Work
"UpSouth" organized by Anne Arrasmith of Space One Eleven traveled to several venues across Birmingham, including Space One Eleven, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Visual Arts Gallery, and Agnes. It showed the work of artists Emma Amos and Willie Birch and writer bell hooks, as well as Ann Benton, Priscilla Hancock Cooper, Karen Graffeo, Lee Isaacs, Janice Kluge, Mary Ann Sampson, J. M. Walker and Marie Weaver. [1]
In 1998, Graffeo's photography was included in the book "Visions of Angels: 35 Photographers Share Their Images" which showed the work of 35 photographers presenting their concepts of angels. Nelson Bloncourt and Karen Engelmann authored the book. Among other artists included were, Audrey Bernstein, Gary Issacs, Blake Little, Jock Sturges and John Wimberley.
Graffeo's work was selected by Frank Simmons to be part of "co-dependent" from the exhibition series "From the Artist's Studio-Wish You Were Here " at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. This exhibition was organized by Diana Shpungin & Blane De St Croix. Other artists in the exhibition included Jeremy Bailey, Julia Chiang and Odili Donald Odita.
Graffeo's exhibition at SACI Gallery in Florence, Italy with her "Roma Series" in March 2007 is now continued in the library, the Biblioteca e Bottega Fioretta Mazzei, of the 'English' Cemetery.
Her work is throughout the world including the American cities of Atlanta (Georgia), Birmingham (Alabama) and New York City as well as Paris (France), Belfast (Northern Ireland), and the Italian Cities of Florence and Rome.
2009 Graffeo's work was chosen to be part of the exhibition "Anthropology: Revisited, Reinvented, Reinterpreted" along with the work of Lee Isaacs, Sara Garden Armstrong, Pinky Bass, Joel Seah, The Chadwick's, Mitchell Gaudet, Kahn and Selesnick, Mona Hatoum, Beatrice Coron, Kelly Grider, and Laura Gilbert, among others. The exhibition was curated by Jon Coffelt and Maddy Rosenberg for Central Booking in Brooklyn, NY.
Jan Yoors was a Belgian-American artist, photographer, painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and tapestry creator. Growing up in Antwerp to liberal, pacifist parents, his father Eugeen Yoors, a famed stained-glass artist, Yoors studied painting before deciding to live with a Rom kumpania he encountered on the outskirts of Antwerp at the age of twelve, and about which he would later write two memoirs, The Gypsies (1967) and Crossing: A Journal of Survival and Resistance in World War II (1971), the latter about living with the Rom during World War II. Yoors fled to London after the war where he lived with his wife Annebert and her best friend Marianne. It is at this point that Yoors began to design tapestries and set up a tapestry studio with his wife Annebert and Marianne. In 1950 he moved to New York, traveling there under the guise of a journalist. The following year, Annebert and Marianne joined and the three set up the Jan Yoors Studio. In New York, Yoors befriended numerous figures in the art and design worlds. He received commissions from corporations such as Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, and private collectors. His work was seen in numerous exhibitions across the United States and internationally. In New York in the 50s, Yoors also continued his passion for photography, which he began while living with the Rom, documenting the streets of New York. He traveled extensively on a trip to revisit his Rom family in Europe, and, in 1966–67 photographed post-war religious buildings for Edward Sovik as part of the First International Congress on Religion, Architecture, and the Visual Arts in New York. Yoors's oeuvre is currently represented by several galleries in New York, Europe including reGeneration Furniture, Todd Merrill, L Parker Stephenson Photographs, and Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerp, and regularly shown at design and photography fairs.
Mary Morgan Keipp was a noted figure in the art photography movement of the early 20th century, exhibiting her photographs of rural Dallas County African-Americans in major exhibitions at the New York Camera Club, the Annual Photographic Salon, Dudley Galleries in London, and the National Arts Club of New York Photo-Secession Exhibition (1902) organized by Alfred Stieglitz.
Francesca Stern Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring either herself or female models.
Johnny Lee Coffelt born is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn New York City. Coffelt paints, sculpts, sews, makes book arts, and curates art exhibitions.
Thomas Tulis is an American photographer and painter living and working in Atlanta, Georgia.
