University Art Museum Opens Spring Season With Two New Exhibitions

Composite shows photos of a man holding a baby on a couch, a woman resting her hand on the shoulder of another woman, a glamour headshot, people dancing at a party, and New York City skyscrapers.
Now on view at the University Art Museum are works by (clockwise from upper left) Mary Ellen Mark, Carrie Mae Weems, Andy Warhol, Larry Fink, and Edward Steichen.

By Bethany Bump

ALBANY, N.Y. (Jan. 19, 2023) — The University Art Museum will open Monday with two new exhibitions for the spring featuring portfolios from six renowned photographers, including pop art icon Andy Warhol, and a feature-length video project by contemporary American artist Carrie Mae Weems.

The exhibitions, Near & Far: Six Photography Portfolios from the University at Albany Fine Arts Collections, and Carrie Mae Weems, Coming Up for Air, include work spanning nearly 100 years in America and explore themes of class, power, unseen labor and celebrity culture that remain relevant today.

On display in the main galleries, Near & Far features collections from photographers Tom Baril and Larry Fink, as well as the late Andreas Feininger, Mary Ellen Mark, Edward Steichen and Andy Warhol.

The earliest photographs are by Steichen, who helped legitimize photography as an art form in the early 20th century and transformed the world of fashion photography as Condé Nast chief photographer from 1923 to 1938. Twenty-Five Photographs, selected by his second wife after his death, features still lifes, closeups of flowers, early New York scenes, and portraits of such celebrities as Paul Robeson and Greta Garbo.

Scenes of early New York are also on display in Vintage New York, a portfolio by Feininger, a Bauhaus-trained artist known for his black-and-white cityscapes. The collection includes five large-scale photographs of New York captured with his super telephoto lens, which was 40 inches long and affixed to a 4x5 view camera held up by a five-pod he invented. Taken during his time as staff photographer for LIFE magazine from 1943 to 1962, they weren’t printed until 1987.

Black-and-white photo shows a table topped with a statue of a girl's head, vase and lamp.
Andy Warhol, Statue print (Provided by University Art Museum)

Two bodies of work by Warhol will also be on display, including 102 color Polaroids and 51 8x10 black-and-white photographs shot in 35mm film. Among his famous Polaroids visitors may recognize fashion designer Carolina Herrera, basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and actress and drag icon Jackie Curtis, among others.

The lives of the rich and privileged can be seen in Fink’s Social Context, a portfolio of 15 black-and-white candids of socialites taken from 1975 to 1991. Born into a working-class family, Fink became a photographer for major publications such as Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine, and wrote that his pictures were “political” and “not polemical” — taken “in the spirit of finding myself in the other.”

Ten intimate portraits from Mark’s In America series (1986-91) feature people from all walks of life, including two boys in their Sunday best on their way to church on a dirt road in Mississippi and four older women donning sequined tuxedo jackets for a Las Vegas performance. Known for bringing empathy and humanity to her subjects, Mark captured portraits of the famous and poor for over four decades, but became known for her photo essays documenting marginalized people and communities around the world.

Four older women wearing costumes of sequined tuxedo jackets, tophats and tights stare at the camera
Mary Ellen Mark, Old women in black, Las Vegas 1991 (Provided by University Art Museum)

An eight-photograph portfolio taken by Baril from 1993 to 2001 features photographs of urban views, flowers and landscapes in palettes of selenium and sepia. The master printer, who printed for photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, frequently explored historical photographic processes in his work, such as collodion wet plates and photogravure.

Marking the 20th anniversary of Coming Up for Air — a feature-length video produced by influential contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems in 2003-2004 — the museum will air the 53-minute film continuously during museum hours as a wall-sized installation in the Nancy Hyatt Liddle Gallery.

The video is presented as seven vignettes, weaving 20th century archival and cinema footage with staged scenes of family quarrels and reconciliation, reflections on parental loss, and moments examining present and historical race and gender relations. Paired with jazz, piano, song and Weems herself reciting poetic narratives, the film is one of her earliest forays into video, which is now a mainstay of her work.

Both exhibitions will be on view Jan. 23 through April 5 during museum hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. Additional Saturday hours will be announced.