William and Sarah Ross Soter Endowed Curator of Photography at Columbus Museum of Art

The Columbus Museum of Art announces the establishment of the William and Sarah Ross Soter Endowed Curator of Photography. The first endowed position in CMA history, this pivotal gift builds upon the Soter and Ross families’ commitment to photography. The Soters’ pledge of $1.5 million to the Art Matters endowment and capital campaign enables the Museum to present special exhibitions of photography, support original scholarship related to the medium, and provide educational and other programs for generations to come. Catherine Evans has accepted the first William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography appointment.

At age thirteen, Sally Ross Soter began volunteering at the Columbus Museum of Art. She inherited her commitment to the Museum from her parents, Elizabeth M. and Richard M. Ross. Mrs. Ross is a long-time Museum Trustee and founding member of the Museum’s Women’s Board.

“The Columbus Museum of Art is important to me because it is the first place I ever volunteered,” said Mrs. Soter. “The hours I spent there have given me a tremendous connection with the Museum even though Bill and I now live in Florida.”

Mrs. Soter’s interest in photography was inspired by her father, an avid photographer and collector. His commitment to photography led to the naming of CMA’s Richard M. Ross Photography Center, a gallery dedicated to presenting photography exhibitions.

The Ross family has been a long-time supporter of CMA’s photography program. The family gave CMA its first significant body of photography holdings, created a foundation and direction for collecting work by twentieth-century photographers, and supported the Museum’s acquisition of the Photo League collection.

“Photography has long been a passion of ours. Bill and I are pleased and privileged to be able to give this gift to the Museum,” said Mrs. Soter. "This gift will ensure that the photography program continues to grow in scope and prominence. I hope it will also inspire others to follow their own passions, endowing other positions that resonate with them.”

Catherine Evans’s tenure as The William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography will begin in January 2011. Catherine joined CMA in 1996 as the Curator of Photography and since 2004, has also served as Chief Curator. She has curated more than 45 exhibitions, giving several artists their first one-person museum debuts. In 2001 she spearheaded the successful acquisition of the Photo League collection, the most significant photography acquisition in CMA’s history. The Museum is now nationally recognized for its comprehensive holdings in this period. She has directed the development of major international exhibitions and partnerships such as Renoir’s Women; Edgar Degas: the Last Landscape, which had a second venue in Copenhagen; and In Monet’s Garden: The Lure of Giverny, which had a second venue in Paris. She was the principal author and curator of the exhibition A View from Here: Recent Pictures from Central Europe and the American Midwest, which toured internationally and nationally. She has been a portfolio reviewer in Santa Fe, Houston, Portland, and Atlanta. Prior to the Columbus Museum of Art, Evans worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and before that, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, in New York and Montreal, Canada. She received her degree from Williams College in Art History and German Literature.

“I am greatly honored the Soters chose to ensure the sustainability of our institution through the endowment of a photography position at the Columbus Museum of Art,” said CMA Executive Director Nannette V. Maciejunes. “Catherine’s talent, passion, and knowledge have rightly earned her a national reputation that has, and will continue to, enhance the prominence of our photography collection.”

“This unprecedented gift affords me an incredible opportunity to devote my energies to growing the photography program,” said Catherine Evans. “I am honored to be part of this historic moment for the Columbus Museum of Art.”

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Nudes pose in the cold Akron weather for Tunick

Monday morning, Spencer Tunick, 42, of New York state, took pictures of Roger Marble, of Brimfield Township, and Jen Maurer, of Akron, for his series of nude individuals in public settings. Tunick is in town for the holidays with his wife, Akron native Kristin Bowler, a graphic designer.

The photographer was Spencer Tunick — an artist best known for his photographs of large groups of people in the nude in public spaces. In 2004, 2,700 people stripped naked for a Tunick shoot near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in downtown Cleveland.

Tunick plans to take more photographs in Akron. Those interested in being subjects can reach him through his Web site.

Tunick is not sure what he will do with his collection of Akron shots. His next show is set to open Jan. 15 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico. It will feature portraits of individuals he took this year in Mexico City.

Read the Ohio.com for more on the Akron shoot.

