Through Our Lenses: Brochure

Personal and Political Views of 18 Photographers

Bill Adams
1992 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Basketball Scene
Collage of Ektacolor prints
1989
44" x 55"

Play at the Plate
Three Collages of Ektacolor prints
1991
Three horizontal images, 28" x 36" each

Baseball Scene
Collage of Ektacolor prints
1990
36"x 45"

Statement
Bill Adams' color photographs and photo-collages are elaborately staged scenes in which he plays all of the characters. He is photographed as he moves to different positions in front of a stationary camera, portraying various people apparently interacting with each other.

There are two contrasting narratives in the work: the ostensible story told in the picture, and the story of the making of the picture. These "action shots" examine qualities of masculinity such as prowess and camaraderie. The dawning realization that all of the characters are played by one man creates shifting identifications and points of view with regard to gender, competition, and spectacle.

Bio
Bill Adams was born in Walnut Creek, California in 1964, and grew up in Santa Cruz. He received a BA in Politics from Princeton University, and an MA and MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico.

Among various publications, two of his pieces are reproduced in Robert Hirsch's textbook Exploring Color Photography. Adams lives and works in an old store in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to which he has added a shower, sink, and cable TV.

Gay Block
National Graduate Seminar Faculty

Johannes DeVries, The Netherlands/Ontario
C and silver gelatin prints
1988/2000
30.5" x 25" x 1.25"; 30.5" x 23.25" x 1.25"

Irene Gut Opdyke, Poland/California
C and silver gelatin prints
1988/2000
30.5" x 25" x 1.25"; 30.5" x 23.25" x 1.25"

Statement
Malka Drucker and Gay Block interviewed and photographed over 100 Christians who rescued Jews in eleven countries during WWII. The book and traveling exhibit, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, was published and shown at Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1992.

Rescuers risked their lives to hide Jews for years. Often these were people they didn't know or perhaps didn't even like, yet they deny that they should be called heroes. "We did what everyone should have done," they said, and Drucker understood them to be saying, "If you see me as Mother Teresa, you let yourself off the hook. Of course you wouldn't be as bad as Hitler, but also you couldn't be as heroic as we were." No, they insist they were ordinary, and these color portraits show them as such.

These few people in the midst of millions of bystanders not only rescued Jews but also preserved the name of humanity, proving that people can do amazing things in the face of extraordinary danger. When governments failed to rescue innocent victims, some people did what they could, proving that goodness is, indeed, a part of the human spirit.

Bio
Gay Block began making portraits in 1973 of her affluent Jewish community in Houston. Her later work includes girls at summer camp, retired people of Miami's South Beach, grocery employees in Texas, and clothed and nude diptychs. Her landmark work with writer Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, both a book and traveling exhibit, has been seen in over fifty venues in the US and abroad, including MoMA in NYC in 1992. Currently, she is working on a visual autobiography of her mother, Bertha Alyce: Mother Exposed, which is forthcoming from UNM Press in 2003. Another book collaboration with Drucker, White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America, will be published by Skylight Paths in 2003.

David Byrne
National Graduate Seminar Faculty

Political Flesh: Arafat
Ink jet print on canvas
2001
72" x 90"
Courtesy of Pace MacGill and Max Protech Gallery

Statement
I picked up a mask of Salinas, the notorious ex-president of Mexico, when I was in Mexico City some years ago. Children begging on the streets would wear this mask of this well-known piece of human scum and dance gaily in the streets-their hands out to passing motorists. It made a lovely piece of political commentary. The levels of meanings between the happy dancing, the mask, the begging and Salinas' exploits made my head spin.

Later, I had one of these masks at home and having removed it from my head some days earlier, it lay on the floor of the closet inside out. I noticed that I could still vaguely tell who it was, though many of its features were now blurred and indistinct. It seemed to refine this face of power-to distill it to its essence. Or at least it had a mysterious creepy quality that the correct side of the mask obliterated by being too cartoonish and literal. The face of power, by being blurred and turned inside out, was somehow more accurately revealed, like the way squinting allows one to see more clearly.

