Copious Notes

David Hilliard, “Mary Remembering,” 2008, c-print. ©Image courtesy of the artist and Carroll & Sons, Boston/Art Museum at the University of Kentucky.

The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky has announced the four photographers for the 2012-13 Robert C. May Photography Lecture Series and gallery exhibits, one of the museum’s signature events. This year’s artists are:

David Hilliard: His large, multipanel works explore ­relationships. Lecture Nov. 2, exhibit Oct. 5 to Nov. 11.

Lalla Essaydi: The photographer with Moroccan and Saudi ­Arabian roots explores the role of women in Middle Eastern ­culture. Lecture Nov. 16, exhibit Nov. 16 to Dec. 23.

Hank Willis Thomas: Using a commercial style, Thomas explores class and racial issues, particularly in sports. Lecture March 1, exhibit Feb. 8 to March 10.

Martha Rosler: Over four decades, Rosler has used found ­images to create striking commentaries on American culture. Lecture April 5, exhibit March 15 to April 21.

All lectures are at 4 p.m. in the Worsham Theater of the UK Student Center. Exhibitions are in The Art Museum at the ­University of Kentucky in the Singletary Center for the Arts, 405 Rose Street. Admission to the lectures and exhibitions is free.

"Howl" by Amy Stein. All images © Amy Stein.

Photographer Amy Stein is a city girl. Primarily, she has lived in Washington, D.C., and New York, where encounters between humans and wildlife usually involve squirrels.

So when she went to the country to work on a project about women and guns, she was surprised to hear about more serious encounters, including a girl seeing a bear on the other side of the chain-link fence that separated her home from the mountains.

“I just became fascinated with these stories and so I set out to re-create these stories,” Stein said by phone from Parsons The New School of Design in New York, where she teaches photography.

The project is Domesticated, on exhibit at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky as part of the Robert C. May ­Photography Endowment Lecture Series. She will talk about the ­project at 4 p.m. Friday in a free lecture at the UK Student Center’s Worsham Theatre.

"Backyard."

Domesticated started at Dave Clark’s taxidermy shop in Matamoras, Pa., which became the setting for the series.

“He was kind of open-minded to working with an artist like myself,” Stein says. “Through spending time in his store and spending time in the town, I became very interested in the location of the town, which is between the Delaware River and a big mountain park. It’s a small town sort of sandwiched between two natural spaces.

“As I spent more time at Dave Clark’s local ­taxidermy shop, I was hearing more and more about these human-animal encounters that happened at night.”

She tried to wait out some naturally occurring images. For the most part, though, she quickly came to realize that she needed to stage the shots.

"Nursery."

“We set out every weekend to create images related to specific stories,” Stein says of herself and her husband, John, who made regular trips from New York to Matamoras, about 80 miles northwest of the city.

It turned out to be a really good thing to know a taxidermist. Clark or his ­customers would lend Stein the animals that would be posed in a variety of looks: a wolf howling at a ­floodlight in a Target parking lot, a deer lounging in a ­greenhouse, that big black bear startling the little girl at her swimming pool.

“The bear’s face had this ridiculous expression, this open-mouth, aggressive expression,” Stein says of the animal, which eventually was photographed from behind. “It took me a while to realize I need to get behind the bear and show the form of the bear without showing the face because that will have more power and also camouflage this ridiculous expression.”

Stein says she usually had to take some time to talk with the people whom she asked to be in the photos, to help them understand what she was doing and that this wasn’t a “smile for the camera” type of portrait.

“One thing I would always do is bring examples of images that are already made, that are in the style of what I wanted to make,” Stein says. “I was lucky at this point that there were some images in Oprah magazine and some pretty big magazines that had ­published some of the ­images. That gives you immediate credibility in a sense.”

"Fast Food." This photograph is not in the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky exhibit, but it is in the book that accompanies the exhibit.

Some photographs were spontaneous, including Threat, which shows a little boy in the woods with a deer, and Fast Food, which depicts seagulls swooping in to eat a discarded burger and fries in a parking lot.

“It’s a lot easier for animals to eat our refuse and scraps, because they have calories and protein and they don’t have to hunt it,” Stein says.

Animals eating humans’ discards was one of ­several themes in the series, along with fences that people build to put up barriers between themselves and the natural world, even though the ­barriers don’t always hold.

"Trasheaters."

Predator shows a little girl standing in a flowery pink dress at the open gate of her fence as a coyote walks menacingly by. Stein says that sometime later, she heard that the same family had trouble with a bear that wanted to hibernate under their house.

Stein says that despite such annoyances, she found that most of the people knew what they were getting into, living where they live.

“They’re lovely people who want to share the beauty and wonder of their surroundings,” Stein says.

And they have, through her lens.

"Watering Hole."

