Deana Lawson

Last updated
Deana Lawson
Born1979 (age 44–45)
Rochester, New York, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Rhode Island School of Design,
Pennsylvania State University
Known forPhotography
Awards Hugo Boss Prize
2020
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize
2022

Deana Lawson (1979) is an American artist, educator, and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. [1] Her work is primarily concerned with intimacy, family, spirituality, sexuality, and Black aesthetics.

Contents

Lawson has been praised for her ability to communicate the nuances of African American experience: "Lawson's oeuvre explores intimacy, affinity, sexuality and relationships. [2] She has work held in the International Center for Photography collections. Her photographs have been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, [3] Whitney Museum of American Art, [4] and the Art Institute of Chicago.

A solo exhibition of her work, The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy is on view May 7-October 11, 2021 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. [5]

Early life and education

Lawson was born in 1979 in Rochester, New York. [6] [7] She received her B.F.A in 2001 in photography from Pennsylvania State University, and her M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2004. [6] Regarding her second year at Penn State, Lawson said, "I reached an early crossroads—either I was going to continue with a business degree or I was going to jump off that moving train and become an artist. I jumped and never looked back." [8]

Teaching

Lawson was an assistant professor of Photography at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey beginning in 2012. [9] In 2021, she was named the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis '78 Professor of Visual Arts in Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. [10] She has also taught at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), International Center for Photography, California College of the Arts (CCA), and Rhode Island School of Design. [9]

Work

Assemblage (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022 Assemblage, 2021, Deana Lawson at MoMA.jpg
Assemblage (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art in 2022

Lawson credits her interest in taking photographs to African American photographers like Carrie Mae Weems and Renee Cox. [11] During her undergraduate years, Lawson was shocked at the lack of scholarship surrounding photographers of color. This led her to learn more about black artists, like Lorna Simpson, whose work inspired her to pursue photography as a medium: "Just to have that model--to realize that not only did I like to make pictures but that I could actually do this, you know, was absolutely important to reaffirm myself as an artist". [11]

Lawson's highly formalist photographs are distinguishable by their meticulous staging, intimate composition, and attention to black cultural symbols. Her photos are highly staged, with an emphasis on "the strangely potent components of black interiors". [12] While referring to her subjects as "family", her models are more often than not strangers she meets randomly in public spaces. [3] In an artist statement, Lawson writes: "My work negotiates a knowledge of selfhood through a profoundly corporeal dimension; the photographs speaking to the ways that sexuality, violence, family, and social status may be written, sometimes literally, upon the body." [13]

Detail from Crystal Assemblage (2020) at MoMA PS1 in 2022 Detail of Crystal Assemblage, 2020, Deana Lawson at MoMA PS1.jpeg
Detail from Crystal Assemblage (2020) at MoMA PS1 in 2022

In 2011, The New Yorker 's Jessie Wender described Lawson's portraits as "intimate and unexpected". [14] In Wender's interview with Lawson, the photographer discussed her inspirations, including "vintage nudes, Sun Ra, Nostrand Ave., sexy mothers, juke joints, cousins, leather bound family albums, gnarled wigs, Dana Lawson [her sister], the color purple, The Grizzly Man, M.J., oval portraits, Arthur Jafa, thrift shops, Breakfast at Tiffany's, acrylic nails, weaves on pavement, Aaron Gilbert [her former husband], the A train, Tell My Horse, typewriters, Notorious B.I.G., fried fish, and lace curtains". [14] Formally, Lawson said, "Formally the images are unified by a clear directorial voice. The subject's pose, lighting, and environment are all carefully considered." [14]

Lawson has stated that her most challenging or successful work is The Garden, which references the Eden scene in Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights . [8] In 2014 Lawson traveled to Congo to look for references for her vision of Eden, and this journey led her to the small village called Gemena, which became the setting for The Garden. [8]

While many of Lawson's photographs are taken in New York, she has also photographed subjects in Louisiana, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. [15] She has expressed the hope that through travel, her work can reflect the ways in which black culture is not confined by physical boundaries. [15]

In November 2015, Lawson was commissioned by Time to photograph the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina by mass murderer Dylann Roof. [16] Steven Nelson, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Arts at the National Gallery of Art, observes that although the photographs document the aftermath rather than the massacre itself, her journalistic photographs for Time nonetheless "dovetail with images that have depicted violence against black people." [2]