I began to photograph as many of these masks as I could find and to print them as if they were banners-as if they could be flags or hung on the outside of buildings like the giant Stalin or Mao faces of old. The rubbery "flesh landscapes" may tell us more about ourselves and our relationship to politics and power than about the politicians themselves.

Bio
Born in 1952 in Dumbarton, Scotland, David Byrne is primarily known as the musician who co-founded the group Talking Heads (1976-88). He has also been involved in an array of music, theater, and film projects. In 1989 he began solo recordings, including Rei Momo, the self-titled David Byrne (1994), Feelings (1997) and Look into the Eyeball (2001). Byrne has his own record label, Luaka Bop, founded in 1988.

Byrne has been involved with photography and design since his college days. Like his film and musical projects, his photography is often described as elevating the mundane or the banal to the level of art, creating icons out of everyday materials and finding the sacred in the profane.

Three books have been published containing his work, including Strange Ritual (1995), Your Action World (1998), and a religious text called The New Sins, created for the Valencia Bienal. In March 2003, Byrne will be having concurrent solo exhibitions at Pace MacGill and Max Protech Gallery in New York City.

Renée Cox
1992 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Rajé and the Sphinx
C-print
1998
48" x 60"
Courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery

Statement
Superhero, Rajé, a character created by Renée Cox as the great-granddaughter of Nubia, Wonder Woman's Black Amazon sister, transports us around the globe for a necessary redressing on both past and present social injustice. This modern character, while personifying the qualities of strength, and beauty, intellect and compassion is unrestricted by the gender specific constructs of the 1940s. Within a contemporary framework of popular culture of supermodels and postmodern ideas, Cox presents her own power agenda by assuming the role of savior and creating a utopia where fantasy characters bent on socio-psychological evolution provide the path toward enlightenment.

Throughout her career, Cox has offered visual culture a recommodification of the imagery addressing issues of race and gender, and ultimately the broader manifestation of power and sublimation. Western patriarchal constructs have consistently been her point of departure. She calls it "flipping the script." In the Rajé series, Cox traces the lineage of racial stereotypes in Western thought beginning with Napoleon's repudiation of African as elder and subsequent desecration of the Sphinx, to the continued representation of blacks in advertising as asexual and docile child-figures. She liberates Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben from the bondage of fear-based white fantasy and servitude through her own process of re-imagining, emphasizing achievement and the reversal of an antediluvian poser dynamic. Rajé stops cabs for Black patrons. This new role model is not one likely to wait another fifty years for change to occur.

Bio
Born in Colgate, Jamaica West Indies, Renée Cox grew up in Westchester, NY. She graduated with honors from Syracuse University and received her MFA from School of the Visual Arts.

In addition to winning numerous fellowships and awards including the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studies Program and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award, she has studied Art History in Florence and received two Ford Foundation Grants in Photography. Cox went on to develop Rajé, the dynamic female African American superhero seen throughout France in 1988.

In her curatorial debut, NO DOUBT: African American Artists of the 90s at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut, her most infamous work, Yo Mama's Last Supper, was first shown. The work was met with favorable reviews as it made its way to the Biennale di Venizia, in Venice, Italy. It later came under fire most notably by New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani and Cardinal Eagan while being exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition, Committed To The Image, which featured the work of 94 African American photographers. She is represented by the Robert Miller Gallery.

H. Eugene Foster
1993 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Essentialism
Silver gelatin print
1999
20" x 20"

Discourse
Silver gelatin print
1999
20" x 20"

Statement
This body of work is, for the most part, about my relationship to a place where I'd dreamed about living since early childhood-Harlem, New York. I realized when I moved here after being away from New York City for fifteen years that the Harlem of my childhood and the community of people I had come to know and love no longer existed. For me, it was like a ghost town. Sure, there were always people going about, from here to there, friendly enough people who spoke as I went past, you know like, "hello", "what's up?" or "¿que pasá?"

But after five years, I knew I would never really get to know them and they would never really get to know me, not the way you know the people you grow up with, like family. Even in a crowd, I felt very much alone.

