The New York Public Library

Gregory R. Miller & Co. and D.A.P.

present

LYLE ASHTON HARRIS

in conversation with

CHUCK CLOSE

celebrating the publication of

Lyle Ashton Harris’ new book

EXCESSIVE EXPOSURE

published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 6PM

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Margaret Liebman Forum, 2nd Floor

Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street

www.nypl.org | www.grmandco.com | www.artbook.com

Lyle Ashton Harris Lecture

Saturday | January 15 | 10:00 to 11:00

Doubletree Hotel

Harris will sign copies of his new book

Excessive Exposure

(published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.).

Photo l.a. XX + artLA projects
The 20th Annual International Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition & artLAprojects
LA’s Longest Running Art Fair Joins artLA projects Thursday, January 13, 2011 through Monday, January 17, 2011
Opening Reception benefits the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at LACMA

photo l.a. XX celebrates its 20th Anniversary as the longest running art fair west of New York and the largest photo-based art fair in the country, drawing over 10,000 attendees. It brings together photography dealers from around the globe, displaying the finest contemporary photography, video and multi-media installations along with masterworks from the 19th century. This is the 48th art fair produced by Stephen Cohen, Director of photo l.a. Its sister fairs include artLA and photo NY.

Previous fairs include: photo san francisco, photo MIAMI, photo santa fe, and the first vernacular photography fair in New York City.

Since photo l.a. was created in 1992, more than 300 galleries, private dealers and publishers have exhibited and more than 150 lectures and collecting seminars have been presented. Many significant artists have been introduced to the public during the fair. photo l.a. is honored to have played a significant role in the cultural life of Los Angeles and proud to have been the catalyst for numerous exhibitions, monographs, and acquisitions by major institutional and private collections, both locally and internationally. It has been essential in transforming the art/ photography landscape of Los Angeles by increasing public awareness and acceptance and the inclusion of photo-based art in almost all contemporary galleries and museum exhibitions.

artLA was created in 2004 as a public event bringing together a mix of national and international galleries, artists, collectors and curators for a visual dialogue on the current art scene. Its ongoing commitment to presenting the most challenging art being produced today has led to the creation of artLA projects, an ongoing citywide program of dynamic and innovative installations, exhibitions, seminars and conversations with established and cutting- edge artists in all media.

photo l.a. XX and the launch of artLA projects, is a prelude to a much larger artLA 2011 that will align with the start of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative and Art Platform, Los Angeles, a new art fair in the fall of 2011 created by the team that produces the Armory Show.

Exhibitor List as of 12/20/2010

21st Editions Abba Fine Art

Aperture Artbook | D.A.P. JoAnne Artman Gallery Blind Photographers Guild John Cleary Gallery Stephen Cohen Gallery Contemporary Works | Vintage Works, Ltd. Corden | Potts Gallery Stephen Daiter Gallery dnj Gallery Eyestorm Peter Fetterman Gallery Galerie Dix9 Gallery 19/21 Gallery M Gebert Contemporary Gitterman Gallery J.J. Heckenhauer Pan-View Gallery Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc. hous projects The Lapis Press Light Work Los Angeles Art Association | Gallery 825 Louis Klaitman Monroe Gallery of Photography

photo l.a. XX + artLA projects

MR Gallery Nazraeli Press El Nopal Press OFOTO Gallery One Hour Cleaners Kahmann Gallery Kaycee Olsen Gallery Kopeikin Gallery PHAIDON PHAIDON | STORE photo-eye Gallery photokunst Queensland Centre for Photography Riflemaker RoseGallery Schaden.com Select Vernacular Photographs | Norman Kulkin Skotia Gallery Barry Singer Gallery Smith Anderson North Joel Soroka Gallery Susan Spiritus Gallery Studio 391 Robert Tat Gallery TS+ Projects Villa del Arte Galleries Women in Photography International Young Projects

20th Anniversary Opening Reception William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Honored Guests Benefiting the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA

Opening Night Tickets

www.lacma.org/photola

Charity ID# T1880

Tickets

$80 Opening Night $20 1-Day Pass $30 4-Day Pass $80 Collecting Seminar

Location

1855 Main Street Santa Monica, CA 90401

Public Fair Hours

Friday Saturday Sunday Monday

January 14 January 15 January 16 January 17

11am – 7pm 11am – 7pm 11am – 7pm 11am – 6pm

Thursday, January 13th

6pm-9pm Opening benefit reception

Friday, January 14th

9:30am Collecting Seminar TBA*

12pm 2pm 4pm 6pm 6-8pm

Christina Caputo and Alex Klein, Panel Discussion “Words Without Pictures Revisited”

