A THOUSAND WORDS

PHOTOgRAPHS fROm THe TWeeD cOllecTiON

A THOUSAND WORDSPHOTOgRAPHS fROm THe TWeeD cOllecTiON

Press Release i

Artist Index – Alphabetically iii

Esther Bubley – Artist 1

Henri Cartier-Bresson – Artist 3

Carolyn DeMeritt – Artist 5

Vance Gellert – Artist 7

André Kertész – Artist and Curator 9

Meryl McMaster – Artist 11

Marc Riboud – Artist 13

iA THOUSAND WORDSPHOTOgRAPHS fROm THe TWeeD cOllecTiON

Press Release

For ImmedIate release

Events Contact: Christine StromCommunication SpecialistTweed Museum of Art(218) 726-7823cstrom@d.umn.eduwww.d.umn.edu/tma

A THOUSAND WORDS: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE TWEED COLLECTION

WHAT: Exhibition featuring 47 photographs by outstanding local, regional, national, and international photographers.

WHEN:Opening Reception: Friday, September 22, 2017, 5:00 – 7:00 PMExhibition dates: May 23, 2017 – December 31, 2017

WHERE: Tweed Museum of Art, 1201 Ordean Court, Duluth, MN 55812

Related Events:Tweevening: December 12, 2017, Alice Tweed Tuohy Gallery, 6:30 – 8:00 PM

Duluth, MN – The Tweed Museum of Art (TMA) at the University of Minnesota Duluth is proud to present A Thousand Words: Photographs from the Tweed Collection, an exhibition curated by Ken Bloom. The exhibition presents a selection of 47 photographs of people in various dynamic situations by 47 socially engaged photographers.

Ken Bloom, curator of the exhibition, says, “I am grateful for the opportunity to increase the visibility and recognition of so many artists as well as the depth of the Tweed photographic collection and to present imagery with such powerful visions of humanity.”

The artists selected for this exhibition are some of the most celebrated and accomplished photographers of the twentieth century as well as many highly-achieving up-and-comers. — many currently living and working in Minnesota.

To view the artists selected for this exhibition, go to the Artist Index for more information.

Exhibition Contact:Ken BloomDirectorTweed Museum of Art(218) 726-8751kbloom@d.umn.edu

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A Thousand Words presents an array of interpersonal photographs that were selected from the Tweed Museum’s holdings. Though the Museum’s collection includes a far wider range of subject matter than photographs of people, landscapes, abstractions, architecture, and more were set aside for an investigation of images that addressed humans in relation to each other. Given our highly divided social world, it’s worth noting that A Thousand Words is in part a construct, an anti-selfie curatorial notion about photography made by combining the varied depictions of those other than ourselves, by seers other than ourselves, in service of a collective humanistic vision.

In creating this exhibition, an attempt was made to address problems of representation by paying more attention to the photographer/subject relationship than of the relative notoriety of the artists held in the Tweed collection. When possible, the artists selected were those who had long-standing experience with their subjects and/or were surveying the social fab-ric of a community with which they identified.

A Thousand Words is an attempt to highlight an expanding area of the Tweed’s collection. The depiction of our social condition is crucial to the educational mission of the Museum, central to the history and dynamism of the photographic arts, and relevant to the cultural constituencies of our regional communities.

Related Events at Tweed Museum of Art:

Opening Reception: September 22, 2017 5:00 – 7:00 PM

Tweevening with Ken Bloom, Director: December 5, 2017 6:30 – 8:00 PM

About the Museum: www.d.umn.edu/tma

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Artist Index – Alphabetically

amberg, rob

arndt, tom

Beal, endia

Bey, dawoud

Bourke-White, margaret

Bubley, esther

Cartier-Bresson, Henri

Chong, albert

Chou, Jessica

Clark, annabel

Connor, linda

Cunningham, Imogen

Curtis, edward s.

demeritt, Carolyn

Gellert, Vance

Gest, Ben

Grinker, lori

Helfman, maxine

Hudson White, Clarence

Jones, tom

Kertész, andré

leibovitz, annie

lindbeck, samantha

mann, sally

mapplethorpe, robert

mark, mary ellen

mcCorkle, rocky

mcmaster, meryl

miller, Wayne

mole, arthur s.

orkin, ruth

Parks, Gordon

Pearcy, Wanda

Penn, Irving

Post-Wolcott, marion

Praslowicz, Kip

Pratt, Greta

riboud, marc

sander, august

salgado, sabastião

shambroom, Paul

smith, eugene W.

soth, alec

strand, Paul

Vainio, Ivy

Verburg, Joann

Webb, alex

Wilson, Will

Winogrand, Garry

Young Huie, Wing

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Biography

(1921-1998) was born in Phillips, Wisconsin. She became interested in photography early in her life and left home in the late 1930s to study at the Minneapolis School of Design. Bubley was especially intrigued by documentary photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). In 1940, Bubley moved to Washington, DC to pursue work as a photographer and went on to New York, where Edward Steichen helped her land a temporary position at Vogue magazine. Bubley returned to Washington in 1941 and was hired as a microfilmer in the National Archives. Several months later, she was hired by Roy Stryker as a lab technician for the FSA darkroom. Bubley began taking photographs on the side and eventually was sent on assignments for the FSA. Later, she worked with Stryker on assignment photographing for Standard Oil of New Jersey’s public relations efforts.