I began to wonder whether it was the community that had changed or was it me. I thought a lot about what someone once told me when I was a sophomore at Brooklyn College-that I would no longer be able to think of myself as one of the masses merely because I had entered college. By furthering my education I would create a gap between myself and the people and the culture I had known all of my life. And I remember thinking, "How stupid is that?"

Bio
H. Eugene Foster was born in Brooklyn, New York. Being the youngest of eight children who all had the ability to at least draw, his interest in artmaking began at a very early age, and while in the sixth grade he won a scholarship to study painting for a summer at the Brooklyn Museum. When he was thirteen his family moved to Freeport, Long Island where he commuted every morning to the Manhattan High School of Machine and Metal Trades to study Architectural Drafting.

After many years of being away from artmaking Foster enrolled in the City College of San Francisco's photography program and then transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute to earn a BFA in Photography. Upon returning to New York, he earned an MA in Photography and Environmental Studies from New York University.

Bill Gaskins
1994 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

India, Bronner Brothers Hair Show, Atlanta, Georgia, 1991
Silver gelatin print
1997
20"x 24"x 3/4"

Stanley, Bronner Brothers Hair Show, Atlanta, Georgia, 1991
Silver gelatin print
1997
20"x 24"x 3/4"

Statement
Folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston believed that there is a "will to adorn" that is unique among most African American people. A common expression of this can often be seen on the heads of Black people through the daily ritual of hairstyling. The most sublime expression of this drive also takes place through the heat of the Black hairstyling competition.

Annually there are conventions of Black hair care professionals that take place in American cities with large African American populations. The marquee event of these gatherings is the fantasy hairstyling competition, where hair stylists compete for cash prizes that declare their exceptional creativity by a professional jury of their peers. In this selection of work from my monograph Good And Bad Hair, a Black man and woman on the front line of the hair wars exhibit two extraordinary examples of Hurston's thesis and our common will to adorn.

Bio
As an artist, Bill Gaskins has focused on the complexity of American life through the diverse gestures and rituals of African American people. His work has garnered critical attention through fellowships, residencies, grants, awards, solo and group exhibitions, exhibition catalogs, and other publications. Gaskins is the author of Good And Bad Hair: Photographs by Bill Gaskins, a monograph on hair and African American identity published by Rutgers University Press. He is presently a lecturer in photography at Parsons School of Design in New York.

John Hitchcock
1997 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Kids Mask
Digital print
2001
44" x 30"

Progress
Digital print
2001
44" x 30"

Statement
My current art deals directly with issues of consumption in North America. After the death of my grandparents from cancer, I began a series of digital photo prints and drawings. The work asks questions about the quality of the United States Department of Agriculture commodity foods distributed by the government for food assistance to indigenous lands, welfare programs, and to third world countries.

In my prints, I appropriated the silhouetted logo from the commodities (a cow from a can of beef and a chicken from a package of powdered eggs) to question notions of assimilation and control. These explorations have lead to broader questions about the proliferation of images in popular culture and mass electronic media that inundates our lives daily. What are the societal, psychological, and physiological consequences of globalization? What have we learned from progress? I examine these issues by re-contextualizing images from culture, electronic media, and food to question social and political systems.

Bio
John Hitchcock is an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he teaches screenprinting and installation art. He earned his MFA in printmaking and photography at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas and his BFA from Cameron University, Lawton, Oklahoma. He is the recipient of many honors and awards.

Hitchcock's current works are a blend of printmaking, digital imaging, video, and installation that depict personal, social, and political views. Exhibitions of his art works include group shows at Seacourt Collaborative Press (Bangor, Ireland), IV International Biennial of Photography (Reus Catalonia, Spain), Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago de Chile), Institute of American Indian Art Museum (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Exit Art (New York), Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, New York), and the Anton Gallery (Washington, DC).

