The Wonders and Powers of Art

While the George Eastman Museum is steadfastly continuing our diligent efforts to protect the health of our visitors and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself increasingly excited about welcoming more of our members and other visitors to the museum for the extraordinarily broad range of exhibitions that we are presenting in 2021.

Currently on view are Carl Chiarenza: Journey into the Unknown, a major retrospective, in our main galleries (through June 20) and Stacey Steers: Night Reels in our Project Gallery and multipurpose hall (through June 6).

Carl Chiarenza has demonstrated that photographs can be much more than just documentary evidence. His artworks suggest mysterious worlds that we are invited to explore. This exhibition spans the Rochester-based artist’s entire oeuvre, beginning with early photographs Chiarenza made as a high school student and concluding with a large selection of his most recent work in collage. Visitors can follow the continuities and ruptures in Chiarenza’s artistic journey across his seven-decade career. The Eastman Museum has published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition.

Stacey Steers’s Night Reels comprises three artworks combining paper collage, animation, and sculpture. Her surrealist films are created from intricate paper collages of fragments of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies; images of silent film stars Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Janet Gaynor; and nineteenth century printed engravings. In our Project Gallery, Steers’s fascinating sculptures — from a precarious stack of bed frames to a foreboding Victorian dollhouse — each create a milieu to set the mood for one of her moving image works. You can have a more immersive experience of the films on the large screen in our multipurpose hall.

In the second half of the year, we will present Joshua Rashaad McFadden: I Believe I’ll Run On, an early-career survey, in our main galleries (opening Fall 2021) and To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, a collaborative work of photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker and professor Vanessa Fabbre, in our Project Gallery (opening June 19).

Joshua Rashaad McFadden uses photography to engage some of the most timely and challenging subject matter of our time. Working across genres — social documentary, reportage, portraiture, book arts, and fine arts — he critically examines race, masculinity, sexuality, and gender in the United States. His work reveals the destructive impact of these constructs on Black Americans. Looking to the idea of “being‑ness,” he considers the contemporary condition of Black life while referencing US history as a means to rediscover and define the Black self. In the end, McFadden’s practice asserts the humanity of Black Americans.

This first early-career survey of the prolific artist’s work will include the series Selfhood, Come to Selfhood, A Lynching’s Long Shadow, After Selma, Evidence, Unrest in America, and finally, premiering at the Eastman Museum, the autobiographical series Love Without Justice. McFadden was born in Rochester and is currently a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, an exhibition organized by Barrett Barrera Projects, features portraits of individuals with a wide variety of life stories that span the last ninety years. Jess T. Dugan’s portraits are open, emotive, and nuanced, utilizing direct eye contact to foster empathy and understanding. To enhance our connection as the viewer to each subject’s story, each photograph is accompanied by a text, drawn from interviews conducted by Vanessa Fabbre, that describes the sitter’s background or experiences. As a whole, the photographs and texts offer a poignant view into the struggles and joys of growing older as a transgender person.

I hope that you will spend time with each of these exhibitions to see the varied approaches and contributions of contemporary photography and moving image works to art, culture, personal identity, and social issues.

Bruce Barnes, Ph.D.

Ron and Donna Fielding Director

March/April 2021 Bulletin