Studio Update
Hot damn and hell yeah - it’s been a long time since I’ve considered writings a studio update! Thanks for joining the list on Substack, which will be home to my first real artist newsletter. In addition to updates, I also plan to post academic writings and share artworks from other artists: Tumblr-circa-2012-style.
As for the 2022 update, I’ll start by saying that I’ve been fairly inundated with grad school. It’s been an incredible experience and I am thankful to be dedicating so much time to a creative practice and the concurrent academic development that supports it.
I have just returned from New York City, where my classmates and I had a whirlwind of a week meeting with other artists, publishers, and curators in the photography world. We met with photographers Susan Meiselas, Bruce Gilden, Matthew Leifheit, Tommy Kha, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Myriam Boulous, Jason Fulford, Paul Moakley, and Rahim Fortune. The curators, editors, and publishers we spoke with represent a broad range of photography organizations from Magnum, Aperture, and MACK Books to Penumbra Foundation, Sasha Wolf Projects, The Museum of Modern Art, Higher Pictures Generation, and The Alice Austen House. We could not have had such amazing opportunities were it not for the work of our professor, Gregory Halpern.
The last few days of my trip were spent at the New York Art Book Fair, a madhouse for art publications that is held annually by Printed Matter. I was invited to share artwork at the Allied Productions table, so I brought along some prints and a mockup copy of my photobook series New Intimacies. Throughout the weekend, I was able to have great discussions with other artists and collectors at the table, as well as with my friends and mentors Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, who run Allied Productions. They received a mention in this Hyperallergic article about the book fair, which I encourage you to read to get a sense of their significance and dedication to the downtown/east village art community in New York.
I have worked with Jack and Peter over the years, including this past summer when I interned for their studio on East 8th Street. We spent a lot of time in the studio organizing ephemera and other materials, and I digitized behind-the-scenes production stills from Super 8 and 16mm films they created as part of Naked Eye Cinema. This was a wonderful thread to pick up on after having curated a film program of this work in 2020, before Covid-19 forced us to cancel our series at Visual Studies Workshop. You can listen to an audio interview that I conducted with Jack and Peter for Ben Lovell’s show In Streams on WAYO 104.3 FM.
During the summer, I was doing thesis research and photographic production in my free time. This included visits to the special collections at the New York Public Library, and trips to a number of the city’s cruising areas, nightclubs, and leather bars. I was also a participant in SOILED: The Downtown Dirty Book Fair, which was organized by Matthew Leifheit at Le Petit Versailles community garden (another project of Waters, Cramer, and Allied Productions), and I had work in a show called Free to Be, which was curated by Lissa Rivera and Orestes Gonzales. Overall, it was an intensive and productive summer, and while I’m glad to be home in Rochester, I can’t think of a more fitting use of time between my first and second years of MFA study.
So, that’s it for now. I will post another update in the winter, which will include details about the thesis exhibition at RIT and my conference presentation for the Society for Photographic Education in Denver. Thanks again for following - besos!