Agnes was a Birmingham, Alabama photography gallery from 1993 to 2001. Shawn Boley, Jon Coffelt and Jan Hughes opened the gallery with the mission of attempting to raise awareness of social issues — such as cancer, AIDS, death and dying, the environment, homelessness, ethics, racism, classism, imprisonment — through photojournalism, film, video, poetry, and book arts. Controversial, Agnes was picketed on several occasions, one of which resulted in a USA Today article on December 5, 1994.
Zoe Strauss is an American photographer and a nominee member of Magnum Photos. She uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Curator Peter Barberie identifies her as a street photographer, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, and has said "the woman and man on the street, yearning to be heard, are the basis of her art."
Marion M. Bass, known as Pinky Bass or Pinky/MM Bass, is an American photographer, known for her work in pinhole photography.
Marie Weaver is an American artist who specializes in ceramic sculpture, printmaking, book arts, and graphic design. Weaver earned a B. A. from the University of Vermont and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University. Weaver lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Weaver's career began as an apprentice to Vermont printmaker Sabra Field and evolved into graphic design. From 1990 through 2002 she was head of the graphic design program in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 2003, Weaver returned full-time to the practice of fine art. She is married to Stephen Harvey, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mary Ann Sampson is an American artist living and working in Ragland, Alabama. Sampson is a book artist, specializing in miniatures and broadsides most of which are unique or one-of-a-kind. She explores the book as a means of expressing visual ideas that stem from recollections of personal events and experiences that have been derived from living in her rural environment of Alabama.
Lee Isaacs is an American photographer, living and working in Birmingham, Alabama.
Jules Trobaugh is an American artist specializing in photography.
Anne Harper Arrasmith was an American artist and curator who lived and worked in Birmingham, Alabama. She co-founded and operated along with Peter Prinz the not-for-profit project Space One Eleven. Arrasmith was a student of Edith Frohock while at University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Janice Kluge is an American artist who specializes in large and small scale sculpture. She holds a BFA with honors from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MFA for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kluge is Professor Emeritus of sculpture and drawing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she has taught since 1982. After serving three years as Interim Chair for the art and art history department she returned to full-time art making and teaching. Kluge is married to Cam Langley, a glass artist who specializes in fine art pieces.
Sara Garden Armstrong is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Armstrong creates sculptures, paintings, drawings, artist's books, multimedia artworks involving computers sound and light, and constructs permanent installations in atrium spaces. Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and her Master of Art Education from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Armstrong also studied art at New York University and with the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario in Yeovil, England while attending UAB. She was an educator for several years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, later she moved to New York City in 1981.
Florence Henri was a surrealist artist; primarily focusing her practice on photography and painting, in addition to pianist composition. In her childhood, she traveled throughout Europe, spending portions of her youth in Paris, Vienna, and the Isle of Wight. She studied in Rome, where she would encounter the Futurists, finding inspiration in their movement. From 1910 to 1922, she studied piano in Berlin, under the instruction of Egon Petri and Ferrucio Busoni. She would find herself landlocked to Berlin during the first World War, supporting herself by composing piano tracks for silent films. She returned to Paris in 1922, to attend the Académie André Lhote, and would attend until the end of 1923. From 1924 to 1925, she would study under painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne. Henri's most important artistic training would come from the Bauhaus in Dessau, in 1927, where she studied with masters Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, who would introduce her to the medium of photography. She returned to Paris in 1929 where she started seriously experimenting and working with photography up until 1963. Finally, she would move to Compiègne, where she concentrated her energies on painting until the end of her life in 1982. Her work includes experimental photography, advertising, and portraits, many of which featured other artists of the time.
Barbara Blondeau (1938–1974) was an American experimental photographer active in the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. In her career as a photographer, she worked in a wide variety of materials, process and formats, although she is best known for her strip prints which she stumbled upon while shooting with a malfunctioning camera.
Val Williams is a British curator and author who has become an authority on British photography. She is the Professor of the History and Culture of Photography at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London, and was formerly the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Hasselblad Center.
Wayne Sides is an American photographer, artist and educator that is best known for his documentary and conceptual art categories of photography and mixed-media art.
Rozalind Drummond is a photographic artist and an early exponent of postmodernism in Australia.