Rock Formations on the Road to Lee's Ferry, AZ: Mark Klett and Byron Wolf used digital photo processing to impose historical landscape photos onto modern photos that they shot from almost precisely the same spot. Both insets were shot by William Bell in 1872. Klett and Wolf shot the larger photo in 2008.

Mark Klett didn’t go to college for photography. Taking pictures was a nice hobby, a thing to do on the side. But science — specifically geology — was how he expected to make his living.

Nearly four decades later, he comes to The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky as part of its Robert C. May Photography ­Endowment Lecture Series.

Klett might have been a little surprised that he ended up with a career in photography, but his subject matter isn’t surprising at all.

When he started graduate school in photography at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, N.Y., Klett says, “I didn’t know what the art of photography was about, what the field was all about, the current dialogues or the art of photography. I didn’t think much about landscape photography. I really thought it was boring.”

But in the summertime, he worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, which took him to Montana and Wyoming and got him thinking about landscapes.

What he came to understand was that landscape photography was not just about aiming his lens at a rock or a tree. It was choices about light and perspective that separated snapshots from photographs.

“I tell my students all the time that landscape ­photography would seem to be a sort of neutral subject, and that’s why I found it ­boring, initially — a rock and a tree and this and that and so what?,” Klett says. “But then I learned that ­photographs were ­actually the result of someone’s decision-making, and that they had a purpose, and that they were reflections of an opinion, and they were a little more like editorial statements. That’s when it got interesting to me.”

Site of a Dangerous Leap, Now Overgrown: Klett and Wolfe imposed this undated colorized postcard onto their photo, shot in 2008.

One of his first serious forays was essentially trying to see through the eyes and lenses of some of the original masters of landscape ­photography, notably Ansel Adams.

The project was to study iconic photos of the ­American West, in many cases figure out what they were and where they were taken, and replicate them.

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Most of the work in The Bluegrass Palette of Andre Pater, currently on exhibit at the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, was loaned from private collections and will go back behind closed doors once the exhibit ends Oct. 23.

Reining, World Equestrian Games Series, a 2010 oil on canvas.

But you could take an original home, and help The Race for Education, if you are competitive with your checkbook. Four pieces Pater created depicting the disciplines of the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, Sept. 25 to Oct. 10 at the Kentucky Horse Park, will be sold at a live auction during an evening event at the Lexington Country Club, 2550 Paris Pike. The Race for Education, a scholarship organization benefitting equine families and students pursuing equine careers, is also selling limited edition, numbered prints of the Pater series titled The Power of the Horse. Prints are $100 each.

Tickets to the event, including cocktails and dinner, are $250 for individuals, $400 for couples (including a print) and $1,500 for a table of eight. For more information and to register for the auction, call (859) 252-8648 or visit raceforeducation.org.

Click the play button to hear Sarah Hoskins talk about her work in Central Kentucky and see a slide show of her images.

Equine photography brought Sarah ­Hoskins to Lexington. African-American hamlets around the city and in Central ­Kentucky made the Bluegrass feel like home.

“I was introduced to one woman named Lydia Talbert, and I was ­introduced to Maddoxtown Church,” Hoskins, left, says of her friend from the New Zion ­community who has since died. “And from there, what happens is, it gets to be a trust thing. I met one person and they led me to somebody else, and they led me to somebody else. I never thought I would be doing this for 10 years.”

Now, the results of her decade of ­visiting New Zion, Uttingertown and other communities are on display at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. Hoskins will give an address at UK’s ­Worsham Theatre on Friday as part of the Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series.

“I think it’s really important that it is in Kentucky,” says Hoskins, who lives with her family north of Chicago. “I’ve always given lectures, and this work was incorporated with other ­projects. This is the first time I will give a lecture solely on this project, and it’s an honor to do it in Kentucky.”

She says she talked to residents of the communities where she worked to make sure they were OK with having their pictures displayed at the ­museum. Many residents plan to come to the lecture. When she has spoken before, Hoskins has ended her lectures with a photo and recording of the Jimtown Male Chorus, and her camera can be heard clicking in the ­background. The group will sing at Hoskins’ lecture.

Her appearance bookends this year’s Robert C. May series with strong Kentucky themes; the first one, last fall, showcased the ­photography of The Washington Post’s Jahi ­Chikwendiu, who grew up in ­Lexington and started his photography career at the Herald-Leader.

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"Milkless" (2004) -- Jahi Chikwendiu encountered this young mother in the Ouri Cassoni refugee camp just outside Baha'i, Chad. He recalls: "She's holding this baby under her veil. And through the veil, I can see the silhouette of her nursing the baby. So, I took a lot of photos before I approached her. But I'm sure she saw me taking pictures, she just went about her business. Then, when I finally approached her, she started to talk about her and her baby and nursing. That's when she tells me that she's nursing but she has no milk. And she thinks that she doesn't have any milk because of the trauma she experienced. Having her whole village bombed in the middle of the night. And having so many people killed in front of her face and having to scatter from her village." Descriptions and images courtesy of The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. All images copyright The Washington Post.