Rex Weiner, Lecture “On Independent Printing and Publishing”

Jeff Sheng in Conversation with Kaycee Olsen

Melanie Willhide in Conversation with Kaycee Olsen

Review LA Portfolio Viewing*

Saturday, January 15th 9:30am Collecting Seminar with

Chrissy Crawford Malone* 10am

Lyle Ashton Harris, Lecture 12pm

Uta Barth Lecture 2pm

Michael Light in Conversation with David Ulin 3pm

The La Brea Matrix, Panel Discussion with Stephen Shore 4pm

Ron Jude book-signing at Artbook | D.A.P. booth 5pm

Zoe Crosher in Conversation with Jan Tumlir 5pm

Joey L. Meet and greet at the photokunst booth

Sunday, January 16th 9:30am Collecting Seminar with Weston Naef * 11am

Andrew Moore, Lecture 1pm

Troubled Waters, Panel Discussion 3pm

David Taylor, Lecture 5pm

Carole Thompson, Lecture “William Eggleston’s Staggering Achievement”

Monday, January 17th 9:30am Collecting Seminar with Julie Rose Novakoff, Principal of Nova Fine Art, LLC*

1pm 3pm 4pm 5pm

Sara Terry and Amy Arbus, Panel Discussion “Two Approaches Towards StoryTelling”

Dawn of Man, Panel Discussion “Guerrillaism 101″ Illegal projections in urban spaces

Nic Rad, Performance “The Celebritist Manifesto”

Josh Peters in Conversation with Geoff Tuck

Lectures and panel discussions are held at the Doubletree Guest Suites,1707 4th Street, Santa Monica 90405, located across the street from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

*            Collecting Seminars will take place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium ** For information on Review LA, contact: CENTER at 505.984.8353 or www.visitcenter.org

Additional programming TBA. For the latest information, please contact 323.937.5525 or visit www.photola.comand follow our twitter feeds @photoLAfair and @artLAfair

Press Contact: Jeannine Jacobi 310.857.6994            jeannine@freshpr.net

Thank you to our Partners and Sponsors for their generous support.

Adobe · Angelini Osteria · Aperture · Arte Al Limite · Art Ltd. · Art Nexus · Art Now · Artfacts.net · Artillery · Artlog · Art Scene · The Art Street Journal · Behance · bld · Create:Fixate · Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany · Cube · Dear Dave · Elizabeth Stevens & Co. · Epicurean Umbrella · Escuela Taqueria · The Equation · Family · Flak Photo · Fraction Magazine · Gawker Artists · Goethe-Institut Los Angeles · Grolsch · It’s Liquid · KCRW Radio · LA Canvas · LatinArt.com · Los Angeles Arts Month · Lucie Foundation · The MAK Center for Art & Architecture · Manfred Heiting · Mutual Art · The New York Times · Paciugo Gelato · photography-now ·            Reeds Ginger Brew · Silvershotz · Turon Travel · Unique and Rare · Visual Art Source · Vita Coco

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:

JANE BROWN
JBROWN@DAPINC.COM

ARTBOOK | D.A.P.

The Fair hosts over 200 international presses, booksellers, antiquarian dealers, and independent artist/publishers presenting a diverse range of the best in contemporary art publications.

I wanted to see what kind of titles were going to be featured and to get a sense of the scope and focus of this book fair. My interest, of course, was books by African Diaspora photographers, though any African Diaspora artists would do. As it turned out, this was a really long journey to discover just a couple of new titles,* though I was hardly surprised that there were so few. I came away with the persistent question that pesters me (and many others)—where are the publications by and about black artists?

To be fair, NYABF does include some really interesting vendors as well as some terrific work by an international group of artists. After a great chat with cartoonist/activist Rebecca Migdal about her collaboration with the Yes Men, I picked up a copy of World War 3, to which she contributed (I’m really interested in the idea of graphic novels and comics), and also Andrew Laties’ Rebel Bookseller: How to Improvise Your Own Indie Store and Beat Back the Chains and had a good chat with him; he told me about Myles C. Pinkney’s photo-illustrated children’s books which I’ll be adding to the list of titles by black photographers. I also fell in love with Lubok Books‘ gorgeous letterpress-printed volumes and it’s probably a good thing for my budget that he didn’t take credit cards or checks, because I wanted them all, athough if they continue to weigh on my mind I have two more days…I also loved virtually all of the small titles from Coracle—I could have bought them all as gifts.