Revealing the Grid

The Weston Art Gallery seems to welcome a preoccupation with the challenge of its street-level gallery space that is nearly dominated by windows looking out onto Cincinnati’s downtown streets of 7th and Walnut. Thomas Macaulay’s House Divided: SiteSpecific Environmental Installation currently on view is another such invitation. With its maze of cardboard boxes, nearly all of them white, The Weston almost begs comparison with the CAC’s Tara Donovan, but I’ll let someone else write that review.

Perhaps my most powerful revelation as an art history student occurred when I was introduced to the grid not just as a design principle in architecture and painting, but most impressive as a concept of our living space. As a professor of art history I always enjoyed most revealing this to my students. Forcing them to recognize the tiles on the walls, ceilings and floors of the classrooms as well as the inherent design of campus buildings as nearly uniform three-dimensional grids in which they spent their days, their lives. Watching their eyes get big, I knew from that moment many of them would never see the world the same way again. House Divided wonderfully forces a similar revelation not only of the gridded space that is The Weston Art Gallery, but of how we move and live within the grid. Despite the analytical clarity of a grid we tend to be blinded to it. And like all mazes, Macaulay’s cardboard box maze forces us to move blindly through this space and in doing so reveals our blindness to the forms around us.

Similarly, the photographs of Fredrik Marsh that make up Transitions: The Dresden Project also reveal the architectural grid that constructs our living spaces. Marsh took the photographs during a residency in Dresden, Germany in 2002 and over four subsequent summers. During this time he found himself drawn to buildings that seemed to be locked in the process of reconstruction but now abandoned. The title of the show either refers to the reconstruction of these buildings or more likely to the transition to a post-Communist world. Marsh notes this transition as one that combines a grandness with decay.

While the black and white and color photographs of decaying interiors seem to present a commentary on the collapse of Socialism, these images reveal too a layering of the grid that makes up our domestic spaces. Photographs like Abandoned Apartment near Bahnhof Neustadt, 2005 presents layers of wallpaper and geometrics that make up a space now abandoned, but clearly once celebrated as expressed in the number of applications of design. Many of the photographs include and sometimes focus on doors and windows further emphasizing the gridded domestic space. Like Macaulay’s maze, these photographs invite movement into these spaces. Again, it is this layering of the grid that forces us to recognize our willingness to abandon or overlook these spaces, thus revealing our blindness.

Both shows at The Weston Art Gallery work so well together to encourage the viewer to engage both the formal and social implications of the grid.

A Weekend with Family and Friedlander

While visiting my family in Lorain, Ohio over the weekend, my 87 year old Aunt Mary made a rare and much anticipated visit with her photo albums in tow. Aunt Mary has happily assumed the role of the family historian though has never written anything down. The pictures are her record. We often hear about families suffering with Alzheimer’s disease, so while my family has not yet been touched by this memory crippling disease, I was still amazed as Aunt Mary seemed to be able to recall a story or two from each of the pages of the albums.

Who was married to whom and who was in the wedding, where everyone lived and worked between Italy, Pennsylvania, and finally Ohio, who owned what car, and family pets animated this oral history. Aunt Mary remembered everything. I suspected there were even a few details she left out, like her time working at a nightclub. Aunt Mary insists she was not a dancer in the club though a picture of her in a leotard seems to suggest otherwise. But this was her history more than mine last weekend. I asked her how she is able to remember all of these details. She said, “When I feel a bit depressed, I look through my pictures and remember how wonderful my family is and much fun my life has been.”

My visit to see family included the requisite stop to the Cleveland Museum of Art. This time I stopped to see the Friedlander show. Lee Friedlander has always been one of my favorite photographers. No doubt it’s the wonderfully entertaining puns found throughout much of his oeuvre that entertain me. Many of his photographs I hold especially dear because his work was perhaps most easily recognizable during slide identification exams in both History of Photography classes I took. Each time one of his pictures projected onto the screen during an exam, I let out an audible sigh of relief. Many of these images are included in this exhibition.

Friedlander’s photographs and books are displayed in chronological order within various categories making it easy to see simultaneously a breadth and depth of his career of five decades. Not only did I recognize many of these photographs, but some of the subjects too. I’ve visited or lived in many of the cities in which he shot, including Boston, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque, NM. I also met at least a couple of his subjects, like Maya Lin and John Szarkowski. With such familiarity of the work combined with walking through the show with my sister, I couldn’t help but recognize the Friedlander show as a wonderful complement to my Aunt Mary’s photographs. As a photographer of “the American social landscape,” Friedlander captures the wonder and wit American life.