A new show at the Rijksmuseum tries to make sense of the US with ‘American Photography’; includes Nina Berman's "Marine Wedding"

 

March 1, 2025

Via The Financial Times

"Nina Berman’s “Marine Wedding” chronicles the marriage in 2006 of mutilated Iraq War veteran Tyler Ziegel, a plastic dome replacing his broken skull, and his childhood sweetheart Renee Kline. The bride appears grief-stricken, the couple divorced within a year and Ziegel died at 30 from an overdose.

The first such major survey in a European museum, American Photography, drawn from the Rijksmuseum’s eclectic collection plus well-targeted loans, is timely, launched as Europe struggles to understand Trumpian America. Installed thematically — “Face to Face”, “At Home”, “On the Road”, “Selling Points”, “Death and Disaster” — it records how the camera has eyed the country in reportage, advertisements, protest posters, family and amateur snapshots, photo-booth strips, memorabilia." --Full article here

A Field for Ghosts: American Photography at Rijksmuseum

Via FAD Magazine

February 10, 2025 

"A step through the gallery doors reveals the first of many rooms that archive, dissect, and tinker with the values and experiences of American culture. The themes are immediately apparent. Domestic strife, racial politics, the suppression of queer identities, sexuality, ecology, and individuality; each of these ideas finds its example, its case. Whether considering the dual personalities in Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits, the interweaving of indigenous art practices with modern photography in Sarah Sense’s work Hinushi 18, or the few surviving artefacts of the country’s abandoned towns in Bryan Schutmaat’s landscapes, the overall impression resounds. America is a nation at war with itself. Conflict, reflected in the photography, regarded as an essential component of the modern experience of life in the USA.

The results of these battles are morbid and cruel. One photograph, from Nina Berman’s collection Marine Wedding, depicts the marriage of a disfigured soldier sent to fight in one of the American governments many international warzones. Described simply by the accompanying placard, the viewer is informed that the marriage broke up, and that soldier had died from alcohol and morphine overdose since. Likewise, the piercing work of Nan Goldin chronicles her experiences with domestic violence and the AIDS crisis as it ravaged New York. In Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City 1986, Cookie Mueller, featured in another depiction of a wedding, walks the aisle with her soon-to-be husband, though anyone who knows the story will understand how tragic this became after the fact, as they both died shortly afterward."

--Full article here

American Photography, 7th February to 9th June 2025, Rijksmuseum

Grieve The Loss Of Local Newspapers During Photojournalism Exhibition At Milwaukee Art Museum

 

Via Forbes

January 30, 2025

Grieve The Loss Of Local Newspapers During Photojournalism Exhibition At Milwaukee Art Museum

"Between 2005 and 2023, more than 2,200 weekly newspapers have shuttered, dropping from nearly 9,000 to roughly 6,000 according to research conducted at Northwestern University. Imagine if the same statistic held true for hospitals. Newspapers care for the health of American democracy as surely as hospitals do its physical health....

Worse still, at the same time, 43,000 newspaper journalist jobs have been eliminated, nearly two-thirds! Imagine any other industry critical to American society, the American way of life, and American democracy losing two thirds of its workers in less than 20 years. There’d be congressional hearings. The president would address the nation with a bold plan to reverse the trend...

Why are politicians and the public not crying over these job losses? Because journalists–the good ones–hold the powerful to account. Politicians, corporations, the wealthy. The powerful benefit when newspapers close or reduce coverage. Citizens lose....

An exhibition on view through March 16, 2025, at the Milwaukee Art Museum demonstrates how photographers have understood and wielded the power of images to convey events. Through more than 100 objects, “True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media,” offers a window into a bygone past of robust, objective, professional news coverage in America focused on the picture makers...

Photographs previously offered incontrovertible proof of what journalists were telling their readers. Thanks to technology, the public can no longer believe its eyes.

Filling the void left by the evisceration of newspapers has been partisan cable news commentators shrieking talking points 24/7/365, masquerading opinion as news, perspective as information, and, increasingly, social media."

True Story: Photography, Journalism, and Media at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Join the Rijksmuseum and the John Adams Institute for a special event featuring Nina Berman whose work is on view in the major exhibition on American photography.

 Via The John Adams Institute

American Photographers in conversation. In collaboration with the Rijksmuseum

Feb 09, 2025, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm,   Rijksmuseum (Auditorium), Museumstraat 1, Amsterdam

Tickets for the public event are sold out. You can still purchase tickets for the livestream via the buy tickets link here.

