Location
Opening reception Sunday, March 16, 2:00-5:00 pm, with a talk by Ida Wyman at 2:30 pm.
These paired exhibitions present work by Ida Wyman and Kevin Miyazaki, who both began their careers as photojournalists and have developed personal bodies of work that transcend editorial photography. Their beautiful, richly evocative images raise important questions about social conditions, economic issues, and racial and political tensions.
Ida Wyman: The Chords of Memory
Ida Wyman began working as a photojournalist in the 1940s and quickly developed into a serious artist. A pioneer in her field as a young woman, Wyman was the first female printer at Manhattan's Acme Newspictures (now UPI). She became a successful freelance photographer for publications like Life, Colliers, and The New York Times, and later worked as a scientific photographer for Columbia University. Today she is intensely involved in curating and printing her early work.
Wyman's photographs capture intimate moments from daily life and reflect her concern for social justice and the dignity of ordinary people. Whether they depict children at play, men and women at work, or a moment on an urban street, her images are infused with warmth and compassion. This exhibit will focus on new prints of Wyman's work from the 1940s and 1950s, when she worked on assignment for many national publications, but will also include a collection of vintage prints and ephemera and a number of more recent works. While Wyman works primarily in black and white, the exhibit will include several of her exquisite color photographs as well.
Kevin Miyazaki: Camp Home
Kevin Miyazaki's work often explores family history and memory. He will be showing prints from his series Camp Home, which documents repurposed barracks used as internment camps for Japanese Americans (including some of Miyazaki's own relatives) during WWII. These internment camps were sited in dusty, barren landscapes, and the barracks in which Japanese cilivians were housed were severely utilitarian structures. After the war, the barracks were distributed to returning veterans, who used them as homes, barns, and outbuildings. Miyazaki's images capture the experience of the Nisei as well as the barracks' subsequent owners. He writes, "The act of searching for the buildings and approaching their owners is important to my process. Family histories intersect and are connected by the history of these buildings, and by the lives lived within their walls."
The exhibition will also include Miyazaki's recent artist's book inspired by a 1940 catalog of Sears home models. This "fictional but factual" publication is full of period photographs and quotes that lend context to his lovely but spare photographs.
Images: (l) Ida Wyman,Checking out the Card Game, New York City, 1948. (r) Kevin Miyazaki, Huffman property on CR177 (N. of CR120 on the East side) No. 33. Likely TID# 5076, 2010.
