ROBERT STIVERS: The Art of Ruin

Robert Stivers "The Art of Ruin" cover

Twin Palms Publishers, April 2015

 Robert Stivers from "The Art of Ruin"

For many of his images, Stivers begins with a sharply focused negative that is then manipulated in the printing process causing intentional loss of clarity to achieve sensual, dream-like images akin to early Pictorialism at the turn of the 20th Century. – Twin Palms Publishers

Robert Stivers "The Art of Ruin"

16 x 20 inches, 26 four-color plates, 54 pages

Twin Palms Publishers, April 2015

NEW ORLEANS: Ancestors and Descendants

Antelope Priests Shaking Rattles, 1901
Hand-colored glass lantern slide by Sumner W. Matteson
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

George Hubbard Pepper slide from around 1899
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

Portrait of Hopi Maiden with Hair Whorls, 1901
Hand-colored glass lantern slide by Sumner W. Matteson
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

Leisure Time at George Pepper's Tent
Hand-colored glass lantern slide
Middle American Research Institute/Tulane University

"Ancestors and Descendants: Ancient Southwestern America at the Dawn of the 20th Century." Photography, Artifacts, and Archival Research from the George Hubbard Pepper Native American Archive.

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) unveiled a little-known Native American archive this past week. Ancestors and Descendants presents a rare opportunity to see a collection that was put together over one hundred years ago by George H. Pepper, a museum ethnologist and early collector and scholar of Native American art. The exhibition, curated by Paul J. Tarver NOMA’s Curator of Pre-Columbian and Native American Art and co-curated by Cristin J. Nunez, includes 140 photographs and 150 objects from Pepper's personal collection. Pepper used textiles, pottery, baskets and other Pueblo and Navajo objects in his lectures. Many of these objects have never been seen by the general public since 1924. "Even in his lifetime, Pepper could only display a handful of objects with a few dozen images he projected through a magic lantern," said Tarver, "This is the first time the breadth of the archive has been researched and displayed."

"In the New Orleans show, An entire gallery is devoted to his relics of snake dances, the Hopis’ prayers for rain. The museum catalog ($24.95) quotes his unpublished eyewitness accounts, which turned up in the Tulane paperwork. Hopi tribesmen would collect a hundred snakes at a time, and then priests would emit a “weird droning” over the “writhing twisting forms of the reptiles,” Pepper wrote. Priests used their teeth to carry the snakes and waved around feathers to distract them. “Snake maidens” showered cornmeal on the reptiles, which were then released “in the sacred earth-mouths in the rock,” Pepper reported." (from NY Times, July 22, 2010)

The New Orleans Museum of Art
July 24-October 24, 2010

THOMAS STRUTH: Architectural Monuments + Landscapes

Waldstrasse auf dem Lindberg-Landscape No. 3, Winterthur 1992
Sold at 2000 Auction for $48,825.
Photograph (c) Thomas Struth /All Rights Reserved

Paradise 14, Yakushima, Japan 1999
Photograph (c) Thomas Struth /All Rights Reserved

Mailänder Dom (Fassade) 1998. Sold at 2008 Auction for $565,000.
Photograph (c) Thomas Struth /All Rights Reserved

Pergamon Museum II, Berlin 2001
Photograph (c) Thomas Struth /All Rights Reserved

Monreale, Palermo 1998
Photograph (c) Thomas Struth /All Rights Reserved

"Thomas Struth's Mailänder Dom (Fassade) above, executed in 1998, conveys a sense of the building's overwhelming dimensions through its own size. The building visually and physically dominates both the composition and the people in front of the massive cathedral. The sharp focus on the cathedral recalls the photographs of Struth's teacher, Bernd Becher. However, Struth's image, while appearing to share Bernd and Hilla Becher's concerns with objectivity, aims to capture something more subjective, more distinctive and more profound about the world in which we live.

Western religion places the cathedral, a dramatic and sacred building, on a pedestal. However, the tourists in front of this particular cathedral in Milan are not pilgrims but tourists. This forces the viewer to consider its relative obsolescence in our more secular age. Struth depicts the cathedral most as the center of human interaction, not merely the center of the Catholic Church. The visitors, for the most part, are surely not worshipers. The religious buildings and artefacts of yore have become the tourist sites of today. Struth does not merely document how places look. He does not merely reduce the fabric of our urban life to abstraction, as is the case in so many other "objective" photographs, although these factors are important to Mailänder Dom (Fassade) and its aesthetic. Instead, he attempts to grasp and convey some essence of our existence in the cosmopolitan playground of the modern world."–Christie's catalog 2008. Number nine of an edition of ten, 74½ x 92½ in. (189.2 x 235 cm.), sold at auction for $565,000.

Thomas Struth Biography

Thomas Struth / Exhibition / June 11-September 12, 2010
Kunsthaus Zurich