Tatana Kellner
National Graduate Seminar Faculty

71125: Fifty Years of Silence
Silkscreen and cast handmade paper
1992
12" x 20" x 3"

Statement
71125: Fifty Years of Silence is one of two artists' books inspired by the realization that I didn't have a clear understanding of my parents' past as concentration camp survivors. As a child I was fascinated by the tattoo on my mother's forearm, the symbol of an unspeakable past. The arm was the only outward sign of my mother's internment, so its presentation became central to my thinking about how to construct a document of my mother's life in the camps.

When I asked her to recollect those years, she decided to write in her native Czech, even though she spoke English well. In the process of translating the stories I had difficulty understanding some of the text. To help me with the translation and to make a kind of personal pilgrimage, I decided to visit the camps she was describing.

In 1990, I visited Terezin, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. While there, I photographed the camps, and the images became the background for the text in the book. I decided to organize the book so the images from the camps became the "public" pages, while the collages from family photographs rest in the more private part of the book.

Much has been written about the Holocaust, describing the horrors and heroics of some of the survivors. My mother's story is a story of an ordinary person living in extraordinary times. She did not perform any heroic acts and was not interested in reflecting on the magnanimous nature of her experience. In her old age, she consented to describe her imprisonment. What has resulted is a straightforward, somber and stark description of my mother's years in the death camps, an experience which indelibly marked her life.

Bio
Tatana Kellner is the founding member and Artistic Director of Women's Studio Workshop, an artists' workspace in Rosendale, NY. WSW is the only women's studio facility and residency program in the United States. For the past 28 years Kellner has been instrumental in designing and implementing programs which provide opportunities for women artists in all stages of their careers.

As a working artist, Kellner is active in creating and exhibiting her work. Kellner's most recent exhibition was a mid-career retrospective at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY. She has just completed a large-scale memorial piece entitled Requiem for September 21, which is installed at the Atrium of the Market Arcade on Main Street in Buffalo. Kellner is a recipient of several grants, awards, and residencies.

Osamu James Nakagawa
1993 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Frozen Jacket, Bloomington, Indiana, Winter 1998, from the series, Kai.
Silver gelatin print
1998
14" x 14"
Courtesy of SEPIA International, New York

Statement

kai -following the cycle of life-

This series of images is an ongoing body of work that is very personal in nature. They revolve around a time of change in my life when I found out that my father was dying of cancer and that my wife was pregnant with our daughter.

Photographing became a way for me to "slow down" and question the changes that were bringing a different rhythm to my life. I began to realize the importance of preserving and creating memories by constructing visual connections and relationships between my family members.

As I observe my daughter grow, I have become interested in questioning the link between the self, parent and child. Through this cycle of age, I began to recognize time as being circular where the beginning and end can occur simultaneously.

Kai is the circle that keeps turning.

Bio
Osamu James Nakagawa is an assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Born in New York City and raised in Tokyo, Japan, he returned to Houston when he was 15 and went on to receive a BA from the University of St. Thomas, Houston in 1986 and a MFA from the University of Houston in 1993.

Nakagawa received numerous grants and fellowships and his work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at the SEPIA International, Inc. in New York, NY, the International Fotofest 2000, and the Houston Center for Photography. Group shows include the Tokyo Biennial, the Stephen Gang Gallery in New York, the Ecuador Bienal '98, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

His work has been published and reviewed in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Village Voice, Aperture: Metamorphosis and others. He teaches workshops at the International Center of Photography in New York and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado.

Pipo Nguyen-duy
1995 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

AnOther Western AnOther Western AnOther Western
Toned silver gelatin prints Toned silver gelatin prints Toned silver gelatin prints
1998 1998 1998
5" x 7" 5" x 7" 5" x 7"

Statement
I began living in the United States in 1975 as a Vietnamese refugee. Consequently, cultural identity and cultural authenticity are the underlying themes of my visual explorations. My work combines photography, performance, theater, sculpture and installation and deals with my assimilation into the West.