In 2016, Lawson's photograph, Binky & Tony Forever, was used as the cover art for Freetown Sound , the third album by Dev Hynes for Blood Orange. [17] The photograph is set in Lawson's bedroom and depicts young love, with an emphasis on the female figure—"the female gaze, and her space, and her love", in Lawson's words. [17]

Lawson's large scale photography, Ring Bearer [18] (2016) was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. [19]

The movie Queen & Slim (2019) was inspired by Lawson's photography, in capturing an intimate portrayal of black experience and the stylized home interiors. [20] [21] [22] In 2019, Lawson photographed Melina Matsoukas, the director of the film. [23]

Lawson was included in the 2019 traveling exhibition Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art. [24]

Lawson's first full-scale museum survey was organized in 2021 by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and traveled to MoMA PS1. The show included assemblages created by the artist with crystals in addition to photographs. [25]

Personal life

Lawson has two children with her former husband, artist Aaron Gilbert. [11] [26]

Publications

Awards

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Related Research Articles

The Hugo Boss Prize was an award given every other year to an artist working in any medium, anywhere in the world. Upon its establishment in 1996, it distinguished itself from other art awards because it has no restrictions on nationality or age. The prize was administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and sponsored by the Hugo Boss clothing company, which since 1995 has been sponsoring various exhibitions and activities at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. It included a cash award of US$100,000 and a tetrahedral trophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graciela Iturbide</span> Mexican photographer (born 1942)

Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is included in many major museum collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The J. Paul Getty Museum.

Laura McPhee is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape—images which raise questions about human impacts on the environment and the nature of our complex and contested relationship to the earth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorna Simpson</span> American photographer and multimedia artist

Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rineke Dijkstra</span> Dutch photographer

Rineke Dijkstra HonFRPS is a Dutch photographer. She lives and works in Amsterdam. Dijkstra has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, the 1999 Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize and the 2017 Hasselblad Award.

Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.

Dawoud Bey is an American photographer, artist and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hank Willis Thomas</span> American artist

Hank Willis Thomas is an American conceptual artist. Based in Brooklyn, New York, he works primarily with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zoe Leonard</span> American artist (born 1961)

Zoe Leonard is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Liz Deschenes is an American contemporary artist and educator. Her work is situated between sculpture and image and engages with post-conceptual photography and Minimalism. Her work examines the fluidity of the medium of photography and expands on what constitutes the viewing of a photograph. Deschenes has stated that she seeks to "enable the viewer to see the inconstancy of the conditions of display, which are always at play but sometimes hard to see." Her practice is not bound to a single technology, method, process, or subject, but to the fundamental elements of photography, such as light, paper, chemistry, and time.

Lisa Oppenheim is an American multimedia artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simone Leigh</span> American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaToya Ruby Frazier</span> American artist and professor of photography

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cara Romero is an American photographer known for her digital photography that examines Indigenous life through a contemporary lens. She lives in both Santa Fe, NM and the Mojave Desert. She is of Chemehuevi descent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ming Smith</span> African-American photographer

Ming Smith is an American photographer. She was the first African-American female photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Kristin Capp is an American photographer, author and educator. Capp's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her work is included in collections at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Harvard Art Museum. She was one of sixty international artists selected for the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in 2017. Her work has appeared in the Bursa International Photofest in Turkey, as well as in Switzerland, France, Belgium, Germany and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austin Irving</span> American artist and photographer

Austin Irving is an American contemporary artist and photographer.

Shannon Ebner is an American artist based in Los Angeles. She was born in Englewood, New Jersey. Ebner's artwork takes the form of photographs and poems that question the limits and ambiguity of language.

Yamini Nayar is a visual artist working between New York and Delhi. Her work is part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Saatchi Collection, Queensland Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the US Department of State Art in Embassies collection.

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for creating art about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, and history.

