council Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London. Stopforth has exhibited in galleries and museums in South Africa, the United States and Europe. His work is in the Harvard Film Archive; the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tufts University Art Gallery; the South African National Art Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Museum; and the University of Witwatersrand Art Galleries. He taught in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University for 10 years and is currently teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Stopforth is represented by David Krut Projects in New York City.
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“Tidal Pool: Bethesda #1,” 2010, gouache on panel, 18 x 80 inches
THE CURRENCY OF AN ALTERED STATE Hanna von Goeler OCTOBER TO DECEMBER 2012 “The Currency of an Altered State” is part of an ongoing series in which Hanna von Goeler raises ethical, political and aesthetic questions by painting on existing currency. These provocative gemlike miniature paintings illustrate different categories of inquiry: environmental concerns, social and economic disparities, immigration, politics, law and geography. In von Goeler’s words, the subtle and complex body of work “… explores the extent to which we have the power to define rather than be shaped by the currencies in our culture.” Hanna von Goeler is a conceptual and project-based artist who makes large installations as well as small paintings. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California-Davis and also completed the postgraduate course of study at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. She has exhibited widely in this country and abroad and has won numerous awards and fellowships.
“He Is History and Into the Night He Flies,” watercolor, gouache and dollar bill, 6 1/8 x 2 1/2 inches, from the 1992 to 2012 series “The Currency of an Altered State” and “My Money, My Currency”
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NEWS/NOT NEWS Marcia Annenberg DECEMBER 2012 TO JANUARY 2013 “News/Not News” is an exhibition of mixed media paintings and three-dimensional wall pieces by the New York-based political artist Marcia Annenberg. Her subject is the declining quality of our media over the past 20 years. Using sardonic wit and irony, her large works are critical of news corporations where marketing needs trump concern for truth. There is a palpable sense of foreboding in the artist’s varied explorations of this democracy in peril. Annenberg’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, among them the Raandesk Gallery of Art, The Puffin Room, and Makor Gallery in New York City. Other venues include: The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; Red Chair Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California; and The Women’s Museum in Dallas. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Jewish Museum London, Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem; The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius; and the Florida Holocaust Museum.
“Dusk, Railroad”, 2008, oil on canvas, 30 x 40”
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THE FOURTH GRADE PROJECT Judy Gelles FEBRUARY TO APRIL 2013 Judy Gelles is concerned that “Children today live in social silos, cut off from diverse cultural and economic groups.” In “The Fourth Grade Project,” she explores this issue through a provocative set of portraits of young children from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. In schools in China, India and the United States, Gelles asked three questions of nine- and 10-year-old students: “With whom do you live? What do you wish for? And what do you worry about?” This exhibition shows vividly that within each school the ways the children present themselves are strikingly similar, both visually and verbally. Gelles hopes that the project will lead to improvements in introducing cultural differences to children in their critical preadolescent years. Judy Gelles received her Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her master’s degree in counseling from the University of Miami. Her work is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. She has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Visual Studies Workshop; and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Awards include a grant from the Lomax Family Foundation; individual artist grant, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts; Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts; Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Artist as Catalyst; WYBE Public Television; Philadelphia Stories New Program Grant; and a Fleisher Challenge Artist Exhibition. Her work has been featured in Ms. Magazine; Vision Magazine, Beijing; Camerawork; New Art Examiner; Artweek; and Photography Now. Panel: “The Fourth Grade Project” Panelists include: Catherine Snow, Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Dorothy S. Strickland, Samuel DeWitt Proctor Professor of Education, Emerita, Rutgers University; and other prominent practitioners in the education field.
