The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) hosts a pair of Photograph Exhibitions

Thursday, 17 May 2007 00:55

AUSTIN, TEXAS – The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) presents a pair of exhibitions, The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures, and 24 Summers at Barton Springs Pool: Photographs by Will van Overbeek . Ninety important American images combined with Overbeek’s vibrant color prints survey a spectrum of genres including still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and street scenes.  The exhibition taps into the strong interest in photography found in Austin, as reflected by local galleries devoted to the medium, impressive public and private collections, and the many important photographers who live in the region.  Executive Director Dana Friis-Hansen comments, "A Century in Pictures brings to Austin many masterpieces of photographic history from one of the world's premier museum collections, highlighting the wide scope and exciting originality of photography as it developed in the United States as an art form in the 20th century.  Providing a colorful counterpoint, Austin artist Will van Overbeek's large and vibrant prints celebrate one of Austin's most treasured natural landmarks and the many ways we have enjoyed it over the years." On exhibition At AMOA–Downtown, May 19 – August 12, 2007.

The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures

A Century in Pictures presents a selection of photographs by American photographers from the Target Collection of American Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Highlighting a range of artistic impulses, the exhibition demonstrates a variety of approaches to photography, and surveys changing tendencies in the medium. Significant photographs by seminal photographers whose works are now considered the basis of the American photographic tradition make up the collection. Key moments in that history are represented, such as Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907), Charles P. "Pete" Conrad Jr.’s Mission: Apollo-Saturn 12 (1969), and selections from Robert Frank’s The Americans (1955/56).  The ninety works will showcase artists including Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Kenneth Josephson, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Ray Metzker, Ed Ruscha, Paul Strand, James Van Der Zee, Catherine Wagner, and Edward Weston. These artists, who gave expression around them from different perspectives, in turn have also affected contemporary photographic practices.

Not strictly a chronological survey, the exhibition examines changing tendencies in the medium. In the early part of the twentieth-century, photographers like Stieglitz sought to define photography as a modern art form whose identity was not bound to the aesthetics of academic painting. By the mid-twentieth century, artists like Frank and Friedlander redefined our understanding of a photograph’s potential to record everyday experience. The exhibition concludes with a work made in 1989 by David Levinthal of two figurines placed in an artificial environment that he created and assembled in his studio. Due to the propensity of staged photographs being made in recent decades, this work is a poignant close to the exhibition. .

24 Summers at Barton Springs Pool: Photographs by Will van Overbeek

Austin photographer Will van Overbeek has been visiting Barton Springs Pool for twenty-four years, documenting the theater of humanity that swarms to this local landmark. Commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine in 1983 to photograph the pool, the photographer became fascinated and turned the original assignment into an on-going project. Since that time, van Overbeek has continued to work with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the passion of an artist, capturing the lively and diverse social interactions that occur at the water’s edge on the hottest summer days. Whether it is the pleasure of a perfectly executed dive, the wacky humor of an awkward leap, the stunning distortion as a swimmer glides through azure water, or intergenerational splashing and play, it is captured with a keen eye for complex composition and dramatic color. Will van Overbeek graduated in 1978 from The University of Texas where he studied under legendary street photographer Garry Winogrand and was advised by documentary photographer Russell Lee. Like Winogrand, he is know for "shooting from the hip," all the better, he explains, "to catch real life without making a ripple of disturbance in the scene I’m observing." From the thousands of photographs he has captured over the years, the artist has personally gleaned and printed a portfolio of thirty-five vivid images as digital inkjet pigment-prints for the exhibition and generously donated them to the Austin Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

The Austin Museum of Art is funded in part by The Austin Fine Arts Alliance, Museum Trustees, Members, and Patrons. Additional support is provided by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

Visit The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) - Go to www.amoa.org for more information.