Between 1995 and 1998, I worked on a project titled Assimulation. These staged black and white self-portrait photographs utilized traditional Asian theatrical and visual language to imitate and interpret Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

Assimulation was disrupted in 1998, and in AnOther Western, my focus shifts from European high culture to the American West. In this site-specific work, I used 19th century photographic syntax to reinterpret and simulate tintype portraits made in the West during the late 1800's. In these new self-portraits, I take on new roles as gunslingers, musicians and gentlemen. By consciously assuming culturally powerful icons, and not the assumed stereotypical representations of the Asian as the submissive other (i.e. opium addicts or domestic servants) my goal is to humorously and ironically question and challenge the legitimacy and authority of the western myth.

My work-in-progress also includes AnOther Expedition which I began in the summer of 1998 when I received a grant from the Lila Wallace and Readers Digest to live and work in Monet's Garden in Giverny, France. AnOther Expedition is a simulated natural history museum installation of a fictitious Vietnamese colonial expedition to France.

I started working on Two Million Steps in the spring of 2001 during my first visit to Vietnam since 1975. Two Million Steps is an investigation of cultural displacement within immigration and emigration contexts. This new work premiered in 2002 at WORKS in San Jose, CA as well as at Elizabeth Leach in Portland, Oregon.

Bio
Pipo Nguyen-duy was born in 1962 in Hue, Vietnam and earned a BA in Economics at Carleton College and an MA and MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. Nguyen-duy has received awards from the Ohio Art Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Award Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Getty Foundation.

His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in South Carolina, Wisconsin, Oregon, Ohio, and New Mexico, as well as in New York and California and is in public collections in Japan and Laos as well as in the US. Nguyen-duy has curated exhibitions for the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon and the Galerie Vrais Reves in Lyon, France. He is currently Professor of Art at Oberlin College.

Maxine Payne
1996 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Mame Sharp with Whirli-Gig
Silver gelatin print, walnut die, flax paper, meatpacking tape, thread
1997
86" x 45.5"

Statement
"but there's always been women that's hired somebody, you know to get rid of their husbands, oh they put on a big deals about it, they think their mistreated too bad that's, that's happened it's called "givin' 'em tea" you know, they, there certain things, that's roots, things that you can dig up, like, now even them caster beans they got on that man, I've knowed all my life that caster beans is one of the poison'ist things in the world but really I didn't know they's poison as they really are 'til they brought, 'til it come out in the paper the last weeks. But uh, I've heard you know people talk about they got, you know some, uh, some tea you know, and I know of one family that did do some of that kinda' of a 'deal back when I'sa kid and that was in uh, (pause) that happened about 19 in 20, uh well one of it happened about 19 in 20, there's a man just disappeared complete, he was, he just was blind in one eye. And my dad said, well said somebody just slipped up onto him on his blind side and he didn't see' em, and he just disappeared, well years later after everybody moved out of the country, there's a people a prowlin' in under the house and there was just a sunk place just, just big enough for a man to be laid down in under the ground, under that house. The floor was took up and one of the women's husbands, he uh, he just got real bad and he was sick one whole summer there and uh, he had been a great big ol' healthy lookin' man, and he would just cough and spit up some of the greenest stuff you ever seen in all your life, well, my dad said it was from smokin' cigarettes that was rolled with some newspaper. But I don't know uh, his half sister of this women, her husband disappeared and the old lady, she, her husband somethin' happened to 'em and this other woman, and uh, but anyhow all of 'em was a drawin' a pension off'a some a' them men, 'lest one was and that was back far as 19 and 20. and that between here and Pleasant Plains. (pause) but girl theres's always been, there's been a lot of things that a lot of people just don't have no idée' you know, about."

Bio
Maxine Payne is a photographic installation artist living and working in Arkansas, where she was raised. She received her MA and MFA in photography from the University of Iowa. She was an Iowa Arts Fellow and a College Art Association Fellow. Payne currently teaches at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

Payne's work explores the personal conflicts of being raised in a poor, rural culture that was violent and racist with the obligatory allegiance she feels toward it. Many of the works contain images of women who raised her and remnants of objects that recall her history in that place. Most recently Payne's work was accepted into the web component of the upcoming International Center of Photography's Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self.