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“Fourth Grade Project” (detail), 2013, archival pigment print
COOKING FOR CHANGE Steve Riskind and Doris Friedensohn APRIL TO JUNE 2013 The photographs and narratives in this exhibition are from the book “Cooking for Change: Tales from a Food Service Training Academy” by Doris Friedensohn with photographs by Steve Riskind. The work provides visual and verbal windows into the exhilaration and frustrations of students at the Food Service Training Academy of the Community FoodBank in Hillside, New Jersey. Riskind’s black and white photographs focus on these low-income men and women (some of whom are ex-offenders and recovering addicts) who are trying to change their lives by learning to cook professionally. In addition to action photographs of the learning process, Riskind has also taken formal portraits of the students and staff, inviting them to “present themselves as they would like to be seen.” The photographer and writer powerfully show many indignities endemic to the workaday lives of the disadvantaged in our socioeconomic system. Panel: “Can We Cook up Jobs? Poverty and Workforce Training” Panelists include: Judy Fan, doctoral student, Department of Psychology, Princeton University; Henry Farber, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics, Princeton University; Doris Friedensohn, author of “Cooking for Change” and professor emerita, women’s studies, New Jersey City University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Graduation”
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PASSAGES Ela Shah JUNE TO SEPTEMBER 2013 As an immigrant from India who has spent most of her adulthood in the United States, Shah persistently weaves her complex roots into her colorful mixed media artwork. She fills the work with references to both countries, commenting upon issues of faith and survival, both personal and political. She combines iconic Indian and Western imagery, from Jainism, Buddhist and Hindu deities, and ancient Indian temples to American pop culture snakes, flowers and puzzle pieces, effectively evoking a confused world struggling to right itself. In India, Ela Shah earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and a diploma in fine arts; then, settling in the United States, she received her master’s degree in sculpture at Montclair State University. Her work is in the New Jersey State Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Jersey City Museum, Noyes Museum of Art, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, and the Newark Museum. She has received two awards from the National Association of Women Artists in New York and Dodge Foundation Residency Award, a New Jersey Innovative Printmaking Fellowship, as well as awards for both sculpture and painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
“Passages,” 1996, mixed media, 30 x 24 inches
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NONHUMAN ANIMALS — EAT, TEST, LOVE Hetty Baiz SEPTEMBER TO OCTOBER 2013 The focus of Hetty Baiz in this exhibition is on the welfare of animals that are factory farmed and laboratory tested. She was inspired by Peter Singer’s seminal book “Animal Liberation” and the ethical issues it poses. In Baiz’s 12 large scale mixed media paintings, the noble and anonymous animals ask each viewer to consider his or her own responsibility in allowing one species to dominate and subjugate another. The cows, pigs, cats, rats and other animals to be seen in the exhibition are all created by piecing together bits of handmade, hand-painted papers from different cultures, along with photographs taken from the artist’s travels in Asia and Africa. After building up the canvas with layers of torn papers, Baiz has reworked the surfaces by incising, scraping, burning, drawing and painting. This exhibition is part of “Concentric Circles of Influence: The Birth of Artists’ Communities in Central New Jersey,” a region-wide project celebrating the confluence of art communities that have flourished here since the 1930s. Hetty Baiz is an active member of the Princeton Artists Alliance. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Cornell University and a Master of Business Administration at Columbia University. Her most recent solo exhibits include Morpeth Contemporary, Hopewell, New Jersey (2011); Tenri Cultural Institute, New York City (2009); and DrawingSpace, Melbourne, Australia (2008). She was selected for the New Jersey Arts Annual 2010 at the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey, and the 2009 International Women Artists’ Biennale in Incheon, South Korea. Baiz’s work has also been exhibited in many museums in the United States and in exhibitions in Tibet, China and France. Panel: “Nonhuman Animals — Eat, Test, Love” Panelists include: Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University and Laureate Professor School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne; Jeff McMahan, professor of philosophy, Rutgers University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Hetty Baiz will give a brief introduction about her work and its inspiration.
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“Cow,” 2012, mixed media on canvas, 66 x 82 inches
SACRED SPACES Mary Cross OCTOBER 2013 The newest collection of work by photojournalist and essayist Mary Cross leads viewers through many of the unique and profound spaces found across Turkey. In each of the past six years, Cross has visited Turkish cities paying homage to the complex beauty and sophistication of Ottoman architecture in Edirne, Bursa, Istanbul, Konya and Üsküdar. These colorful images of Turkey’s great mosques and tombs are from her forthcoming book “Sacred Spaces: Turkish Mosques & Tombs.” Mary Cross is known for her books, including the titles: “Egypt,” “Morocco: Sahara to the Sea” and “Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth.” She has photographed the Stone Age people of Papua New Guinea, hill tribes of Thailand and the Asmat tribe of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Her work has been shown at the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; University of Pennsylvania; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; as well as in Istanbul and Cairo.