Henry Roy, Spirit, 2009

One photographer whose name I didn’t recognize was Henry Roy, so I wrote down his name to, well, check to see if he is black. It sounds crass but I have a budget and would rather keep my collecting focus narrow to either black artists or black subjects, which aren’t always one and the same. Roy’s new publication is titled Spirit, and now that I see his site I may have to go back and get his book. A glance at Amazon.com reveals another Roy title, Out Of the Blue, which isn’t listed on his site, so Roy was a real discovery for me.

Gregory R. Miller & Co. had Lyle Ashton Harris’ Blow Up from 2008 displayed; I asked about the forthcoming title, Excessive Exposure: The Complete Chocolate Portraits, and Eva, the rep, let me know that although the book won’t be out until spring there is a PDF review copy available now, so I’ll be requesting that to review here. I’m very excited about another Lyle publication; Eva did share with me that Lyle’s eponymous first book with Gregory Miller was also the title that launched Gregory Miller’s press and that he regards Lyle as the reason he’s a publisher. That was great to hear.

Aperture had Hank Willis Thomas’ Pitch Blackness in the inventory at their booth, though not on display; I was so relieved to see it there that I forgot to check for Dawoud Bey’s Class Pictures. As I posted here recently, their Zwelethu Mthethwa monograph is delayed until 2010.

Kehinde Wiley, Black Light

powerHouse Books had the one new title I purchased (though on my way back I stopped at Strand Books and it was about $20 cheaper there [patronize Strand at your discretion]): Kehinde Wiley’s Black Light. It’s a sumptuous yet slender full-color folio, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that Wiley is primarily known as a painter and thus an “artist” versus “photographer,” and a bit of an art star at that. I think this kind of work is more saleable—perhaps it’s more striking on the shelf alongside all of the other new titles out there? But it’s a great-looking book and a great addition; I can’t wait to delve further into it. I also picked up powerHouse’s Fall/Winter 2009-2010 catalog but haven’t had a chance to peruse it. Hopefully it will yield some more titles.

*Luckily, I was able to pick up the DAP catalog and while they aren’t strictly photographers, artists-who-use-photography Glenn Ligon and Rashid Johnson both have new monographs:

Glenn Ligon, Some Changes

Glenn Ligon, Some Changes

Glenn Ligon is one of the preeminent members of a generation of American artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s with conceptually-based paintings, photographs and text-oriented works concerning the social, linguistic and political constructions of race, gender and sexuality. Incorporating sources as diverse as photographic scrapbooks and Richard Pryor’s stand-up comedy routines–his lush coal-dust paintings of excerpts from James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village,” for instance–Ligon’s art is a meditation on representation of the self in relation to culture and history. Handsomely designed with a hardcover slipcase, Some Changes is the artist’s first significant monograph. Well-illustrated texts by critics and curators Wayne Baerwaldt, Huey Copeland, Darby English, Wayne Koestenbaum and Mark Nash survey Ligon’s works from 1982 to 2005, and a candid interview with Toronto artist Stephen Andrews delves into Ligon’s personal insights and professional experiences.

Rashid Johnson, Sharpening My Oyster Knife

Rashid Johnson, Sharpening My Oyster Knife

Rashid Johnson belongs to a generation of young African-American artists that takes an extremely critical approach to the search for its cultural roots. His artistic strategies, which include photography, painting and sculpture, performance and beyond, are aesthetically nonconformist and politically provocative.

It was interesting going to this just after having added several new titles to this site in the last week by artists I’d never heard of—that sense of discovery led me to hope that there would be similar revelations at a fair of this size and scope. Let’s say that, on average, each vendor brought 10 books (some had only one while some had dozens)—that would make more than 2,000 titles represented at this fair. To have come away with only two new titles by African Diaspora photographers is beyond under-representation. The fact that among these there are no new titles by black women artists is especially disappointing. I want to think that there are titles about which I don’t know because those artists are just off my radar, or even those who might read these don’t think to send info on their own titles. I think I might have more luck studying the bookshelves of my gracious host this weekend.

Alright, now I’m off to sleep.