Kate Sartor Hilburn
1995 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

The Window from the series Beating Hearts: Stories of Domestic Violence
Photo construction
2000
40"x 36"x 2"

Statement
The Window is a mixed-media piece from the exhibition Beating Hearts, Stories of Domestic Violence, a photographic project inspired by testimonies of domestic violence victims in North Louisiana documented by photo artist Kate Sartor Hilburn in collaboration with writer Terrie Queen Autrey.

The series retells in visual and verbal terms the experiences of women they met through their work in domestic abuse prevention. Each piece is a portrait of a victim and the abuse she has suffered. The testimonies cover different ages, genders, ethnic and economic backgrounds and were gathered from their home area. The windows and doors that are incorporated into each construction imply the framework of house and home and other metaphors including isolation, imprisonment and secrecy. The Window tells a story of progressive isolation and control, common symptoms of domestic abuse.

Bio
A Louisiana native, Kate Sartor Hilburn lived in Virginia and Texas before returning to her home state in 1994. She has a BA in Studio Art from Mary Washington College and an MFA in Photography from Texas Woman's University. Exhibited nationally and published internationally, she is represented by the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans.

Feminist issues of body, roles, and the culture of domestic violence make up most of Sartor Hilburn's work. In addition, she is experimenting with photo surfaces and the permanent/impermanent aspects of the image. She is currently researching memory and romanticism in preparation for a photo documentary project in 2003 in Paris, and completing a poster series of her domestic violence work through a grant from the Gannett Foundation.

Virginia Beth Shields
1991 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

From Red Dreams
Ektacolor prints
1992
32.5" x 32.5"

Statement
Red Dreams consists of 30" x 30" Ektacolor prints and 30" x 30" handwritten texts and is displayed in several forms. The work has been shown as a small handmade book, an installation and as an exhibition. The exhibition and the installation are based on the book, yet overall they cross boundaries of medium by integrating photography, storytelling, installation and the visual book medium.

For this project I collaborated with five members of my family who were sharecroppers in South and North Carolina: my grandmother Ethel Graim Wyatt Randolph, my mother, Joyce Randolph Shields, and three of my aunts, Mary Estoy Randolph, Jackie Hill and Judy Rochester. The bookwork itself is a combination of texts from their oral histories that I have recorded and photographs of houses similar to those in which women lived. The texts are a sampling of sayings, ghost stories, dreams, real life experiences and descriptions of various houses they lived in as sharecroppers. The style of the text is rooted in my family's storytelling tradition as I have maintained their culturally specific use of language. The women in my family who I collaborated with for this project told these stories to me when I was a child.

The installation recreates the inside of a dwelling typical of a sharecropping family. Every part of the installation works together to conjure a holistic environment that provides the viewer with an insider's perspective of this culture.

In a fine arts context, Red Dreams adds to current theoretical discourses involving multiculturalism and cross-media practices. The work advocates women's roles in history as it celebrates a regionalism that is usually denigrated. As a whole the work has a strong socio-political conscience as well as a rural Southern flavor. The installation exposes the community to alternate voices in American history and to new approaches to artmaking.

Bio
Virginia Beth Shields was born in rural South Carolina and grew up as the granddaughter of sharecroppers. She has had over fifteen solo exhibitions in the last ten years and has participated in group exhibitions at commercial galleries and non-profit spaces including the Steinbaum/Krausse Gallery, and the Painted Bride Arts Center. Shields is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, an Art Matters Foundation Grant and an Alternate Roots Community/Artist Partnership Grant among others.

Susan Sponsler
1995 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

41 Days
Silver gelatin prints
1999
41 6" x 6" separate framed pieces

Statement
My twin sister and I were born in Seoul, Korea in 1958. Shortly before we were to be adopted, we both became ill with pneumonia, and my sister died. At the age of 4 months I was adopted by my new parents, an Iowa farm couple. I remember my mom telling me that she and my dad had wanted to adopt both of us. When they got the news that my twin had died, she was very worried about me. As I grew older, I often wondered what it would be like to be a twin.