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Tombs of Mehmed I, Bursa, Turkey
JUSTICE: FACES OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS REVOLUTION
Mariana Cook NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 2013 “Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution” is a collection of fine art portraits of human rights pioneers around the world by Mariana Cook. She traveled the globe to answer one question: Why do some people have the courage to look injustice in the eye while others avert their gazes? Each black and white photographic portrait is accompanied by first-person accounts of how each of these human rights activists found their way into the field and what compels them to make it their life’s work. The portraits were shot with natural light and simple backdrops, resulting in unadorned, elegant meditations on the men and women who have been crucial in securing basic rights and safety for their fellow man. This exhibition celebrates the publication of Cook’s book “Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution,” with a forward by the late Anthony Lewis, a longtime columnist at The New York Times. Photographer Mariana Cook, the last protégé of the famous American photographer Ansel Adams, is widely known for her intimate character studies of people both in and out of the public eye. Her photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris; J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her previous publications include “Manhattan Island to Myself,” “Fathers and Daughters,” “Mothers and Sons,” “Generations of Women,” “Couples,” “Faces of Science,” “Mathematicians” and “Close at Hand.” Panel: “Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Movement”
AUNG SAN SUU KYI, Yangon, Burma, 21 March 2011 © Mariana Cook 2011
Panelists include: K. Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University; Mariana Cook, photographer; Deborah N. Pearlstein, assistant professor of law, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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CINDER Susanne Slavick JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 2014 Susanne Slavic is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was Head of the School of Art between 2000 and 2006. Slavick’s “R&R (…&R)” series begin with “found” photographs that circulate on the web. These photographs include decimated buildings and gaping earth as documents of the recent war-torn regions, including Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Slavick paints intricate details into each scene, insertions that combine realism with lyrical, poetic imagery. These “restorative” additions are culturally specific, based on historical research: Islamic angels instead of mechanics tend to a charred car in “Stretch”; white tracery of a mashrabiya (a traditional Arabic window treatment) hovers ghost-like in a bullet-pocked entryway. In “Hemorrhage,” a rusted vehicle is deluged by oily water with fish braving the flow of our overconsumption. By taking traditional imagery from the same country whose photograph she appropriates from the web, Slavick poses questions about the magnitude of loss and recovery. While “R&R” is known as the military term for “rest and relaxation,” the works here open up its meaning to include remorse, restoration, revelation and regrets. Slavick studied at Yale University and Jagiellonian University in Kraków before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized through National Endowment for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships. She has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony; Mt. Desert Island/Four Seals Foundation; Skoki Castle/Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland; Blue Mountain Center; and Fayoum International Art Center in Egypt. Works from her “R&R (…&R)” project premiered at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and subsequently traveled to The Warhol Museum, Rutgers University and Bradley University. Solo shows include Chicago Cultural Center, John J. McDonough Museum of Art and Accola Griefen Gallery in New York City. She was a co-founder of 10 Years + Counting, an online resource developed to commemorate a decade of senseless war, and she is the editor of “Out of Rubble,” an anthology of works by international artists who respond to the aftermath of war. Related curatorial projects are traveling across the country. Slavick has also published visual essays and articles for: Cultural Heritage and Arts Review, Cultural Politics, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics and Alternet.