While working for Stryker and corporate clients, Bubley became a regular freelance photographer for numerous national magazines and produced many photo-essays and several cover stories for Life magazine. Bubley’s most ambitious magazine project, however, was “How America Lives” for Ladies’ Home Journal, a celebrated series that ran intermittently between 1948 and 1960.

Bubley’s photographs have been acquired by several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the National Portrait Gallery (Howard Greenburg Gallery).

Esther Bubley – Artist

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Selected Images

Esther Bubley (American, 1921-1998)Strongman, 1951Gelatin silver printCollection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDSax Brothers Purchase FundD2012.3.8

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Biography

The son of a wealthy textile merchant, Henri Cartier- Bresson (1908-2004) studied painting at André Lhote’s academy in Montparnasse in 1927 and soon thereafter entered the bohemian world of the Parisian avantgarde. In 1931, he began to use a camera and to make photographs that reveal the influence of both Cubism and Surrealism—bold, flat planes, collage-like compositions, and spatial ambiguity—as well as express an affinity for society’s outcasts and the back alleys where they live and work. Within a year, he had mastered the miniature 35mm Leica camera and had begun traveling in Italy, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico, developing what would become one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century photographic style. Although he was influenced by such photographers as Eugène Atget and André Kertész, his photographic fusion of form and content was groundbreaking. In 1952, he published the landmark monograph, The Decisive Moment.

Cartier-Bresson was drafted into the French army in 1940. He was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped on his third attempt and joined the French Resistance. In 1946, he assisted in the preparation of a “posthumous” show of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the mistaken belief that he had been killed in the war. The following year, he founded the Magnum photo agency with Robert Capa (1913–1954), David “Chim” Seymour (1911–1956), and others, and spent the next twenty years on assignment, documenting the great upheavals in India and China, and also traveling to the Soviet Union, Cuba, Canada, Japan, and Mexico. He left Magnum in 1966 and devoted himself primarily to painting and drawing (Howard Greenburg Gallery).

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.– Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson – Artist

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Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)Rue Mouffetard, 1954Gelatin silver printCollection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDGift of Martin WeinsteinD2015.46.1

Selected Images

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Carolyn DeMeritt – Artist

Biography

A native of Charlotte, NC, Carolyn DeMeritt is a photographer who has worked at her craft for over 35 years. She has participated in numerous exhibitions across the country and internationally. Her work is included in many museum, corporate, and private collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC; the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC; and the Bank of America collection. Through the years, while focusing on the development of her own visual messages and photographic techniques, DeMeritt has collaborated with other artists to bring to the public an awareness of certain groups of people who reside in the shadows but whose strength and perseverance should be celebrated.

From 1986 through 1990, I photographed ten young girls, shooting each girl several times each year, as they grew from childhood into adolescence. These portraits attempt to celebrate this growth and examine the physical and emotional changes that occur in young women during this period of life. – Carolyn DeMeritt

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Selected Images

Carolyn DeMeritt (American, b.1946)Caitlin/Halo, 1987/2017Archival pigment print, ed. 7/25Collection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDSax Brothers Purchase FundD2017.22.3

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Vance Gellert – Artist

Biography

Vance Gellert is the recipient of awards and fellowships such as Minnesota History and Cultural Heritage Legacy Fund; Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship; Jerome Foundation Travel Study Grant; McKnight Foundation Photography Fellowship; and National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Visual Artist Fellowship. Gellert’s work is held in collections such as Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Museum of Art, Princeton University; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Daimler Contemporary Art Museum; Tweed Museum of Art; North Dakota Museum of Art; Instituto Chileno Norte Americano, Santiago, Chile; State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Vance Gellert’s body of work, Sleeping Giant shows a people struggling with economies of dwindling scale, resource management, and conservationism coming into conflict with entrenched practices. Though he describes his subjects as “indomitable,” mythically heroic in their efforts to wrestle a meager living from rock, his photographs navigate a terrain caught between the brute scale of mining operations and an imperiled middle class existence — as in a panoramic image of backyard playgrounds perched atop an open ore pit.

Even while heavily focused on matters concerning industry and extraction, Gellert’s attention to ways of life that merit retention — high school hockey, porketta, civic engagement, Finnish heritage — show just how tenuously held such things are. (Tim White, mnartists.org)

I met Adeline while working on a project about self-taught artists of Minnesota. The project was inspired as a result of my 13 years curating exhibitions of photography for the pARTs Photographic Arts…. There’s something about visiting visual artists in their studios. It not only yields compelling imagery, I find it creatively inspirational.– Vance Gellert

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Selected Images

Vance Gellert (American, b. 1944)Adeline Wright, Duluth, MN, 2004Color coupler print on Kodak paperCollection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDSax Brothers Purchase FundD2006.ph2

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Biography

Born in Budapest, André Kertész received his bachelor’s degree from the Hungarian Academy of Commerce in 1912, after which he found a job as a clerk at the Budapest Stock Exchange. The work provided him with the resources to purchase his first camera; he brought it with him when, in 1914, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. The photographs he made during the war represent the beginnings of his formation as a serious artist.

