Exhibition

The Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in collaboration with the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) invited digital submissions of images or texts that respond to the question: what stories, images, or ideas do trees inspire for you? Selected submissions were printed and are displayed together at the Bryant Bannister Tree-Ring Building from January 31, 2022 to July 22, 2022.

This community art project is on display in conjunction with the exhibition trees stir in their leaves, in CCP’s Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery. 

You can view this community art project at the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am - 5pm.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION Trees Stir In Their Leaves:

“To find the wealth of information trees have to share,” writes paleoclimatologist Dr. Valerie Trouet in Tree Story, “we must simply learn how to look.”

From January 22 – July 22, 2022, the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) will stage installations together that follow historical, cultural, and scientific narratives inspired by trees.

With more than 75 images and objects assembled from CCP and LTRR’s collections, trees stir in their leaves creates a multilayered experience with photography and dendrochronology (the study of annual rings in trees) in CCP’s Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery. Learn how visual information and analyses are crucial to tree-ring research and environmental advocacy. Explore trees as a point of departure from which artists and scientists consider nature, place, progress, migration, connectivity, and catastrophe. The installation includes work by such CCP collection artists as Ansel Adams, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Barbara Crane, Kozo Miyoshi, Doug and Mike Starn, Aaron Siskind, Rosalind Solomon, John Yang and more.

Founded as the first of its kind in 1937 at the University of Arizona, LTRR comprises an interdisciplinary research lab, teaching institute, and wood sample archive. At LTRR, the collaboration continues with a community art installation that responds to the prompt: what stories, images or ideas do trees inspire for you? Also at LTRR, trace the histories of dendrochronology; experience the interactive tree-stump and large redwood section exhibit; join tours of the facilities; and view films about lab research on trees.

To complement the installations, the Center’s mobile app, CCP Interactive, offers a guided tour of campus trees along the walk between CCP and LTRR. Designed by the University of Arizona Campus Arboretum, the mobile tour provides a lived experience of the aesthetic, scientific, and cultural connections between people and trees. The tour is also available in printed and mobile formats through the Campus Arboretum website here.

Small front room of main gallery

During the last four years, the Center for Creative Photography created a process and funding source for diversifying our collection. We began by analyzing existing holdings, determined strengths, and identified where underrepresented artists and gaps in the collection existed. It was clear that there were many perspectives, as well as a range of contemporary voices, not represented in our holdings. Through three auctions of duplicate holdings in our collection, the Center funded an endowment which is being used to purchase work to diversify the collection. This exhibition of new acquisitions presents three rotations of three artworks each and serves as our first opportunity to share these new works with our community.  

Trios: Looking Close at Three New Acquisitions offers a concentrated opportunity for visitors to know some of the Center’s newest works. Each photograph is shared along with an observation from a member of the CCP staff and student staff, and a statement from the artist. Our intention is to open a valuable space for contemplation, close looking, and reflection with singular works of art. Designed to be an evolving exhibition, we will reinstall in February and March, sharing three new prints each time. Tapping into the global slow art movement that promotes quality experiences with art, we share prompts to support extended exploration of each work in the gallery. Visitors are invited to share their experience by posting to social media and tagging #CCPSlowArt or adding their comment on an in-gallery Slow Art wall.  

In the early months of 2022, as the Center reopens the front room of our main galleries for the first time since our pandemic-related closure in March 2020, we find ourselves in a unique situation. Our building and digital infrastructure are undergoing renovations to improve our ability to care for the collections and make them accessible. This process will be explored and illustrated through text and image in the gallery as well. Although much of our main galleries are impacted in that process, they will reopen to the public fully in January of 2023. 

In the decades following World War II, numerous radical Japanese photographers undertook an aggressive reassessment of the medium. These new non-conformist photographers broke from photojournalism’s norms of objective description and instead adopted a radically expressive, subjective, and critical approach in response to a changing modern world. Publishing in avant-garde zines and underground artists’ journals, their aim was to challenge viewers’ complacency about the medium’s possibilities and question how photography was used to make claims to truth, to shape national identity, and to convey patriotism.