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“Replenish,” 2010, gouache on archival digital print/Hahnemühle, 10 x 14 inches
PRISON VOICES: ART FOR SURVIVAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE Ojore Lutalo and Judith Vazquez FEBRUARY TO APRIL 2014 “Prison Voices: Art for Survival and Social Change” depicts political artwork by two artists who have spent much of their lives behind bars. Most of the work was created by Ojore Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was incarcerated in the Trenton State Prison for 28 years for aggravated assault, robbery and weapons possession. Lutalo spent 22 years in solitary confinement where he began producing political art. “I wanted to express the conditions of the prison and to show people what was really going on,” Lutalo said. “I felt invisible, being locked away for 23 hours a day — I received one hour per day for exercise — and I wanted to keep my mind active and alert.” Lutalo’s collages, using text and images from newspaper headlines and magazine photos, tell his story about what he endured in prison. “Everything that happened to me in prison is represented in my collages,” Lutalo said. “I felt a responsibility to show people prison conditions and what prison was really like. It is easier to educate people visually than it is verbally.” Since his release in 2008, Lutalo dedicates himself to assisting the American Friends Service Committee in its attempt to expose the true nature and extent of long-term isolation, its effect both on the prisoner individually as well as society at large. This outreach often involves speaking engagements in which he uses artwork to reinforce his text, finding visuals often communicate more effectively than a purely oral presentation. Judith Vazquez created her drawings while incarcerated for 20 years — three years of solitary confinement in a Hudson County Correctional Facility jail cell and 17 years on a maximum security unit of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, New Jersey. Like Lutalo, she has struggled to preserve her sanity and safety through art, which she also sends to family members whom she rarely gets to see or speak to in person. Panel: “America Imprisoned”
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Panelists include: Bonnie Kerness, American Friends Service Committee, Prison Watch Project; Bruce Western, professor of sociology and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy, director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and faculty chair of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
Ojore Lutalo, collage
JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH APRIL TO AUGUST 2014 In these paintings and prints, critically acclaimed Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith expresses her concerns about our environment, corporate greed, consumerism run amok and the rising gap between rich and poor. Through humor and cleverly constructed compositions, her signature visual language uses a combination of historic and literary references; she includes AmericanIndian mythology, as well as contemporary current events, to make her provocative sociopolitical statements. These artworks, gathered from both public and private collections, including the Accola Griefen Gallery, Flomenhaft Gallery and the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, show the breadth and scope of Smith’s long career. Smith has had over 100 solo exhibits in the past 40 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide. Over that same time, she has organized and/or curated over 30 Native exhibitions, lectured at more than 200 universities, museums and conferences internationally, most recently at five universities in China. Smith has completed several collaborative public art works such as the floor design in the Great Hall of the new Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle. Smith was born at St. Ignatius Mission on her reservation and is an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation of Montana. She holds honorary doctorates from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the University of New Mexico. Her work is in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Walker Art Center; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum for World Culture, Frankfurt, Germany; and the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. Recent awards include a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to archive her work; 2011 ArtTable Artist Award; Moore College Visionary Woman Award for 2011; Induction into the National Academy of Art 2011; Living Artist of Distinction, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, New Mexico 2012; Switzer Award for 2012. “Imperialism,” 2011, oil and acrylic, 72 x 48 inches, courtesy of Accola Griefen Gallery
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THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION: AN AMERICAN STORY AUGUST TO OCTOBER 2014 Originally created for the ACLU’s 90th anniversary in 2010, these six foot by eight foot photographic collages on fabric illustrate important ACLU cases that focused on key themes such as: defending liberty in times of crisis; speaking up for freedom of expression; fighting for racial justice; promoting women’s equality; applying the Bill of Rights to criminal justice; guaranteeing the right to vote; protecting religious freedom; ensuring fairness for all within our borders; dismantling enclaves of oppression; forging the path to equality for LGBT people; and safeguarding reproductive freedom. The ACLU communications department, under the direction of Emily Tynes, produced the exhibit with Mia Nitchun as curator and lead writer and Karen Simon of Simon Does as the exhibit designer. In 2014, the ACLU revived the exhibit for the Woodrow Wilson School’s Bernstein Gallery, showcasing the organization’s work, particularly during a policy forum held at the Woodrow Wilson School on Sept. 18-19, 2014. Policy Forum: “Civil Liberties in Times of War” Keynote speakers include: Edward Felten, Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs; Jeffrey Rosen, president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center; Susan N. Herman, president of the ACLU; and Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago. Panels: “When ‘Others’ Scare Us — WWII and Japanese Internment; The War on Terror and Treatment of Muslim Americans”; “Saying ‘No’ to War —WWI and the Vietnam War, and Conscientious Objectors”; “The Spy Who Didn’t Come in From the Cold: Surveillance in the Name of National Security vs. Privacy — the Cold War and McCarthyism, the Pentagon Papers, Wikileaks, and the Snowden Affair” This conference is sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School; the Wilson School’s Program in Law and Public Affairs; and the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, which houses the complete ACLU archives. The ACLU was involved in planning the event.
