Aaron Siskind: Photographs of the Seventies and Eighties
Exhibition Overview
Photographs made by Aaron Siskind in the 1970s and 1980s will be shown in a special exhibition at the University of Kansas Spencer Museum of Art August 23- October 18 in the Kress Gallery. The exhibition includes some sixty works selected from a collection of 228 Siskind photographs, promised gifts to the Spencer from Dr. Robert Drapkin and Lee Arnold of Florida. The collection includes works from the 1930s to the present. Photographer Siskind and Dr. Carl Chiarenza, author of a critical biography of Siskind, will speak at the Spencer at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, September 28. Dr. chiarenza, the Fanie Allen Knapp Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Rochester, will speak on "Continuity and Change in the Art of Aaron Siskind." Thomas Southall, curator of photography who organized the show, said that Siskind's work is distinguished by metaphoric meaning in abstract forms discovered through photographing fragments of walls, graffiti, landscapes, and other objects and scenes. "Siskind is one of America's great masters of photography," Southall said. Many of the photographs on view are landscapes, but they retain the quality of flat abstraction characteristic of his earlier photographs. A distinctive sense of place is found even in abstract works photographed in recent years in Mexico, South America, Morocco, and Hawaii. Of particular interest in the exhibition is an important series of images made in homage to Siskind's friend Franz Kline. In addition to recent work, the exhibition will also include several of Siskind's prints from earlier decades to suggest how this will also include several of Siskinds prints from earlier decades to suggest how his themes and visual concerns have evolved.
Exhibition images
Works of art