In 1997, I had an opportunity to visit the country of my birth for the first time since my departure as an infant. One of my interests during my visit was to try to locate a photo of my sister, whose picture I had never seen. I had a naive hope that a glimpse of her image could tell me if we were identical twins. I also wanted to find and visit her grave. I was disappointed and shocked to learn that her grave was unmarked, alongside many other orphans who had died in the years shortly after the Korean War.

My discoveries about her short life inspired me to create this piece as a sort of memorial to her. The piece also documents my memories of the twins in my adoptive family and my fascination with facts and stories about twins. Each of the 41 prints represents one day of my sister's life and are set up in a 7-day calendar grid, starting with the Sunday on which we were born in 1958. 41 Days is the grave marker that my sister never had.

Bio
Susan Sponsler was born in Seoul, Korea. She was adopted by American parents and arrived in the United States-Iowa, specifically--in March, 1959. In the first years after the Korean War, Harry Holt, who knew of the Korean orphan plight, founded the Holt International Adoption Agency. Sponsler's father, a Korean War veteran, and her mother went through the Holt agency to adopt two babies-Susan and a younger brother.

Sponsler grew up in Iowa with three younger brothers, graduated from Iowa State University and joined the staff of the office of marketing and communication at Texas Woman's University in 1984. The artist earned her MFA in Photography from TWU and currently serves as creative director in the TWU office of marketing and communication.

Bill Thomas
1995 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Knife and Iron from the SUICIDE series Tub and Toaster from the SUICIDE series
Silver gelatin print Silver gelatin print
1991 1995
30" x 40" 30" x 40"

Statement
On September 15, 1959, I witnessed the bloody aftermath of a bombing at my elementary school, where a madman killed himself and five others, including his own six-year-old son, by detonating a powerful bomb on the school grounds. This was an extremely upsetting event for my fellow sixth-grade students and me, but our trauma was never acknowledged or addressed in any way. Ironically, upon our return to school the next day, we were asked by the voice over the public address speaker to observe a "moment of silence" and pray for the victims of the bomb. Those of us who survived the blast and saw the bodies became part of a conspiracy of denial and were condemned to having to recover from this "great image."

Recovering this image from my memory has necessarily brought me "closer" to death, and has led me to examine our cultural attitudes that deny death. Perhaps nowhere is this denial stronger than with regard to the social taboo of suicide. I've often wondered what degree of intent is necessary to qualify a behavior as suicide, especially when I see ordinary people smoking cigarettes, abusing drugs and alcohol and driving while intoxicated. Are we always conscious of our reasons for doing these and other self-destructive things?

The SUICIDE series attempts to deal with this taboo content in an ironic way, looking at suicide from both serious and humorous perspectives. It is my intention to present the viewer with several death-related issues-the acknowledgment and denial of death, the cohesion of the self, self-destructive behaviors and alienation-against the backdrop of humor. In this context, I intend humor to be more than a clever device to gain access to the darker sides of ourselves. Humor contains a life-affirming, restorative power which can also sustain us during our long journey through the detours of art and life, regardless of what images we might unwittingly recover-and then have to recover from.

Bio
Currently, Bill Thomas is a photographer and Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. Prior to that, he directed the Photography/Digital Imaging program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Thomas is a recipient of artist awards from the NEA, the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, and the Houston Center for Photography. Also a freelance curator, Thomas curated a photographic/mixed-media exhibition, Cultural Baggage, at Rice University in 1995, commissioning the work of 20 artists from across the country.

His own work was exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), and traveled elsewhere as part of the Texas triennial in 1993-94. Most recently Thomas' series, SUICIDE, was exhibited in a solo show at The Floating Gallery in Winnipeg, Canada in 2000. Thomas' photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the University of Houston, and the Harry Ransom Collection, University of Texas, Austin.

Chris Verene
1996 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

My Cousin Candi's Wedding
C-print
1994
24" x 20"

Rozie in the Window
C-print
1994
24" x 20"

Statement
The cover of my book features my cousin Candi's wedding with her two favorite customers from her job as a waitress at the Sirloin Stockade. I am so pleased that Candi and the family have responded so positively to my work and my book.