In 1925, he made the fateful decision to move to Paris. Excited about an opportunity to participate in the bohemian artist’s life, he worked as a freelance photographer. Working for dozens of different European magazines, Kertész found Paris a welcoming and artistically inspiring place. Within a short time he made portraits of the artists living in Paris, including Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Sergei Eisenstein, and Tristan Tzara.

In 1936, after the death of his mother and his marriage to Elizabeth Saly, he moved to New York, where he had been engaged by the Keyston Agency. Though he canceled the contract only a year later, the progress of the war made his return to Paris impossible. Unable to leave and treated like an enemy by the government (which prevented him from publishing for several years), Kertész was caught in tragic, uncompromising circumstances.

It was not until 1964, when John Szarkowski, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, organized a solo show, that Kertész’s career was reawakened. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kertész was shown regularly at the major international museums — having solo shows in Paris, Tokyo, London, Stockholm, Budapest, and Helsinki (Howard Greenburg Gallery, NYC).

Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison d’être. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison d’être, which lives on in itself. – André Kertész

André Kertész – Artist and Curator

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Selected Images

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)Satiric Dancer, 1926Gelatin silver printCollection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDMarguerite L. Gilmore Charitable Foundation FundD2017.15.1

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Biography

Meryl McMaster graduated in photography from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is the recipient of many awards and is being featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada.

McMaster’s practice extends beyond straight photography by incorporating other artistic media into how she builds images and expresses her ideas. McMaster’s resulting work takes advantage of both the spontaneity of photography and the manual production of props or sculptural garments, performance and self-reflection.In-Between Worlds explores the mixing and transforming of bi-cultural identities— Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian. This series addresses the idea of liminality, of being betwixt and between cultural identities and histories. In-Between Worlds is a sequence of moments that appear out of the ordinary and can be interpreted as being in a state of suspended belief.

Talisman and prop-like sculptures become extensions of the body that suggest a collaging of identities. “Anima” means soul or life in Latin and in many cultures, especially in my Plains Cree heritage, butterflies represent the souls of your ancestors. I was also drawn to the symbolism butterflies have in connection to metamorphosis, which had significance and correlation to the story I was telling within this series. Through this body of work I want to transform the way the viewer and I understand the past from the perspective of the present. Throughout all the images there is an ethereal feeling occurring. I wanted to continue this feeling and give a surreal quality to the image by having vibrant colored butterflies in a wintery landscape. Butterflies fly south for the winter and wouldn’t survive the cold days and nights of Canadian winters. I am also turning into icy figure or fading away and they are landing on me to almost bring me back to life or even to feed off me like they do a flower to keep their spirits alive. So we almost need each other for survival. – Meryl McMaster

Meryl McMaster – Artist

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Meryl McMaster (Canadian, Plains Cree, b.1988)Anima (from In Between Two Worlds series), 2012Digital chromogenic print, AP 1/2Collection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDMarguerite L. Gilmore Charitable Foundation FundD2016.15

Selected Images

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Marc Riboud – Artist

Biography

Marc Riboud (b.1923) was born in Lyon, France. He took his first photograph at the Great Exhibition of Paris in 1937 with a small Vest-Pocket camera. From 1945 to 1948, Riboud studied engineering but eventually dropped his studies to devote himself full-time to photography.

In 1953, he joined the Magnum agency after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. In 1955, Riboud crossed the Middle East and Afghanistan to reach India, where he remained for one year. He then travelled to China, the USSR, Algeria and Western Africa, photographing throughout his journey. Between 1968 and 1969 Riboud was one of the few photographers allowed to travel in South and North Vietnam. In 1976, Riboud became president of Magnum, a position he held for three years.

Riboud published many books of his photographs including: The Three Banners of China, Journal, Huang Shan, Capital of Heaven, Angkor, the Serenity of Buddhism and Marc Riboud in China. In 2004, a Riboud retrospective was held at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. He has received many awards, including the Overseas Press Club, the Time- Life Achievement, the Lucie Award, and the ICP InfinityAward. And His work is exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Paris, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo (Howard Greenburg Gallery, NYC).

The idea of photography as evidence is pure bullshit. A photo is no more proof of any reality than what you may hear being said by someone in a bus. We only record details, small fragments of the world. This cannot allow any judgement, even if the sum of these details may convey a point of view. – Marc Riboud

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Selected Images

Marc Riboud (French, 1923-2016)Minneapolis, 2006Gelatin silver printCollection of Tweed Museum of Art, UMDGift of Martin WeinsteinD2014.29.11