References

  1. 1 2 "Deana Lawson". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  2. 1 2 Nelson, Steven (June 4, 2018). "Issues of Intimacy, Distance, and Disavowal in Writing About Deana Lawson's Work". Hyperallergic. Retrieved December 25, 2021.
  3. 1 2 "New Photography 2011, Deana Lawson". MoMA. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  4. ↑ "Deana Lawson (American, 1979)". mutualart.com. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  5. 1 2 "The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2021-04-16.
  6. 1 2 "Profile". Princeton University. Archived from the original on 2017-05-04. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  7. ↑ Great women artists. Phaidon Press. 2019. p. 235. ISBN   978-0714878775.
  8. 1 2 3 "Deana Lawson". Interview . 2015-12-02. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  9. 1 2 "Deana Lawson". Princeton, Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  10. ↑ "Professor of Visual Arts Deana Lawson Wins Prestigious 2020 Hugo Boss Prize". Lewis Center for the Arts. 2020-10-22. Retrieved 2021-12-25.
  11. 1 2 3 "In Conversation with Deana Lawson". Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. 2011-11-01. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  12. ↑ St. Félix, Doreen (2018-03-12). "Deana Lawson's Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love". The New Yorker. ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  13. ↑ "Deana Lawson – CPW". www.cpw.org. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  14. 1 2 3 "Deana Lawson's Intimate Strangers". The New Yorker. 2011-12-15. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  15. 1 2 "Deana Lawson: Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series". The Art Institute of Chicago. 2015. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  16. ↑ Laurent, Olivier (2015-11-11). "Telling Charleston's Story in Photographs". Time . Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  17. 1 2 "The True Story Behind The Cover Of Blood Orange's Freetown Sound". The Fader. Retrieved 2017-05-04.
  18. ↑ "The Cutting-Edge Sincerity of the Whitney Biennial". The New Republic. Retrieved 2018-03-30.
  19. ↑ Livingstone, Josephine (2017-03-16). "The Cutting Edge Sincerity of the Whitney Biennial". New Republic. Retrieved 2017-05-10.
  20. ↑ "Forward 50 | Melina Matsoukas: The camera queen". The Forward. 2019-12-20. Retrieved 2020-02-18.
  21. ↑ Ugwu, Reggie (2019-11-01). "With 'Queen & Slim,' Melina Matsoukas Steps Beyond Beyoncé". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-02-18.
  22. ↑ "From Beyoncé to the big screen: the whirlwind rise of Melina Matsoukas". The Economist. ISSN   0013-0613 . Retrieved 2020-02-18.
  23. ↑ "Melina Matsoukas' 'Queen & Slim' is redefining Hollywood". The California Sunday Magazine . 2019-11-18. Retrieved 2020-02-18.
  24. ↑ Sargent, Antwaun (2020). Young, gifted and Black : a new generation of artists : Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art. New York, NY: D.A.P. pp. 128–131. ISBN   9781942884590.
  25. ↑ "Deana Lawson Checklist" (PDF). MoMA PS1. Museum of Modern Art. Archived (PDF) from the original on 29 March 2022. Retrieved 19 July 2022.
  26. ↑ Lubow, Arthur (2018-10-11). "Deana Lawson Reveals Hidden Grandeur in Her Uncanny Portraits". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-03-08.
  27. ↑ "IPF Grant Recipients". Aaron Siskind Foundation. 2017. Archived from the original on 2020-07-01.
  28. ↑ "Deana Lawson Awarded Hugo Boss Prize 2020". Guggenheim.
  29. ↑ Gaskin, Sam (22 October 2020). "Who Won the $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize?". Ocula.
  30. ↑ Khomami, Nadia; Arts, Nadia Khomami; correspondent, culture (12 May 2022). "Artist who 'reclaims black experience' wins Deutsche Börse photography prize". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-07-08.
  31. ↑ Warner, Marigold. "Deana Lawson wins the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022". British Journal of Photography. Retrieved 2023-07-08.
  32. ↑ "Deana Lawson: Mother Tongue | Rhona Hoffman Gallery | Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  33. ↑ "Deana Lawson | Rhona Hoffman Gallery | Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  34. ↑ "New Work | Sikkema Jenkins & Co. | Artsy". www.artsy.net. Archived from the original on 2022-05-14. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  35. ↑ "Deana Lawson". Carnegie Museum of Art. Retrieved 2019-03-09.
  36. ↑ "The Underground Museum". theunderground-museum.org. Archived from the original on 2021-06-11. Retrieved 2019-03-09.
  37. ↑ "Exhibition Deana Lawson: Centropy". contemporaryand.com. 2020-06-09. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  38. ↑ "Black Cowboy | The Studio Museum in Harlem | Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  39. ↑ "List of Artists Announced for 2017 Whitney Biennial | artnet News". artnet News. 2016-11-18. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  40. ↑ "American Family: Derrick Adams and Deana Lawson - Exhibitions - The Gordon Parks Foundation". www.gordonparksfoundation.org. Retrieved 2019-03-09.
  41. ↑ "Binky and Tony Forever | RISD Museum". risdmuseum.org. Retrieved 2019-03-13.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.