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SOUTH SIDE OF CHICAGO Jon Lowenstein NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 2014 Jon Lowenstein explores the consequences of power, poverty and violence over time. This exhibition, “South Side of Chicago,” examines the legacy of segregation, the impact of wealth inequality and how deindustrialization and globalization play out in one section of Chicago. Through a combination of photography, experiential writing, personal testimonies and short experimental films, Lowenstein strives for unsparing clarity in revealing what life looks like today for the residents of Chicago’s South Side. Lowenstein engages with his adopted community by bearing witness to how people in underserved neighborhoods experience life’s joys and sorrows, when that life is fraught with significant poverty and a consistent lack of personal security. Images such as a block party, a prom dress, a funeral, an abandoned building soon to be demolished are hauntingly elegiac. Lowenstein captures the interplay of innocence, hope and beauty in social isolation amid great economic deprivation. Lowenstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor who escaped Germany on the Kindertransport, has spent the past decade recording the largest transnational migration in U.S. history: from Central America and Mexico to the United States and back. He has covered world-shaping events that include elections in Afghanistan, the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the recent civil unrest over Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri. A member and owner of NOOR Images, based in Amsterdam, he has received many awards, grants and fellowships from, among others, the Open Society Foundations, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Alicia Patterson Foundation, Institute for Justice and Journalism, National Press Photographers Association, World Press Photo, Getty Images and Pictures of the Year International. He is a Hasselblad Master and a 2014 TED Senior Fellow. This year, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University awarded him the twenty-second Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. His work has been seen in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Photo District News, The Daily Beast, Audubon magazine, Verve, Scientific American and NBC News. Panel: “The Consequences of Power, Poverty and Violence in the South Side of Chicago”
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Panelists include: Mitchell Duneier, Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University; Alison Isenberg, professor of history and co-director, Princeton’s Program in Urban studies; Floyd Morris, president and chief executive officer of Children’s Futures; Jon Lowenstein, photographer, writer and filmmaker. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
“Waiting for the chainsaw to arrive on the 7100 block of Dobson,” 2004
CALL AND RESPONSE Andrew Ellis Johnson DECEMBER 2014 TO JANUARY 2015 “Call and Response” presents two series of digital collages by the artist Andrew Ellis Johnson. The scale and language in one series are those of miniature painting, and in the other series are those of storefront advertisements. Each portrays the breakdown of communication, the rupture of cultural continuity, the inaccessibility of both shared and remote experience — all this in the context of technological advances. The title of one series, “And Gazelles? And Gazelles” is itself a call and response. As such, it emphasizes connection between parties, and direct causal relationships between events. It evokes the 1970 Art Worker Coalition’s My Lai Massacre poster titled “Q. And Babies? A. And Babies.” While Johnson’s images are more topical and allegorical, featuring attack helicopters in the Middle East and the quick and elegant animals for which they are named, their call is no less clarion. The second series, “Airborne,” presents call and response in the language of glossy cell phone advertisements, emphasizing communication by visualizing its lack through the muzzling motif of masks. Dust masks, common in Seoul, South Korea, and other cities, are social shells that conceal and reveal collective contamination and individual sacrifice. The mask is indicative of social challenge when worn by protesters and of personal vulnerability or pandemic infection when worn by the sick (as in the case of Avian Influenza or Ebola); it shows fear floating freely between peoples, countries and continents.
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Since 2004, Andrew Ellis Johnson has been associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. Some past exhibition topics include: the Haitian grass roots movement in “Lavalas”; homelessness in “A Dressing Room”; predatory economics in “Just Another Market Mop Up” and “StOck OptiOns”; hemispheric hegemonies in “Democracy on Ice”; unabated sowing of land mines in “Spring — Let Them Keep Their Children Tethered”; crises in the Middle East in “Pressed: When Words Were Earth, Fleece, Fold,” “The Annunciation II: VICTEORY (sic)” and “Pluck”; cultural eclipses in “One Night or a Thousand Others,” “Cleave” and “Formal Graffiti and Eternal Flames”; and meditations on labor and myth in “Till,” “Hind” and “Hawker Hacker Herald.” Venues for his work have included museums, galleries, electronic arts and video festivals, public collaborations, conferences, books and journals in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
From the series, “And Gazelles? And Gazelles,” 2008, digital print on archival paper, 4.3 x 14.5 inches
SOCIETY IN UPHEAVAL: THREE ARTISTS RESPOND Raúl González III, Edward Monovich and Karen Moss FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2015 Raúl González III, Edward Monovich and Karen Moss are three artists whose work shares a common focus on similar sociopolitical themes. Images of social ills, environmental devastation and economic disparities are prominent in their art. Many of the same art historical figures, as well as media and pop culture images, were part of their formative years and have helped shape their art. One common thread is the use of animal and human hybrids and references to coloring books, comics and cartoons. Despite their different cultural backgrounds, all three artists had childhood influences that made them sensitive to the underdog and the critical issues of their time. Raúl González III is a first-generation Mexican-American who grew up in El Paso, Texas, and spent time in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. His mixed media works reflect life on both sides of the border, from brutal street gangs and drug cartels to struggling illegal immigrants and border control officials. His satiric vignettes are reminiscent of the work of José Guadalupe Posada, the renowned Mexican artist who, a century ago, used the calavera (skeletons) to satirize corrupt politicians of his day. Art as political statement has been an important element in Mexican art since the days of the Mexican Revolution, and González’s work is bold, contemporary commentary following in this tradition. Edward Monovich grew up in a family of labor organizers and antiwar activists in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Appalled by the Midwest’s mall culture and its rampant consumerism, along with a world of senseless violence perpetrated by corrupt governments, he created mixed media artworks that are nightmarish visions of a hallucinatory world breaking apart. Often using children in a backdrop of bucolic suburban settings, his compositions are packed with menacing images of war and deception. No innocence is to be found anywhere.
