Ralph Eugene Meatyard

RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD  American, 1925-1972
Romance of Ambrose Bierce #3 from Portfolio Three: The Work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1964 (printed 1974)
Gelatin silver print
Bequest of Robert C. May 

Ralph Eugene Meatyard is one of Kentucky's most well-known photographers. Three of his works are included in WIDE ANGLE: American Photographs which is on exhibition through April 27 at the Museum.

Meatyard's love of art, literature, and philosophy enriched his photography and was fostered by multiple associations with artists, poets, and writers over his lifetime, including Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Jonathan Greene, and Thomas Merton. However, it was his introduction in the mid-1950s to the Eastern philosophy of Zen by photographer Minor White that had the greatest impact. Once familiar with Zen philosophy, “Meatyard dedicated his photography to conveying the spiritual essence of existence, which he felt lay beyond the visible world,” writes curator and photography historian Barbara Tannenbaum.

Accordingly, Meatyard was not interested in the traditional notion of photography as a recorder or mirror of reality, but of something deeper. His title Romance of Ambrose Bierce refers to the writer’s definition of romance in his 1911 book The Devil’s Dictionary: “Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of things as They Are.” Instead, Meatyard staged scenes, some of which appear theatrical or seem to refer to an unknown ritual. He used various props and experimented with multiple exposures, blurred movements, and a “no-focus” technique. Many of his best known images are of his three children and other family members, who pose in dilapidated structures in rural Kentucky and the surrounding countryside. As in the photographs exhibited here, they sometimes wear rubber masks that not only obscure the identities of the models, but create an ambiguous portrait, not of any particular individual, but of humanity itself.

Meatyard also used the masks to pull viewers in, to more deeply consider the possible interpretations of his photographs. Described as “charming stories that have never been written,” by Davenport, a writer who taught at the University, these unsettling dramas constructed by Meatyard deal with the complex emotions tied to childhood and aging, intimacy and distance, and loss and destruction.

The History of the Lexington Camera Club

ROBERT C. MAY, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1972

Dr. James Birchfield will give a free lecture about the History of the Lexington Camera Club on Sunday, March 16 at 2 pm at the Art Museum at UK.

The Lexington Camera Club began in 1936 with an eclectic mix of business leaders, doctors, and academics who shared a commitment to photography as an art form. Several members of this group earned national recognition as photographers including Van Deren Coke, Eugene Meatyard, and Robert C. May whose work is included in the Museum’s current exhibition, Wide Angle: American Photographs.

Dr. Birchfield is the former Curator of Rare Books at the University of Kentucky. He served as chairman of UK Art Museum Advisory Committee and has been guest curator of photography exhibitions for the UK Art Museum, and Louisville’s Speed Museum.

Art in Bloom 2014

 Art in Bloom 2014 was a fabulous success thanks to the sponsors, the designers, the volunteers, the staff, and the hundreds of patrons who supported the Museum’s annual fund-raiser. This was the 14^th year for this event which is held every year on the last weekend in February.  Planning for this weekend begins in July when chairs and committee members volunteer to find sponsors and auction items. Trudy Tibbs, the 2014 event chair, started planning the event last July with Kasia Pater serving as Sponsorship Chair and Peggy Collins serving as Auction Chair.  Under their leadership the event saw new growth and reached out to many new members in the community.  

Ed and Joan Schaeffer were chosen to be Honorary Chairs and presided over both events with elegance and grace. Photographer Elizabeth Shatner was selected as the Signature Artist and not only donated her art and time but attracted an unprecedented amount of media coverage with her celebrity status. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, 50 floral designers spent hours planning and creating a spectacular wonderland of fragrance and color for three days of art and flowers.  Thank you for supporting the event and we look forward to next year! 

image caption: Photographer Elizabeth Shatner poses in front of her Art in Bloom 2014 signature image with fashion designer Maui Crane's model.

Robert Frank

ROBERT FRANK  Swiss, born 1924

Indianapolis, 1956

Gelatin silver print

Bequest of Robert C. May  1993.13.10

Indianapolis by Robert Frank is one of the 70 photographs in the WIDE ANGLE: American Photographs exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, on view now through April 27.

When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice—Robert Frank

The photographer best known for capturing the feeling of America in the 1950s, from city streets to small towns, was the Swiss-born Robert Frank. Influenced by Walker Evans and his seminal book American Photographs, Frank crisscrossed the country between 1955 and 1957, traveling with his wife Mary (with whom he is pictured in the portrait section) and two young children, and shot 28,000 photographs. Although it is now widely considered a masterpiece, the resulting book, The Americans, was poorly received at the time. Critics derided the dark, seemingly random glimpses of popular culture.

One person who immediately understood the work was Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac. In his introduction to The Americans, Kerouac wrote: “That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow, photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.”

Frank’s “snapshot” aesthetic had a strong influence on a generation of street photographers.

Photographer Catherine Opie exhibition and lecture at the University of Kentucky

This Friday, February 7, 2014 at 4 pm, photographer Catherine Opie will visit the University of Kentucky campus to open her exhibition at the Art Museum and to lecture at the UK Student Center’s Worsham Theater.

Catherine Opie’s early work examines concepts of masculinity and feminity in lush color portraits of transgender individuals, cross-dressers, and pierced practitioners of sadomasochism, many of them her friends in the subcultures of Los Angeles’s gay and lesbian community. The series that immediately followed featured black-and-white studies of the Los Angeles highway system; subtly toned platinum prints emphasizing the formal beauty of line, form, and space.

In many ways, Opie can be considered a documentarian of America’s subcultures, whether she is making portraits of individuals who are part of a social or cultural group, or images of urban architecture that defines a community and the people who inhabit it. “I am an American photographer,” she has said. “I have represented this country and this culture. And I’m glad that there is a queer, out, dyke artist that is being called an American photographer.”

Her work is also strongly informed by art historical traditions. The large seascapes on view at the Art Museum are from the series 12 Miles to the Horizon. They are both meditative and visually stunning. They evoke color field painting as well as notions of the sublime in painting, in which nature provides an awe-inspiring spectacle that goes beyond mere beauty to provide a spiritual experience. At the same time, she plays with the notion of sunrise and sunset as photographic clichés. Opie set interesting artistic restrictions on herself in this series, made while she traveled on a freighter from Busan, Korea, to Long Beach, California, at the invitation of the shipping company Hanjin. She photographed at sunrise and sunset daily, and made sure the horizon line perfectly transected the composition, helping to create a mood of balance and calm as well as a formal relationship between all the works. She also created her own artist’s log of the trip, designing and printing the paper in advance, and recording her thoughts, whether in the form of doodled drawings or writing.

Catherine Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In addition to a Guggenheim retrospective, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, her work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Saint Louis Art Museum, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Opie was the 2013 recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award and was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. She is a professor of photography at the University of California in Los Angeles.

CATHERINE OPIE, Sunset #1, 2009, C-print
Courtesy of Regen Project, Los Angeles
Copyright: Catherine Opie