In 1988 and 1990, with the support of two major grants from the Hitachi Corporation, the Center for Creative Photography made a historic acquisition of 87 works by nineteen contemporary Japanese photographers, including Moriyama Daidō, Fukase Masahisa, Eikoh Hosoe, Tōmatsu Shōmei, and Ishiuchi Miyako. These nineteen artists each played a fundamental role in steering the aesthetics and ethos of the postwar period in Japan and beyond and represent vastly ranging perspectives. Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs, 1961-1989 brings together all 87 prints for display for the first time since they were acquired, introducing audiences in the Phoenix and greater Southwest region to this critical moment in Japanese photography.

“To find the wealth of information trees have to share,” writes paleoclimatologist Dr. Valerie Trouet in Tree Story, “we must simply learn how to look.”

From February 5 – July 22, 2022, the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) will stage installations together that follow historical, cultural, and scientific narratives inspired by trees.

With more than 75 images and objects assembled from CCP and LTRR’s collections, trees stir in their leaves creates a multilayered experience with photography and dendrochronology (the study of annual rings in trees) in CCP’s Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery. Learn how visual information and analyses are crucial to tree-ring research and environmental advocacy. Explore trees as a point of departure from which artists and scientists consider nature, place, progress, migration, connectivity, and catastrophe. The installation includes work by such CCP collection artists as Ansel Adams, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Barbara Crane, Kozo Miyoshi, Doug and Mike Starn, Aaron Siskind, Rosalind Solomon, John Yang and more.

Founded as the first of its kind in 1937 at the University of Arizona, LTRR comprises an interdisciplinary research lab, teaching institute, and wood sample archive. At LTRR, the collaboration continues with a community art installation that responds to the prompt: what stories, images or ideas do trees inspire for you? Also at LTRR, trace the histories of dendrochronology; experience the interactive tree-stump and large redwood section exhibit; join tours of the facilities; and view films about lab research on trees.

To complement the installations, the Center’s mobile app, CCP Interactive, offers a guided tour of campus trees along the walk between CCP and LTRR. Designed by the University of Arizona Campus Arboretum, the mobile tour provides a lived experience of the aesthetic, scientific, and cultural connections between people and trees. The tour is also available in printed and mobile formats through the Campus Arboretum website here.

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View the exhibition virtually by location here:

The School of Art 2020 MFA Thesis Alumni Exhibition is proud to honor the achievements of their Master of Fine Arts graduates from 2020. During the last year of their coursework, graduates were poised to exhibit their thesis research when we were hit with campus closure because of the pandemic. As a result, these students missed out one of the most intrinsic components of their academic studies, presenting a fully developed body of work to the public in the form of an exhibition. Slowly as the world begins to open we are able to host these artists and reflect on the work they completed in those last months of their degree pursuits. Please join us in celebrating the School of Art's graduates in
the 2020 Alumni Exhibition.

FEATURING ARTISTS: Erin DiGiovanni, Zach Gotschalk, Mijoung Kim, Marisa Lewon, Dorsey Kaufmann, Martin Krafft, Elena Makansi, Leah Netsky, Jared Robison, Marina Shaltout, Kaitlyn Jo Smith, Alex Turner, Kenzie Wells

The public can enjoy the very best artworks created by our 2020 MFA alumni offered in 3D, 360-degree, virtual reality. Physically hung in the galleries, the exhibition is viewed virtually. Utilizing the 3D space capture program from Matterport, museum visitors have the opportunity to virtually ‘walk-through’ the different exhibitions and even view the exhibition in VR, which puts you “in the gallery.” Each piece of artwork has been carefully scanned to facilitate the new online medium and paired with the navigation aspect allows for great user experience.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Hume Kennerly has documented momentous events and people including politicians, entertainment figures and a space shuttle liftoff. A pop-up exhibition of 25 of his prints are on display at Main Gate Square and inside the Tucson Marriott University Park hotel.