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Like her activist parents, Karen Moss has been politically engaged since growing up in the Midwest. Her artwork reflects her major concerns with contemporary society. Using imagery full of biting wit and satire, she takes on such themes as consumerism, economic inequality and the degradation of our natural world, including cruelty to animals. She deftly uses mixed media and a carefully chosen palette filled with acid colors, charred grays, and not-to-be-trusted pretty pastels. Moss’s jarring juxtapositions, from Disney World characters to creepy hybrid creatures, are visions of society in upheaval.
Raúl González III and Elaine Bay, “Every Step You Take is Forever,” 2012, mixed media on paper, 50 x 55 inches
FEMINIST HUMOR AS POLITICAL DEVICE Mary Beth Edelson MARCH TO MAY 2015 Mary Beth Edelson is internationally recognized as one of the founders of the feminist art movement. Her social and political activism began in the 1960s and continues today. Edelson has worked in a wide range of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, photo-based work, video and performance. In this exhibition, the focus is on her drawings and prints. Through her work Edelson provokes with sassy wit and visually rewrites Hollywood scripts by appropriating images of actresses such as Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Mae West. These film stars are taken out of the context for which they are best known and reimagined as wily, independent women. For example, “The Young Judy Garland” series depicts the actress as a caricature of herself with a big head and small body surrounded by text that urges women to challenge the male authority in their lives. Edelson’s work has been featured in more than 90 books and is widely reviewed in the United States and abroad. Her work is in the permanent collection of many museums including: the Guggenheim Museum, New York City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Seattle Art Museum; Malmö Museum, Sweden; and the Sammlung Verbund.
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“Scoring Yourself: Best Little Girl,” 1996, oil paint, silkscreen, pencil and ink on jute tag, 1996
AFTER GENOCIDE — COLLECTED STORIES Aliza Augustine, Mary Oestereicher Hamill and Chath pierSath AUGUST TO OCTOBER 2015 The exhibition is comprised chiefly of two projects, one on Holocaust survivors’ descendants and one on survivors of the Khmer Rouge decimation of Cambodia. With “Documenting the Second Generation: Children of Holocaust Survivors,” Aliza Augustine presents her fine art photographs of an individual whose ancestors were victims of the Holocaust; each of them contains reproductions of old photographs of ancestors. The works’ large scale and narrative style help contemporary viewers relate to these horrific events from the past. Augustine also presents work directly about her own ancestors. With the “Cambodian War Widows’ Project,” Mary Oestereicher Hamill and the Khmer Rouge survivor Chath pierSath present artwork by 14 elderly widows in a Cambodian rural village. Each widow made a unique pillowcase memorializing her dead or missing husband by selecting a meaningful object from his life and making a print of it using the antique photo-based method of cyanotype. Personal narratives about their experience during and after the war years accompany these fabric works. Supplementing the pillowcases is a small set of artwork on genocide by pierSath and by Hamill. Aliza Augustine has a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. After attending a residency in photography at the School of Visual Arts in 2006, her major series have been narrative photographs dealing with family, sociopolitical issues, feminism, gender and genocide. Her work has been shown in solo shows at Rutgers University, Kean University and the Monmouth Museum. Her frequent group shows have been in Manhattan, the tri-state area and around the United States. Venues include: Jersey City Museum, New Jersey; Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, New Jersey; Theresa A. Maloney Art Gallery, College of Saint Elizabeth, Morristown, New Jersey; and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. She has received a grant from the Puffin Foundation, and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers in the category of documentary and editorial.
