Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Last updated

Abigail Solomon-Godeau (born January 6, 1948, in New York City) is an American art critic, exhibition curator, art historian, and Professor Emerita in art history, University of California, Santa Barbara. [1]

Contents

Education

B.A., [2] University of Massachusetts, magna cum laude[ citation needed ]

Ph.D., [2] Graduate Center, City University of New York

Career

Abigail Solomon-Godeau is an art critic and art historian [3] who taught [2] at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is now a Professor Emeritus there in the Department of History of Art & Architecture.

Solomon-Godeau is a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow. [4]

Exhibition curator

Among the exhibitions Solomon-Godeau has curated are;

Publications

Solomon-Godeau has produced over 100 works in 236 publications in 4 languages. Her writing focuses on feminist theory, photography, 19th-century French art and contemporary art, and she offers a reassessment or revision of the ideas presented by the artistic "canon" and of some of her predecessors in the history of art, such as Martha Rosler and Susan Sontag. [5] In a 2004 essay she describes herself as among those who "intellectually came of age as postmodernists, poststructuralists, feminists, Marxists, antihumanists, or, for that matter, atheists." [6] and later clarifies;

I do not consider my work to be particularly theoretical, although my writings on photography, like those on art history or contemporary art, are informed by the theorists, past and present, who have shaped my thinking overall. Perhaps my essays are best characterized as a form of practical criticism insofar as they engage with specific bodies of work, historical contexts, social relations, and institutional structures, rather than with the more philosophical questions manifested in the new field of the philosophy of photography. [7]

Her essays have appeared in journals including Art in America , Artforum , The Art Journal , Afterimage , Camera Obscura, October, Screen, and many have been collected in anthologies in various languages.

She is currently working on a book Genre, Gender and the Nude in French Art.

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane Arbus</span> American photographer (1923–1971)

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Sontag</span> American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933–2004)

Susan Sontag was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Her best-known works include the critical works Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1968), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978), as well as the fictional works The Way We Live Now (1986), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (1999).

<i>The Family of Man</i> 1950s photography global exhibition

The Family of Man was an ambitious exhibition of 503 photographs from 68 countries curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Department of Photography. According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the "culmination of his career." The title was taken from a line in a Carl Sandburg poem.

<i>On Photography</i> 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag

On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977.

Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum,Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Halberstam</span> American academic, LGBT+ activist

Jack Halberstam, previously known as Judith Halberstam, is an American author. Since 2017, Halberstam has been a professor in the department of English and comparative literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Previously, Halberstam was a professor of American studies and ethnicity, gender studies, and comparative literature, and the director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC. Halberstam associates himself with gender and queer ideology and is an author on that ideology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesca Woodman</span> American photographer (1958–1981)

Francesca Stern Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Williams (film scholar)</span> American professor of film studies

Linda Williams is an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfredo Jaar</span>

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, photographer and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is mostly known as an installation artist, often incorporating photography and covering socio-political issues and war—the best known perhaps being the 6-year-long The Rwanda Project about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He has also made numerous public intervention works, like The Skoghall Konsthall one-day paper museum in Sweden, an early electronic billboard intervention A Logo For America, and The Cloud, a performance project on both sides of the Mexico-USA border. He has been featured on Art:21. He won the Hasselblad Award for 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mira Schor</span>

Mira Schor is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her contributions to critical discourse on the status of painting in contemporary art and culture as well as to feminist art history and criticism.

Richard Meyer is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University.

Max Kozloff is an American art historian, art critic of modern art and photographer. He has been art editor at The Nation, and Executive Editor of Artforum. His essay "American Painting During the Cold War" is of particular importance to the criticism on American Abstract Expressionism.

Vikky Alexander is a Canadian contemporary artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has exhibited internationally since 1981 as a practitioner in the field of photo-conceptualism, and as an installation artist who uses photography, drawing, and collage. Her themes include the appropriated image, and the deceptions of nature and space. Her artworks include mirrors, photographic landscape murals, postcards, video and photography.

<i>Afterimage</i> (magazine) Journal of contemporary art, culture, and politics

Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism is a bimonthly journal of contemporary art, culture, and politics. It publishes features, essays, local and international reportage, exhibition reviews, and book reviews with an emphasis on social dialogue, politically engaged artistic practices, and the role of the artist as cultural critic and curator.

Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. She was born with auditory dyslexia and attributed her start in photography to her brother, who showed her how to develop in dark rooms. She was mostly self-taught, although she took some photography courses at East Los Angeles College, where her second solo exhibition, Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell, was held. She was well-known for her portraits, mostly of herself, and also focused upon people in marginalized communities, including LGBT and Latino subjects, self-love, and social stigma of obesity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorit Cypis</span> Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator

Dorit Cypis is a Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work has collectively explored themes of identity, history and social relations through installation art, photography, performance and social practice. After graduating from California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), she attracted attention in the 1980s and 1990s for her investigations of the female body, presented in immersive installation-performances at the Whitney Museum, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual Studies Workshop</span> Art education organization

Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is a non-profit organization dedicated to art education based in Rochester, New York, in the Neighborhood of the Arts. VSW supports makers and interpreters of images through education, publications, exhibitions, and collections. VSW houses a bookstore, microcinema, exhibition gallery, and research center, and hosts artists-in-residence.

Light Vision was a bi-monthly Australian photography magazine that existed between 1977 and 1978.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photography in Sudan</span> History of photography in Sudan

Photography in Sudan refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the former territory of present-day South Sudan, as well as what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and some of the oldest photographs from the 1860s, taken during the Turkish-Egyptian rule (Turkiyya). As in other countries, the growing importance of photography for mass media like newspapers, as well as for amateur photographers has led to a wider photographic documentation and use of photographs in Sudan during the 20th century and beyond. In the 21st century, photography in Sudan has undergone important changes, mainly due to digital photography and distribution through social media and the Internet.

Elke Solomon is an artist, curator, educator and community worker. She is known for her interdisciplinary practice that combines painting, drawing, object-making, performance and installation. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad.

References

  1. Wheeler, Sarah B. Abigail Solomon-Godeau. In Warren, Lynne; Warren, Lynn (2005), Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 3-Volume Set, Taylor and Francis, pp. 1461–1462, ISBN   978-0-203-94338-0
  2. 1 2 3 "Abigail Solomon-Godeau". History of Art and Architecture. University of California Santa Barbara.
  3. Durden, Mark (2012), Fifty key writers on photography, Routledge, pp. 208–213, ISBN   978-0-415-54944-8
  4. "Abigail Solomon-Godeau". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 8 April 2023.
  5. la Grange, Ashley (2005), Basic critical theory for photographers, London Taylor and Frances, ISBN   978-0-08-046838-9
  6. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail (2017), "The Family of Man: refurbishing humanism for a postmodern age", in Parsons, Sarah (ed.), Photography after photography : gender, genre, history, Durham Duke University Press, pp. 43–60, ISBN   978-0-8223-6266-1
  7. Parsons, Sarah (2017), Introduction, Photography after photography : gender, genre, history, by Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Parsons (ed.), Durham Duke University Press, p. 6, ISBN   978-0-8223-6266-1