Sponsored by Marshall Foundation, established in 1930 by Louise Marshall, seeks to enhance the lives of the citizens of Tucson, AZ and Pima County through its support of charitable and educational institutions. The Foundation focuses its community giving on early childhood through undergraduate education and supportive wrap-around social services to aid underserved populations in attaining education. Marshall Foundation also funds projects, programs and scholarships at the University of Arizona, including post-secondary levels.

Photojournalism 20/20: A Think Tank for an Unimaginable Present will be on view in CCP's Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery until December 4, 2021. Esta exposición está disponible en español.

This retrospective exhibition will survey the career of Marion Palfi (1907–1978), who produced one of the most important visual documents of American injustice of the twentieth century. Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America, 1940-1978 features over one hundred prints and numerous archival materials drawn exclusively from the Center for Creative Photography’s vast Marion Palfi Archive, including photobooks, magazine spreads, research journals, and grant applications. Many of these prints and expository archival materials have never before been exhibited or published and will offer an unprecedented opportunity to draw new insights into the work.

Palfi’s philosophy of using photography to influence social change shaped her vision and distinguished her career. A German immigrant to the United States during World War II, Palfi arrived in Los Angeles to find a reality far from the myth of the American Dream. Outraged at the economic, racial, and social inequalities she encountered, she spent over three decades traveling throughout the United States documenting troubled communities to expose the links between racism and poverty. As a self-described “social research photographer,” Palfi aspired for her photographs to live in the world and to effect social change. Her work was featured in numerous American periodicals, including Ebony and The New York Times. Sponsors for her work included the Council Against Intolerance in America, the NAACP, and the New York State Committee on Discrimination in Housing.

Each of the photographer’s four major projects are represented in the exhibition: her piercing nationwide study of children living in poverty; her decades-long civil rights activism documenting the effects of systemic racism against African Americans; her research on the abject conditions of aging in New York; and her revelatory pictures, funded by a 1967 Guggenheim fellowship, of the forced relocation of Native Americans off of reservations in the Southwest. Weaving together over three decades of work, the exhibition elucidates Palfi’s sustained focus on themes of inequity, solitude, racial victimization. Taken as a whole, it elucidates the photographer’s elegiac crusade for human rights and presents a cumulative photographic record that resonates with many of the social concerns still plaguing our country today.

Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography.  

As a featured component of the University of Arizona’s Family Weekend 2019, the Center for Creative Photography has designed its first-ever outdoor pop-up exhibition.  Including 63 images by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly (b. 1947), the exhibition shows the Pulitzer-prize winning photographer’s breadth of subjects.  Included are his early political pictures of Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford; entertainment images including Mick Jagger, Miles Davis, and Jerry Seinfeld; sports figures Mary Lou Retton, Mohammed Ali, and Carl Lewis; recent political figures President Donald Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and former President Jimmy Carter; and news events including a space shuttle lift off, presidential inaugurations, and a chilling view of the Penatgon on 9/11.

Kennerly has documented momentous events for newspaper and magazine publications, and as photographer to President Gerald Ford, for over fifty years. His photographs bring us closer to the world leaders who made the news, and to those impacted by their actions.

The pop-up exhibition will complement an exhibition of 25 of his fine art prints on display in the University of Arizona's Old Main, including a tender view of Arizonan Linda Ronstadt, profound pictures of Vietnam soldiers, an early color portrait of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennerly’s prize-winning frame of the Mohammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight.

The Center for Creative Photography is excited to be integrated into the activities of this popular fall event.  It is a powerful opportunity for Kennerly's work to be introduced to the campus community for students, parents, staff, faculty, and visitors to experience and enjoy.

Learn more about the David Hume Kennerly Archive.

Presented by Bank of America, Marshall Foundation, Arizona Arts, and Center for Creative Photography