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Mary Oestereicher Hamill is a pioneer of participatory photo-based art regarding social issues. In a multiyear project begun in the 1990s, she loaned video cameras to homeless people and transformed the imagery and sound into collaborative interactive installations at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Sanders Theatre, Harvard University; and the Massachusetts State House. Her seminal “Constructs of Frailty” at the Rose Art Museum led to medical missions in remote rural Vietnam and Cambodia, with resultant art exhibitions both there and in the United States. Other exhibitions in Canada, England, France, India, Spain and Uruguay derive from projects in collaboration with residents of an ancient Beijing neighborhood, Native Americans in New Mexico, and others. Accomplished as an educator and activist as well, she is a scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Chath pierSath, a published poet and visual artist, was born in Banteay Meanchey province, Cambodia, in 1970. A child of war in the Khmer Rouge era, his traumatic experiences have been central to his verbal and visual art from the very beginning. Based on his own profound understandings of loss and healing, pierSath has carried out extensive practical work with orphans and with people affected by HIV and AIDS, utilizing art as a vehicle. pierSath’s art works have been shown at: Rhode Island Foundation Gallery; Whistler House Museum of Art, Lowell, Massachusetts; The Queen’s Gallery, Bangkok; H Gallery Project Space, Bangkok; Kunming, China; Tally Beck Contemporary, New York City; and at JavaArts, Phnom Penh. In 2014, pierSath was honored as Alumnus of the Year by the University of Massachusetts Lowell Community Social Psychology Program, from which he earned a master’s degree.
Aliza Augustine, “Yona,” C-Print, 2015, 42 x 18 inches
“Cambodian War Widows Project,” cyanotypes drying on the line, 2014, 5 x 10 x 4 feet
THE CHANGING AMERICAN FAMILY Gigi Kaeser and Seth Bernstein OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER 2015 “The Changing American Family” is an exhibition of photographic portraits by Gigi Kaeser and videos by Seth Bernstein. The exhibition celebrates the most recent major achievement in the broad civil rights movement in the United States: namely, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that persons of the same sex can legally marry across all 50 states. One major method to promote understanding and acceptance of people who seem “different” has been the use of photographs and videos such as those seen in this exhibition. The black and white photographic portraits are by Kaeser, taken over the last 22 years; the texts accompanying them are by Peggy Gillespie. Both are co-founders of Family Diversity Projects, an award-winning educational nongovernmental organization. Filmmaker and lighting designer Bernstein directs Eidetic Production in New York City. He made the videos for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), the firm of Mary Bonauto, Esq., who argued and won the Obergefell marriage equality case before the Supreme Court. The videos were useful for the public and for state and national legislators alike.
