Agave I, Imogen Cunningham

Artwork Overview

Imogen Cunningham, Agave I
Imogen Cunningham, Agave I
Imogen Cunningham
Agave I
1920
Imogen Cunningham
1883–1976
Agave I, 1920
Where object was made: United States
Material/technique: gelatin silver print
Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 34 x 26.5 cm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 13 3/8 x 10 7/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 25 x 20 in
Credit line: Museum purchase: National Endowment for the Arts
Accession number: 1975.0020
Not on display
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Label texts

Archive Label 2003: Imogen Cunningham, one of America’s early modernist photographers, was internationally recognized for her sharply focused studies of plant forms. She believed that beauty could be found in the most common things and explored the use of light and composition when making her plant photographs. The striking contrast of spiky leaf forms against angular white and black spaces in Agave Design 1 typify Cunningham’s modernist approach. Her plant studies were accepted for the significant 1929 international Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart where they were displayed in the company of Karl Bloßfeldt’s plant forms. In 1973, still a practicing photographer, Cunningham said of Agave Design 1: “This is what I call monkeying around, trying to get a little something different out of an agave. I think it is different. I don’t think I’d have the patience to do that now.” Cunningham was also known for her portraiture.

Exhibitions

20th Century Paper Wall: Photographs and Prints from the Collection
Stephen Goddard, curator
John Pultz, curator
1995
Brosseau Center for Learning: Photographs from the early-mid 1900s
2022
Photography Between the Wars: A Survey of American and European Photography 1920-1940
Brett Knappe, curator
2006
Photographs from the Collection 1840-1940
John Pultz, curator
2003–2004
Fish, Flowers & Flying Things: Nature at the Spencer
Joseph W. Lampo, curator
2002
Photographs from the Museum Collection
Thomas Southall, curator
1978

Citations

Broun, Elizabeth. Handbook of the Collection: Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art. Lawrence, Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, 1978.

The University of Kansas. The Register of the Museum of Art: Bicentennial Issue, 1976 5, No. 3, Bicentennial Issue (1976):

Southall, Thomas. "The Photography Collections of the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art." In Kansas Quarterly Vol. II, no. 4 (Fall, 1979): 77-103.