New Directions: Recent Acquisitions

George Eastman Museum : 900 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607

March 16, 2024 – October 6, 2024

Link: Kodak Museum

As part of the slate of programs in honor of the 75th anniversary of the public opening of the George Eastman Museum, New Directions: Recent Acquisitions features work acquired by the museum over the past five years and showcases significant developments in photographic practice. The exhibition title echoes New Acquisitions/New Directions/New Work, 1981–1989, organized by curator Robert Sobieszek on what was the museum’s 40th anniversary.

Throughout New Directions, the photographic image figures as a tool to fortify—but also unsettle—ideas about history and identity. Performances staged for the camera enable artists to explore and break with the conventions of gender, making the home or studio an experimental theater for engaging the world at large. While some of the artists embrace photography as a documentary medium, others develop strategies to destabilize the authority of the image. Some work to explicitly make visible the myriad ways that the past shapes the present. As instruments of power, archives become platforms to be challenged, subject to reinterpretation and reconfiguration. Found and appropriated materials offer practical, but also critical, approaches to reflecting on contemporary life and the status of images in the digital era. Likewise, recent approaches to the natural environment and the human landscape register the legacies of modern warfare, industrial pollution, and social inequity.

Alongside photographs made in the past decade, the exhibition includes works by artists who were often overlooked or marginalized in the past, but whose contributions are touchstones for contemporary art.

Under Water

Granary Arts: 86 N Main Street, Ephraim, Utah 84627

May 22, 2024- September 20, 2024

Link: Granary Arts

Under Water includes thirteen photographic works that span ongoing series in Eileen Quinlan's creative practice. Through a meticulous examination of contemporary environmental and political conditions, Quinlan’s abstract works of decaying analog film and recontextualized appropriated imagery, explore themes of propaganda and spectacle, celestial and natural environments, and domestic narratives.


Permanent Collection

Art Institute of Chicago: 111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

Link: AIC



Accrochage 2

Miguel Abreu Gallery: 88 Eldridge Street, NY, NY 10002

July 8- September 7 2024

Link: Miguel Abreu

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present accrochage 2, an installation of works in conversation by gallery artists.