“Ellen Wade and Maureen Brodoff, Plaintiffs, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health,” 2014, video still by Seth Bernstein
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THE CUBAN REVOLUTION DECEMBER 2015 TO JANUARY 2016 The people and events of the Cuban Revolution inspired celebrated and unknown photographers alike to produce a uniquely evocative photographic record. Many of the images in this exhibition were created by Cuban photographers, including, most notably, Alberto Korda (Fidel Castro’s official photographer and personal friend) and Osvaldo Salas, whose photographs of the events and people remain widely influential. Images created by Korda and Salas, along with a handful of other photographer-witnesses, are largely responsible for our visual memory of the Cuban Revolution and, indeed, the iconography of “revolution” that has prevailed since then. All photographs are vintage silver gelatin prints made in the 1950s and 1960s, many bearing the stamps of the photographers and their studios. This exhibit draws from a more comprehensive collection of Cuban Revolution photographs assembled by David Sellers. Panel: “The Cuban Revolution as seen from 2015” Panelists include: Rachel Price, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures, Princeton University; and Adrián López Denis, lecturer, Program in Latin American Studies and History, and director, Princeton in Cuba program. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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“Anti-Batista demonstration in New York,” 1958, stamp of the photographer: Salas, 8 x 10 inches
COMBAT PAPER NJ FEBRUARY TO MARCH 2016 “Combat Paper NJ,” is an exhibition of works on paper made by veterans from the Vietnam and recent Middle East wars. The project is supported by Frontline Arts, an art studio and research center that promotes social change through the arts. Combat Paper NJ, directed by David Keefe and run by veterans who are artists, provides safe and comfortable settings for using art to explore and share experiences. Each individual work on paper in the exhibition is made from deconstructed fibers of the uniform that each soldier wore during his or her tour of duty. The fabric is beaten into pulp using specially designed papermaking equipment, creating a slurry of uniform fibers and water. Sheets of paper are pulled from the pulp and dried to create handmade paper. This paper then becomes the foundation on which veterans create works of art, drawing from their personal experience. Often veteran artists incorporate photographs, iconic images and words into their “Combat Paper” using silkscreen and other printmaking techniques. Since its founding, Combat Paper NJ has conducted over 150 workshops, presentations and exhibitions in New Jersey and beyond. Panel: “Vets Coming Home: Downshifting From Combat” Panelists include: Capt. Kym R. Leyva, scholarship and enrollment officer, Princeton University, Army ROTC; Major Gen. William Nash, visiting lecturer in international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; U.S. Army Major Brendan Gallagher, Woodrow Wilson School doctoral candidate, Princeton University; U.S. Army Major Michael Kelvington, Woodrow Wilson School Master of Public Administration candidate, Princeton University. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
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Jim Fallon, “Orphan’s Opus ’68,” silkscreen on paper made from Vietnam era uniforms, 2013
IN THE NATION’S SERVICE? WOODROW WILSON REVISITED APRIL TO OCTOBER 2016 The exhibition draws on modern scholarship, newly digitized resources and Princeton’s special collections to paint a more complete picture of Wilson than is often presented, highlighting the ways in which he failed a great number of Americans. Correspondence, writings, photographs, newspapers and other documents that place Wilson in historical context are designed to give a fuller understanding of his complexities and why he continues to evoke both admiration and opprobrium nearly a century after his death. The exhibit was produced and curated by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in conjunction with WhirlWind Creative. Panel: “Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy on Race” Panelists include: A. Scott Berg, author of “Wilson”; Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, doctoral candidate, Department of History, Rutgers University; Eric Yellin, associate professor of history and American studies, University of Richmond; Chad Williams, associate professor and chair, Department of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis University.
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THE POLITICS OF WATER Princeton Artists Alliance NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 2016 Twenty-three artists reflect upon the politics of water locally, nationally or globally. The artwork includes a wide range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional approaches. The Princeton Artists Alliance is a 27-year-old working group of well-established New Jersey painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers who meet regularly and exhibit together. Artists included in the exhibition are Joanne Augustine, Hetty Baiz, Joy Barth, Anita Benarde, Rajie Cook, Clem Fiori, Tom Francisco, Carol Hanson, Shellie Jacobson, Judy Langille, Eva Mantell, Pat Martin, Charles McVicker, Lucy Graves-McVicker, Harry Naar, Jim Perry, Maria Pisano, Richard Sanders, Madelaine Shellaby, Marie Sturken and Judy Tobie. Panel: “The State of Our Waters and What Are We Going to Do About It?” Panelists include: Peter Jaffe, professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate director for research, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University; Jonathan C. Kaledin, executive vice president/general counsel, Natural Systems Utilities. Moderator: Stanley N. Katz, lecturer with the rank of professor of public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.
Rajie Cook, “Prescription Population,” 2016, assemblage, 32 x 32 inches
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A QUIET DEFIANCE: WOMEN RESISTING JIHAD IN MALI Katie Orlinsky DECEMBER 2016 TO JANUARY 2017 This photographic exploration of women in central Mali shows the vibrant culture that resisted the Al-Qaeda jihadist effort to impose Sharia law (2013). Twenty-nine large, bright photographs reveal the lively spirit of the strong women as they carried on with school, work, sports and weddings despite despots’ threats. Katie Orlinsky studied political science at Colorado College before earning a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Working regularly for The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, she has been awarded national photography prizes in the United States and in France. Her work in Mali was supported by the International Reporting Project
“Wedding Guests,” Timbuktu, Mali, October, 2013
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