In Ground, Bill McDowell has assembled a series of "killed" negatives from the FSA archives, many of which have never before been published. These include several photographs from 1936 that Walker Evans had made for Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, the book he published with James Agee. Also included are never before published photographs by Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Paul Carter, Theodor Jung, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein.
McDowell has poetically organized the photographs in Ground according to how and what they represent. While the book's images document 1930s agriculture and landscapes, they also have been chosen for the manner in which their black hole (created by Roy Stryker's hole punch) abstracts its subjects. McDowell feels that in today's culture the "killed" negatives' black hole has the appearance of being a contemporary mark, one current with the practice of intervention, alteration, and appropriation. This provides the photographs a temporal duality in which they present the post-Depression era through a contemporary filter. In our continuing struggle to recover from 2008's Great Recession, these photographs speak to now even as they confer on past government programs, race and class, damaged and bountiful land, drought, flood, and exodus.
Bill McDowell is the 2013 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, the New York Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship, as well as many other artist grants. He is a professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Vermont. McDowell’s photographs are represented in collections at the Yale University Art Gallery, International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Deichtorhallen Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Light Work, Wellesley College, St. Lawrence University, and Rochester Institute of Technology.
His selected solo exhibitions include Jan Kesner Gallery, in Los Angeles, Houston Center of Photography, Robert B. Menschel Gallery at Light Work, The University of Notre Dame, Kenyon College, and St. Lawrence University. His group shows include the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Society for Contemporary Photography, in Kansas City, and the Triennial of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Museum, Hamburg.
McDowell’s project, Banner of Light: The Lily Dale Photographs, was published by Light Work in Contact Sheet 96, and his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Art Issues, The New Yorker, Russian Esquire, Guernica, Spot, and Exposure.
Jock Reynolds, Artist and the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery
Jock Reynolds earned a B.A. in 1969 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. in 1972 from the University of California, Davis. From 1973 to 1983 he was an associate professor and director of the graduate program at the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art at San Francisco State University, and was also a cofounder of New Langton Arts, San Francisco’s premier alternative artists’ space. From 1983 to 1989 Mr. Reynolds served as the executive director of the Washington Project for the Arts, a multidisciplinary visual artists’ association in Washington, D.C., before becoming the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, a position he held until September 1998, when he was appointed the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery and professor (adjunct). Mr. Reynolds has won numerous grants and awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists fellowships and many more.
Bill McDowell is the 2013 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has
received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer s Fellowship, the New York
Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship, as well as many other artist grants.
He is a professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Vermont. McDowell s photographs are represented in collections at the Yale University Art Gallery, International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Deichtorhallen Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Light Work, Wellesley College, St. Lawrence University, and Rochester Institute of Technology.
His selected solo exhibitions include Jan Kesner Gallery, in Los Angeles, Houston Center of Photography, Robert B. Menschel Gallery at Light Work, The University of Notre Dame, Kenyon College, and St. Lawrence University. His group shows include the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Society for Contemporary Photography, in Kansas City, and the Triennial of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Museum, Hamburg.
McDowell s project, Banner of Light: The Lily Dale Photographs, was published by
Light Work in Contact Sheet 96, and his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Art Issues, The New Yorker, Russian Esquire, Guernica, Spot, and Exposure.
www.billmcdowellphoto.com
Jock Reynolds, Artist and the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art
Gallery
Mr. Reynolds earned a B.A. in 1969 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
an M.F.A. in 1972 from the University of California, Davis. From 1973 to 1983 he was
an associate professor and director of the graduate program at the Center for
Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art at San Francisco State University, and was also a
cofounder of New Langton Arts, San Francisco s premier alternative artists space. From
1983 to 1989 Mr. Reynolds served as the executive director of the Washington Project
for the Arts, a multidisciplinary visual artists association in Washington, D.C., before
becoming the director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy,
Andover, Massachusetts, a position he held until September 1998, when he was
appointed the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery and professor
(adjunct). Mr. Reynolds has won numerous grants and awards, including two National
Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists fellowships, a Fulbright fellowship, and multiple
National Endowment for the Arts/Art in Public Places project awards. Mr. Reynolds
frequently collaborates in his work with Suzanne Hellmuth, his wife. Their performances,
installations, and photographs have been commissioned and exhibited in many solo and
group exhibitions and installations in Japan, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and
across the United States. Mr. Reynolds s and Ms. Hellmuth s artwork is represented in
both private and public collections, including the Smithsonian s National Museum of
American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis
Institute of Arts, and the University of Washington s Henry Art Gallery.
Rosanne Cash:
Singersongwriter and author. Rosanne Cash's fourteen albums have charted eleven
number-one singles. Her most recent album, The River and the Thread (2013) is a
kaleidoscopic examination of the geographic, emotional, and historic landscape of the
American South. The album s unique sound, which draws from country, blues, gospel,
and rock, reflects the soulful mix of music that traces its history to the region.
She is the author of four books, including Bodies of Water (1997), Songs Without Rhyme:
Prose by Celebrated Songwriters (2001), Composed: A Memoir (2010), and the children's
book Penelope Jane: A Fairy's Tale (2006). Her essays and fiction have appeared in The
New York Times, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine. She lives in New York City
with her husband, John Leventhal, and her children.
Wendell Berry:
Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934. He earned a bachelor s
degree from the University of Kentucky in 1956 and continued on to complete a master s
degree in 1957. In 1958, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford
University.
Berry has taught at Stanford University, Georgetown College, New York University, the
University of Cincinnati, and Bucknell University. He taught at his alma mater, the
University of Kentucky from 1964-77, and again from 1987-93.
The author of more than 50 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Wendell Berry has
been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation
Fellowship (1962), the Vachel Lindsay Prize from Poetry (1962), a Rockefeller
Foundation Fellowship (1965), a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing
(1971), the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review (1974), the
American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award (1987), a Lannan Foundation
Award for Non-Fiction (1989), Membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers
(1991), the Ingersoll Foundation s T. S. Eliot Award (1994), the John Hay Award (1997),
the Lyndhurst Prize (1997), and the Aitken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee
Review (1998). Most recently, he has been awarded the National Humanities Medal
(2010) by Barack Obama, and gave 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center in
Washington, D.C.
His books include the novel Hannah Coulter (2004), the essay collections Imagination in
Place (2010) and What Matters? (2010), and Leavings: Poems (2010), all available from
Counterpoint Press. Berry s latest works include New Collected Poems (2012) and A
Place in Time (2012), Wendell Berry s newest volume in his Port William series.
He lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.
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