Rochester, N.Y. – Jamie M. Allen, Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Associate Curator in the Department of Photography, will guide guests through the books featured in Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory. Tour the virtual exhibition in advance of the talk at eastman.org/nettles.
When: Friday, June 5; Time: 1 p.m.; Where: Register via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9215906820321/WN_oNUDME7DT0e5a94dZppDPA
Price: FREE (Advance registration required; space is limited)
About the exhibition
Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory includes more than 150 photographs and objects that represent the diversity of Nettles’s career. Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand‐coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in a woman’s life, often with autobiographical undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.
To accompany the exhibition, the George Eastman Museum and University of Texas Press have published a 200+-page book that provides a survey of Bea Nettles’s groundbreaking mixed-media photography. The catalogue presents the most up-to-date scholarship on Bea Nettles, with essays by Jamie M. Allen, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Associate Curator, Department of Photography, George Eastman Museum; Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, former director, the Sheldon Art Galleries; and Amy L. Powell, curator of modern and contemporary art, Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; as well as additional texts by Bea Nettles. The volume is illustrated with examples from all of Nettles’s major series to date, including her photographic and book works.
Bea Nettles has taught photography since 1970. Her classic alternative processes textbook, Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook, has influenced two generations of readers. She has delivered lectures and workshops internationally and is recognized for her innovations in mixed media photography. Her images can be found in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ. Her artist’s books are included in special collections libraries at numerous museums and universities. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships and grants from the New York and Illinois State Arts Councils.
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