Exhibition

Richard Avedon: Relationships, envisioned by Chief Curator Rebecca Senf for the Tucson galleries of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 2018, has been expanded and traveled from the Royal Palace in Milan, Italy, to a second venue at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Palermo, Italy.

The exhibition, which features both Avedon's portraiture and fashion photography, will present the Center's exhibition of over 100 prints in a series of galleries featuring Avedon's early and late fashion, portraits of performers, artists, and politicians. Each section is introduced by a portrait of Avedon and a quote by the artist bringing a sense of Avedon and his personal outlook into the galleries. The exhibition boasts a new publication--printed in both Italian and in English--to accompany and amplify the installation of prints, and the exhibition includes a special "Vogue" room with a reading area to allow visitors to peruse the exhibition catalogue.

Why Color? is the first class residency piloted by the Center for Creative Photography + Art & Visual Culture Education in the School of Art. Simultaneously a classroom and installation, the project launches in early September, inviting University of Arizona graduate students in the course “Participatory Practices and Edu-Curation in Exhibitions” to design an exhibition from CCP’s collection of color photography. The goal? To create an art-influenced community experience that can be both educational and meaningful, as well as collaborative.

In Why Color?, the exhibition is accomplished in two stages. The first is a review of color processes, showing how experimentation and evolution is at the foundation of color photography. There is also a collection of books, games, and archival reproductions to explore, topics ranging from the effects of color on emotion to Polaroid pictures, from cultural histories of color to photographers’ work prints.

The second stage, set to be completed in early November 2022, realizes the semester-long work of participating students. Themes are ultimately up to the graduate students, their specific interests and concerns, and will also be securely rooted in ideas of community, collaboration, and interdisciplinary engagement by way of color photography.

Highlights include photographs by Lalla Essaydi, Mark Klett, Reagan Louie, Joyce Neimanas, Catherine Opie, and Edward Weston.

Showcasing more than 70 portraits, landscapes, self-portraits, and family archival images, And Let It Remain So: Women of the African Diaspora presents the nuanced perspectives of five photographers who are exploring their experiences of the African Diaspora, defined by the voluntary and forced movement of Africans and their descendants over centuries through waves of migration and enslavement.

Featured works by Widline Cadet, Jasmine Clarke, Hellen Gaudence, Nadiya I. Nacordia, and Sasha Phyars-Burgess reflect specific locales, general memories, and multilayered family experiences, drawing on elements from the past and present to consider an imagined future. Experienced collectively, these dynamic photographs illuminate shared and separate understandings of family and history, place and displacement, migration and mobility, and belonging and community, all informed by individual diasporic realities.

The exhibition is curated by Aaron Turner, a regular collaborator with the Center for Creative Photography and an African-American photographer and educator based in Arkansas. Turner’s own photography focuses on the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas and his reflections on the place of the Civil Rights movement within his and his family’s experience. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at University of Arkansas, School of Art, and the Director of the Center for Art as Lived Experience.

And Let it Remain So: Women of the African Diaspora is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography. It is made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members.

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.