Deep Storage: The Arsenal of Memory
New Works Laboratory: A Partnership Between 911 Media Arts Center and the Henry Art Gallery
Jacob Lawrence: Painting LifeAaron Siskind, The Fragmentation of Language
East Gallery
April 2, 1998 – July 5, 1998
One of America’s most influential photographers, Aaron Siskind (1902 – 1991) became well-known in the 1950s for his innovative abstraction. A friend of New York artists Robert Motherwell, Willem DeKooning, and Franz Kline, Siskind’s endeavors paralleled theirs in terms of formal compositional concerns and subject matter. Siskind was the only photographer to be a member of their informal gathering called ‘The Club’ in New York City, and to regularly exhibit with them. Over the course of his career, Siskind was engaged by the potential symbolic and literal meanings that could be discovered in signage, graffiti and found objects. He created richly toned black and white photographs that express his fascination with the human gestures and enigmatic messages he found in ordinary circumstances. The thirty-nine works in this exhibition employed a rich variety of ideas about language and explore the dialogue between realistic depiction and expressive symbolism.