This panel highlights artists who collaborate with teens to explore adolescent identity, how young photographers approach their own representation, and the ways in which these dovetail and differ.
Panelists include Dawoud Bey, who will reference work from his recent book Class Pictures (Aperture, October 2007), photographer Wendy Ewald, who develops work from images young people make of themselves, and teens involved in the Expanding the Walls program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who will provide insight into the use of photography to address their own identity, culture, and environment. The panel will be moderated by Phyllis Thompson, a former editor at Aperture Foundation- The New School
Bio
Danny Alba
Danny Alba is a student, photographer and participant of Expanding the Walls.
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, "Harlem, USA," that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as The Art Institute of Chicago, The Barbican Centre in London, the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, the Walker Art Center, the Yale Art Gallery in
New Haven, CT, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his works were also included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work in 1995 that
traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication, Dawoud Bey: Portraits, 1975-1995 was published in conjunction with the exhibition. Aperture will publish his latest project Class Pictures in 2007 and mount a traveling exhibition of this work that will tour museums throughout the country.
Dawoud Bey's works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both here in America and in Europe, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, National Portrait Gallery in London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale Art Gallery and many others. He has received numerous awards and fellowships over the course of his career including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1992 he has completed a number of collaborative projects working with young people and museums. These projects have involved young people, museums and cultural institutions together in a broad dialogue that seeks to create an engaging space for art making and institutional interrogation. These projects have also been aimed at broadening the participation of various communities in these institutions.
His critical writings on contemporary art have appeared in a range of catalogues and critical journals throughout the United States and Europe. He is the author of several groundbreaking essays, including the recent essay, "The Black Artist
as Invisible (Wo)Man" in 'High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-1975,' which places the work of African American artists Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, and Jack Whitten within this important moment in art history.
He is also the author of "David Hammons: In the Spirit of Minkisi," which was the first essay to place this important African American artist within the traidition of Black Atlantic cosmological tradition.This essay appeared as the catalogue essay for Hammon's survery exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Vienna. "Authoring the Black Image" appeared in the Art Institute of Chicago’s book, "The VanDer Zee Studio," accompanying the exhibition of the same title.
Dawoud Bey has taught at colleges, universities, and other institutions for the past thirty years, and is currently professor of photography at Columbia College Chicago.
He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art, and is presently represented in the United States by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.
Wendy Ewald
For more than twenty-five years, Ms. Ewald has taught photography to children and young people around the world. She has encouraged her students to become photographers in their own right, turning their experiences and dreams into powerful, poetic images. Likening herself to a "translator" of those images, her long-standing commitment to helping children recognize the worth of their own visions has gained her numerous awards and widespread recognition.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Wendy Ewald attended Antioch College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied photography with Minor White. After teaching photography to Naskapi and MicMac Native children in Canada for several years, Ms. Ewald was sponsored by the Kentucky Arts Commission to teach photography and filmmaking to students in Whitesburg, Kentucky from 1976 to 1980. In 1982, after receiving a Fulbright fellowship, Ms. Ewald traveled to Raquira, Colombia. During her two years there, she helped transform children into young photographers. After completing a similar two-year project in Gujarat, India, in 1989, Ms. Ewald created the Literacy through Photography programs in Houston, Texas, and Durham, North Carolina. In 1996, she was a visiting associate professor at Bard College. Currently, she is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Project Director of the Literacy through Photography program.
Ms. Ewald has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, several National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Visual Arts Fellowship for South Africa. In recent years, she has lectured widely through the recognition of the Caixa Foundation in Barcelona, Spain; the Buffalo State College Distinguished Lecturer Series; and the Mondrian Foundation Commission and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Corinne Thomas
Corinne Thomas is a student, photographer and participant of Expanding the Walls.
Phyllis Thompson
Phyllis Thompson, is a former editor at Aperture Foundation and a scholar specializing in representations of the family and intimacy who now teaches in the History of American Civilization department at Harvard.
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