I know I am not the only person at the Lexington Herald-Leader who knew Jahi Chikwendiu was a remarkable talent the moment I met him. So his award winning career at The Washington Post comes as no surprise, nor does the decision of the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky to show Jahi’s work as part of the prestigious Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series. To preview his exhibit, I caught up with Jahi earlier this week before he started a busy day on the job for the Post.

Click the play button to hear our podcast with Jahi Chikwendiu:

[podcast]http://copiousnotes.bloginky.com/files/2009/10/091001jahi-podcast.mp3[/podcast]

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Here are a few more images from the exhibit.

"Sally Sami, a blogger who left her home country of Egypt (reflected)" (2007) -- Digital print Courtesy of the artist and The Washington Post In Egypt, there are growing restrictions on bloggers who receive threats of arrest for expressing and publishing what are considered anti-government and/or anti-Islam views. Another Egyptian blogger, Karim Amer, was jailed by an Egyptian court for four years for “insulting Islam.”

"Wall of Thorns" (2004) -- Hawa Oosman Adam rests in her temporary home of thorns and twigs where IDP's (internally displaced people) have made an impromptu camp on the outskirts of Nera, Sudan. Some families, including Hawa's, have had to move six times during the course of this 20-month-old conflict where African settlements are being attacked by the government with the help of militias known as the janjaweed.

"Darfur Sandstorm" (2004) -- On his first day in a vast refugee camp in Darfur, Chikwendiu was standing on a water truck at the edge of the camp to survey the scene when a dust storm rolled up. He recalls: "I started noticing people's attention go to an area behind the camp ... I didn't even know what it was. So maybe within a few minutes I figured I'd better get off of this truck. I take off running, and within seconds, wham! I just get hit by this wall of wind, and the sand is moving so hard that it's kind of slicing against you.I just remember looking for shelter. I saw these guys walking and I saw them jump in a tent. So I just jumped in the tent with them. They seemed OK with my being there, because we started giving each other the thumbs up.I was just sitting there waiting for ... hoping, praying that I wouldn't be impaled by something flying. So then, I got myself together. I had a few handkerchiefs that I wrapped around my camera and my face. I fashioned a camera hood out of my handkerchiefs. I started walking around, looking through my camera. Not even taking pictures. Because it was the only way that I could see. The sand was just slicing at my eyes. So, for a while after that, my vision was blurry where the sand had just scarred my eye lenses."

“Black Hawk Down” (2003) — Mourners at the Washington D.C. funeral of a soldier killed in a Black Hawk helicopter crash in Iraq.

Click here to read our story about Jahi.

Click here to see more of Jahi’s work at his website.

British glass artist John Reyntiens photographs some of his glass work, a first look at pieces he is creating for the Myra Leigh Tobin Chapel in the University of Kentucky Albert B. Chandler Hospital, in the University of Kentucky's Boone Faculty Club. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

John Reyntiens developed his glass work for the chapel in the University of Kentucky’s new hospital with a keen sense of where it would be displayed.

“I didn’t want it to be ­mechanical,” Reyntiens said on the morning of May 22, showing samples of his work for the Myra Leigh Tobin Chapel at the Albert B. Chandler Medical Center. “People who are here will spend a lot of time around machines and medical equipment.

“It is important for people to have places to take time out and meditate and be quiet.”

Reyntiens' design for the sanctuary window of the Myra Leigh Tobin Chapel.

Reyntiens’ Springtime in Kentucky is one of many pieces of art being commissioned and bought for the new hospital, which is under construction and is expected to start opening in phases in 2010.

“The art is my favorite part of this project,” said Dr. Michael Karpf, executive vice president for health affairs at UK. “It humanizes the building.”

In filling the building with artwork, Karpf said, the hospital is taking cues from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the Cleveland Clinic, which have made art a big part of their designs.

By incorporating art, both visual and performing, Karpf said, the hospital becomes more inviting and comforting for patients. The art is selected to reflect Kentucky. One piece, a 90-foot multimedia wall at the entrance, will be a constantly changing display of images from across the commonwealth.

The idea is to move away from a traditional, sterile hospital environment to something warmer and more conducive to healing. Karpf also talks about establishing music therapy and art therapy programs at the hospital.

“It is incredible what art and music do for people,” Karpf said, showing a virtual tour of the hospital.
In addition to visual art, the hospital will have a 300-seat, state-of-the-art education and performance theater, financed by the W. Paul and ­Lucille Caudill Little Foundation. All of the art initiatives in the hospital are privately financed, Karpf said.

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