For many the title Blow Up refers to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film in which a photographer uses his camera to express his lust for a model, and in the same moment, the camera may have caught a murder on his film.  The film sets up a deep critique as to photography’s ability to record reality and to express yearning.  This reference and metaphor lies at the heart of a new book with the same title.

Blow Up is the first retrospective monograph of the artist Lyle Ashton Harris.  Published by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art for his 2008 traveling exhibition of the same name, this small (8 ½ by 6 1/2 inched) softbound book tracks the Harris’ career through a variety of visual tracks.  Harris’ utilizes many different tangents of photographic medium : from the use vernacular to the handling of collage onto its using photography as a stage for performance.   It is these abilities to transcend forms and find new artistic expressions that warrant a monograph of Harris’ work, for it is imperative for viewers to understand the visual journey that his ideas travel along.  But the form of the book itself halts some of the reading of Harris’ complex work.

The 192-page book takes us from the early well-known work of Harris’ beginning in 1988 and travels through 2006.  Taking us through the catalog of work chronologically, it starts with Harris’ most well known imagery.  These aggressive black and white images Harris’ uses the body serves as a stage for performing his complicated views about race and sexuality.  Identity politics serve as a space of inspiration for these images.  Men and women are clad in white face makeup return the stare of the viewer. (American Triptych (Kym Lyle and Crinoline). They stand in wigs defiantly screaming back at the camera (Ecstasy #2); they are clad in the American flag, yet are often blurred, as if to run away from a gaze (America’s Triptych  (Miss America)) .  They are defiant and strong.

From these images, we see Harris as a different type of image-maker.  The Watering Hole represents Harris’ beginnings with collage work.  In this work he is responding to the story of Jeffery Dahmer, and his violent acts.  Harris created collages, which are then re-photographed which elegantly pair newspaper clippings, advertisements, and text to combine the acts of fetish and fear that Dahmer’s acts represents.

These artistic acts lead Harris to create the piece Blow Up, for which the book is named after.  In 2004 Harris shifts his practice from collage to photographic installations for this work.  Responding to the an Addias ad of the famous soccer star Zinedine Zidane receiving a pedicure from a brown skin man, Harris’ collects imagery that hints the same homoerotic and servitude nature of this inspirational image.   This image appears at the center of the work, and is cloaked with images of sports fans in the stadium, police there to protect both player and spectator and images from popular culture that reflect the fetish for heroes.   Here the act of collage was not made for the camera, but shifts to be made for the space in which the work was installed (at Rhona Hofmann Gallery Chicago, 2004).  And as Harris’ installed the work in different cities throughout the years (Armory 2005, Seville 2006) allowing the city, space and different political environments reflect into the installation of the work.

Lastly Harris’ work travels to Ghana, where Harris lives and teaches part of the year.  Harris’ turns his camera onto the people of Ghana, and allows this African country to speak for itself. Instead of the poor images of Africa that we are often see, Harris’ offers snapshop images of a modern culture complete rich with culture which is complicated by technology and cell phones.   These images were included in the book but not in the exhibition, and are a part of the artist’s collection of images.

Writings by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cassandra Coblentz, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and a conversation between the artist and Senam Okudzeto intertwine into the imagery offering a variety of reads of Harris’ work.  These writings dominate the pages of the book.  From the anecdotal (Appiah) to the rather academic (Coblentz) the writers repeatedly focus on the installations of Blow Up, but offer very little commentary on the work that comes before, and more importantly after that pivotal body of work.  Much is mentioned to Harris’ ability to collect and harvest vernacular imagery in his collages, and the history of this creative outlet.  While much is mentioned about Harris’s trips to Africa and the difference in cultural community (reflections are made about being a homosexuality in an Ghana), little is offered in the discussion in the sharp visual shifts of the work.  This creates a confusing visual conclusion to this collection of images.

Design components of this book make it a challenge to read.   The text matches the teal cover of the book, creating a difficult read for the eyes.  Reading also challenged by two types of paper (one cream, and one stark white).  Some reproductions that illuminate the writer’s ideas are in black in white and others are in teal and white, which does not translate a full color image well.   The book is rather small in size, especially when looking at large installation work.  These quirky design elements do not help with the enjoyment of viewing of the book.

This is collection of Lyle Ashton Harris’ work is an important document discussing the ideas and concepts of an often overlooked artist.  More attention should have been spent on the consequences of the books design, and the weightiness of all of the essays.  For these elements dilute the power of this visual collection. – Myra Greene