September 19th: Corey Keller in Conversation with Elisabeth Sherman
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Corey Keller will discuss Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work with Elisabeth Sherman.
This event will take place live at Paula Cooper Gallery at 521 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th avenue, on Tuesday, September 19th at 7 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work (Published by Delmonico Books and the Jay DeFeo Foundation, 2023)
This monograph on the legendary and influential artist Jay DeFeo features over 150 photographic works―many never before published―most reproduced at the size the artist printed them. After the completion of her monumental masterpiece The Rose in 1966, DeFeo moved from the heart of artistic activity in San Francisco to a small house in Marin County, California. There she embarked on a focused and rigorous exploration with the camera. For much of the 1970s, she used the camera as a tool to look and think with, creating a wide range of black-and-white photographs she processed in her darkroom. The artist used experimental photographic techniques to produce extraordinary artworks, alongside documentary images of her studio and paintings in process. Her contact sheets, some of which are reproduced here, are often filled with multiple views of one object, revealing the way DeFeo looked and sketched with the lens. In 1972 she wrote: “My interest in photography has always paralleled my expression as a painter.”
Essays by Hilton Als, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller and Catherine Wagner survey the rich materiality, sculptural layering and illusionistic devices of DeFeo’s playful and enigmatic photographic works, illuminating her astonishing range and daring experimentation with the medium.
Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was a Bay Area artist who created an original and provocative body of work, including the iconic painting The Rose (1958–66). In the 1970s and 1980s, DeFeo continued her visionary work in a range of mediums, including works on paper, photography, collage and photocopies. Among many other exhibitions, a retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012.
Corey Keller is an independent historian of photography based in Oakland, California. From 2003 to 2021, she was a curator in the Photography Department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where her critically acclaimed exhibitions included Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020), Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene (2019), About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change (2016), Francesca Woodman (2011), and Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900 (2008). A specialist in nineteenth-century photography, she is particularly interested in the intersections between historical and contemporary concerns about technology and art.
Elisabeth Sherman is Senior Curator, Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. Her first exhibition at ICP, Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño, is on view from September 2023 – January 2024. Previously, as an Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions at the museum, including, Time Management Techniques (2022), Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2019-2022) which had a four venue tour and won the Lucie Award for Photo Museum Exhibition of the Year in 2021, Making Knowing: Craft as Art, 1950–2019 (2019–2022) and the Whitney’s presentation of Zoe Leonard: Survey among numerous others. She has written for exhibition catalogues and artist's monographs as well as contributed to Artform and Art in America. She is a board member of Burnaway in Atlanta.