January 14 – February 14, 2010
Erica Lord: simulacrum & subversion
Erica Lord (Athabaskan/Iñupiaq) was born in Alaska, but abiding to her cultural tradition of nomadic living, has spent her years bouncing both physically and metaphorically between her home village in Alaska and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. An interdisciplinary artist, Lord explores the ideas and concepts that grow from the experience of living with a multi-faced identity. Lord explores race, ethnicity, gender, and memory, hoping that through generous doses of narcissism, she will find answers.
Lord has exhibited in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (New York), Alaka Native Arts Foundation Gallery (Anchorage), Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (Santa Fe), 10th Havana Bienal (Havana, Cuba), Carl N. Gorman Museum at the University of California Davis, Musee du Quai Branly (Paris), and Schopf Gallery on Lake (Chicago). She received a B.A. from Carleton College (2001) and an MFA in Sculpture/Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006). She is currently teaching in the art department at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
The artist will lead a video storytelling workshop with Native American students in mid-January. The resulting video piece will be on display in the exhibition, and a catalogue about the workshop and exhibition will be published this spring.
For more information on Erica Lord, please visit her
web site.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by the Friends of the DeVos Art Museum.
Related Events:
Thursday, January 14, 6-8pm: opening reception
Friday, January 15, 2pm, Room AD165: artist's talk
View the artist's talk by Erica Lord from Friday, January 15 by clicking this
link.
January 4 – May 16, 2010
MOSTLY MICHIGAN:
the photography of D. James Galbraith
MOSTLY MICHIGAN presents 55 vintage black and white photographs by D. James Galbraith that capture the everyday lives of people in Michigan and Ireland. Galbraith (1930-2002) had an extensive career that began as a United States Air Force photographer and continued as a photojournalist for numerous newspapers in Lower Michigan. The photographs and oral histories of Jim and Susan Galbraith earned their published book, “Hartland: Change in the Heart of America”, a Pulitzer Prize nomination for documentary literature in 1985.
The majority of the photographs in the exhibition concentrate on Galbraith’s work from the Hartland Project, where the artist documented the daily lives of people in the small town of Hartland, Michigan during the 1970s and 80s. Galbraith also traveled extensively, including trips through Ireland in 1970, 1978 and 1997, where he documented the lives of people across the country. The Ireland photographs were recently acquired by National Photographic Archives in Dublin, Ireland. Whether in Michigan or Ireland, Galbraith had a unique ability to capture the personalities and spirits by documenting the daily lives and landscapes where his subjects lived.
MOSTLY MICHIGAN is co-curated by Melissa Matuscak, Director of the DeVos Art Museum and Susan Scott Galbraith, wife of D. James Galbraith, archivist and co-author of the Hartland Project.
Related Events:
Thursday, January 14, 6-8pm: opening reception
Friday, February 5, 2pm, Room AD165: guest lecture by Jack Deo. Marquette-based photographer Jack Deo will give a talk about his experiences collecting local history photography. Deo founded the Superior View Gallery in Marquette in 1978 with the acquisition of the original negatives from The Childs Art Gallery (founded in 1860 by Brainard F. Childs). Since then Deo has acquired dozens of negative archives from studios such as J.W. Nara (Calumet), Peterson Brothers (Gwinn and Menominee), Nickolai Olli (Mohawk), Adolph Isler (Houghton) and G.A. Werner (Marquette and Ishpeming). The archive now contains over 100,000 images.
Friday, April 2, 2pm, Room AD165: guest lecture by Christine Flavin. NMU assistant professor of photography Christine Flavin will give a talk on the history of social documentary photography. The lecture will provide a brief overview beginning with Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor of 1840 to Abu Ghraib of 2004, with a focus on how the portrayal of the under privileged has changed in the post colonial political arena with digital and cell phone camera technology.
