Displaying items by tag: berenice abbott

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces a major gift of over 500 photographs from photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear. 

Shear’s extensive donation serves as a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day. The collection chronicles different photographic processes, techniques, and artistic approaches from an early half-plate ambrotype of Niagara Falls to a Polaroid self-portrait by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. Historic works include important examples by photographic pioneers such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

The Phillips Collection’s Director Dorothy Kosinski announced today the acquisition of several hundred gifts of photography to the museum’s permanent collection, accepted from a small group of collectors. Nearly 300 of the photographs were given to the museum in 2014, increasing the collection by more than 25 percent. Many of these new acquisitions, including superb color prints and black-and-white photographs from masters such as Berenice Abbott, Esther Bubley, Louis Faurer, and Joel Meyerowitz, will be displayed at the museum for the first time on June 6 with the opening of the special exhibition "American Moments: Photographs from The Phillips Collection."

It is perhaps not surprising that Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone, curators of "Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age," chose the work of Berenice Abbot as a starting point for their exhibition. Abbot, who made powerful images of the architectural changes that gripped 1930s New York, seemed to not only document what she saw, but to question it, too.

While Abbot herself might disagree (she was an avid documentarian who rejected the idea photography should ever express feelings) there is an inescapable unease to her 1936 shot of Park Avenue towers soaring over a two-story show house, and a hazy peculiarity to her famous image of midtown Manhattan from the Empire State Building.

Maine philanthropists, Owen and Anna Wells, have donated their impressive photography collection to the Portland Museum of Art. The gift includes works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Ansel Adams, William Wegman and Berenice Abbott. 45 photographs from the Wells’ collection will go on view on December 21, 2013 as part of the exhibition American Vision: Photographs from the Collection of Owen and Anna Wells.

Owen Wells, Vice Chairman of the philanthropic Libra Foundation, and his wife, Anna, President of the Portland Museum’s Board of Trustees, began collecting photography in the 1990s. The couple initially gravitated towards American artists with ties to Maine, but their collection has grown to include some of the most well-known photographers of the 20th century. The Wells’ collection spans more than eight decades and includes landscapes, portraits and scenes of everyday life.   

American Vision: Photographs from the Collection of Owen and Anna Wells will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art through February 23, 2014.