Join the Rijksmuseum and the John Adams Institute in welcoming photographers from the United States whose work is on view in the major exhibition on American photography. Their collective works invite us to investigate what America is, not only in the present, but also what it has been in pivotal moments since the invention of photography itself. Captured through their lenses, events, individuals and movements of national importance are brought into focus.

Following an introduction to the exhibition by curator Hans Rooseboom, photographers Bryan Schutmaat, Sarah Sense and Nina Berman will tell us more about their work. They will explore diverse aspects of the United States in conversation with the audience and moderator Clarice Gargard (Lilith Agency).

Program information

About Bryan Schutmaat: Based in Austin, Texas, Schutmaat’s work has been widely published and exhibited. His meditations on people and place picture a wide variety of contemporary issues, from poverty to climate change. He has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Aperture Portfolio Prize, and his work has appeared in the Atlantic, New Yorker, and National Geographic, among other publications.

About Sarah Sense: Born in Sacramento, California, Sense practices what she calls photo-weaving, combining traditional Chitimacha ad Choctaw art and craft techniques with photography. Her works investigate landscapes from a Native American perspective, focusing on the colonial impacts on the climate. She is a graduate of Parsons the New School for Design, and her work has been exhibited in major galleries and museums around the world.

About Nina Berman: Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist and educator. Her work explores American politics, militarism, environmental issues and post violence trauma.

Read, Watch, Listen: Looking for background information in advance of the event? Read Zachary Karabashliev – 18% Gray. Using trauma as an impetus to change his life, Zack sets off for New York with a vintage Nikon. Through the lens of the old camera, he starts rediscovering himself by photographing an America we rarely see. Watch Don’t Blink by photographer Robert Frank. A documentary about the groundbreaking photographer of The Americans. Listen to Simon & Garfunkel’s America. Their 1968 anthem is steeped in national mythology and has been interpreted as both exaltation and elegy.

More about the exhibition

In more than 200 works, the Rijksmuseum has gathered a major retrospective of American photography. The medium has left an indelible mark on human history, revolutionizing the way we look at the world, be it through art, news, advertising, our everyday lives, and the digital versions thereof we fashion on social media platforms like Instagram.

Live stream tickets here

Rijksmuseum moves you to The American Dream. To the real American. To unexpected recognition. The Rijksmuseum is staging the Netherlands’ first major survey exhibition of American photography.

Kéyah: installation by Diné artist Eugene Tapahe

 Via BYU Museum of Art

January 23, 2024

Kéyah
Our Home by Eugene Tapahe
January 24 - April 26, 2025

The land where I was raised embodies the Navajo concept of hózhó, representing harmony, beauty, and balance. --Eugene Tapahe

People, places, and eras come together in balance in this reverently spectacular installation by Diné artist Eugene Tapahe. As you traverse Kéyah, we invite you to ponder the diversity of the sands we walk upon and the unity, holiness, and healing humanity so desperately needs.  Viewers will be able to explore their relationship to the land and ruminate on how to create hózho, a Diné concept that focuses on harmonious connections of balance and beauty. 

Featured Artwork:

Eugene Tapahe, Kéyah, 2025.

Mixed Media Installation

30 x 72 x 336 inches

Courtesy of the Artist

Selections from Eugene Tapahe's “Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project” will be displayed by Monroe Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City from April 23 to 27, 2025.

Eugene Tapahe included in Tiny Gallery Takeover exhibit Land Back

 

Via Tiny Gallery

November 1st, at 8 Stanford Place: opening reception for Land Back: A Tiny Gallery Takeover in Lenapehoking, curated by Jennifer Ley.

In celebration of Native American Heritage Month and Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge/Native Art at the Montclair Art Museum, Tiny Gallery presents Land Back featuring collections from seven contemporary Native artists, including Eugene Tapahe, installed in six Tiny Galleries across Montclair, Glen Ridge, and Bloomfield, New Jersey—all part of Lenapehoking, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape people. 

Art allows us to examine the past, interpret the present, and envision the future, and Ley’s curation of Land Back brings the stories of Indigenous Americans, too often dismissed or overlooked, forward.

One of Tiny Gallery’s missions is to bring artistic voices that may not normally be heard into communities and present them in a new context and we feel incredibly privileged to be able to collaborate with renowned Native artists.

Tiny Gallery

8 Stanford Place

Montclair, NJ 07042

Information here