This artwork began fifteen years ago when I was seventeen. I wanted to make honest pictures of my family that told their true story in a manner that anyone could understand. In my book, Chris Verene (Twin Palms, 2000), there are scenes of sorrow, joy and desperation. My job has been to make documents that retain all the dignity of the people and their homes as well as convey the complexity of emotion that I had seen in the family drama.

Galesburg is a small city of about 33,000 people in central western Illinois. It was and is a railroad town, created in the boom of that industry. Galesburg's people are mostly retired senior citizens, young families, restless teenagers, the young unemployed, and farm laborers. The great poet Carl Sandburg was born and raised in Galesburg. He called it "…a piece of the American Republic. Galesburg burns in my memory."

Bio
Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Chris Verene received his MFA from Georgia State University in 1996 and has received critical acclaim for his performances and photographic works. The performance piece, The Self Esteem Salon, has been presented at Deitch Projects in New York in 2002 and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally from Atlanta to Amsterdam, Memphis to Paris, and was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. He was the first photographer to ever receive the Jackson Pollock/Barbra Krasner Fellowship.

Verene's work has been reviewed by Art Forum, Art in America, The New YorkTimes, Art News, The Village Voice, Contemporary Visual Art, Elle Magazine, French Mens' Vogue, and was featured on PBS in early 2001. His monograph (Twin Palms, 2000) was a New York Times book review critic's pick. He teaches in the graduate school of the School for Visual Arts and The International Center of Photography in New York City. His works are in museum and private collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum.

Deborah Willis
National Graduate Seminar Faculty

The Shotgun Series No. 4
Hudson Bottom, Orangeburg, South Carolina
Inkjet print
2002
24" x 28"

The Shotgun Series No. 5
Hudson Bottom, Orangeburg, South Carolina
Inkjet print
2002
22" x 28"

Statement
I am looking at how beauty is manifested in African American culture, from the physicality of the body to the architectural structure of the home. Memory is central to my work. In the 1800's, shotgun houses were homes for the working class, free blacks and immigrants. These homes were inexpensive to build and were situated on small lots, making them affordable to people who dreamed of owning their own homes.

Shotguns date from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries and are found in the southern United States. They may be the only African American building type there is. Folklore attributed the name "Shotgun house" to the notion that a bullet fired through the front door could go straight through the house and out the back door due to the linear arrangement of rooms. Some scholars argue that these one-story wooden frame houses with narrow widths reflect African building traditions that entered the American Southeast via the transatlantic slave trade through the Caribbean Islands.

Bio
Deborah Willis is Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a photographer working with images exploring beauty. She is the 2000 MacArthur Fellow, author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, and the co-author of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History with Carla Williams.

Soon-Mi Yoo
1999 National Graduate Seminar Fellow

Comfort Women
Silver gelatin prints and text
1998
44" x 33"

Statement
During World War II, approximately two hundred thousand women, mostly Korean, were forced into sexual slavery by Japan's armed forces. Euphemistically called "comfort women", these women were enslaved in comfort stations set up throughout East Asia by the Japanese military from 1932 until the end of the war.

I photographed thirteen surviving former comfort women in 1998 in South Korea. The text was taken from the interviews done by the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women in 1994.

Bio
Soon-Mi Yoo's installation work has been exhibited in the Cannon House Office Building (Washington, DC), Photographic Resource Center, Boston Center for Arts, Work Gallery (San Jose), Guild Hall Museum, and Mills Gallery. Her photographs of the comfort women survivors are published in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony from Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Holmes & Meier, NY, 2000).

Her film and video work includes faith (1999), Stories From the Border (2000), and Do Roo (Circling Back, 1994). She received a residency fellowship from the MacDowell Colony and the Corporation of Yaddo. She is a recipient of The Corcoran Alumni Award for Excellence (1997) and the National Asian American Telecommunications Association Grant (1994). She was born in 1962 in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US in 1990.