PhotoAlliance

EVENT DETAILS:

Date:

October 14, 2011

Time:

7:30 pm

Location:

San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall 800 Chestnut Street San Francisco, Ca (at Jones Street)

Ticket Information:

$10.00 general admission $5.00 students with ID--- TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR

Fall 2011 Lecture Series

Ralph Eugene Meatyard by Elizabeth Siegel

Featuring:
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
Alex Fradkin

Elizabeth Siegel, (Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago) will present the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972) in conjunction with an exhibition of the work opening October 8th, 2011 at the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Julian Cox, chief curator of the de Young and founding curator of photography of the Fine Arts Museums, will introduce the speaker.

Introductory presentation by Alex Fradkin
Featuring images from the recently published book by UC Press:
The Left Coast, California on the Edge

Elizabeth Siegel is Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has worked for over ten years. She received her undergraduate degree at Yale and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Among her recent exhibitions are Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks, which is traveling to the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Richard Misrach: On the Beach; and Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato Photographs. Her books include Playing with Pictures; Taken by Design: Photography at the Institute of Design, 1937–1971; and most recently Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums.

Read Artist Biography

About Ralph Eugene Meatyard:
Elizabeth Siegel is Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author, most recently, of Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (The Art Institute of Chicago in association with Yale University Press, 2009) and Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums (Yale University Press, 2010).

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks

Available from Radius Books
http://radiusbooks.org

In 1950s America there were neither likely nor logical paths for a photographer. Family man, optician, photographer and avid reader, Ralph Eugene Meatyard found himself in the midst of a cultural and philosophical movement in Lexington, Kentucky, which at that time included such figures as Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry and Guy Davenport. Through the camera, Meatyard explored and created a fantasy world of dolls and masks, where his family members played the central roles on an ever-changing stage. His monograph, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, published posthumously in 1974, recorded his wife and family posed in various disquieting settings, wearing masks and holding dolls and evoking a penetrating emotional and psychological landscape. The book won his work critical acclaim and has been hugely influential in the intervening decades.

Dolls and Masks opens the doors on the decade of rich experimentation that immediately preceded the production of his final opus, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, this handsome book presents 55 mostly unseen works from the Meatyard Archive. Essays by writer and historian Eugenia Parry and curator Elizabeth Siegel greatly expand our understanding of Meatyard’s elusive and captivating genius and set the stage for a foray into this unknown work of one of the century’s most intriguing photographers.
About the Artist

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925–1972) attended Williams College as part of the Navy’s V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Photography quickly became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Meatyard used still images to record things most often reserved for moving images, such as the motion on subjects in an otherwise solid setting, scenes part sharp and out-of-focus, children and others sometimes masked, in seemingly normal, yet oddly disquieting, situations. His photographs create a world of mystery and one concerned with the ineffability of reality. Meatyard’s work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.
Hide Artist Biography

Ralph Eugene Meatyard