Sandra S. Phillips

Last updated

Sandra S. "Sandy" Phillips (born 1945) is an American writer, and curator working in the field of photography. [1] She is the Curator Emeritus of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She joined the museum as curator of photography in 1987 and was promoted to senior curator of photography in 1999 in acknowledgement of her considerable contributions to SFMOMA. [2] [3] A photographic historian and former curator at the Vassar College Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Phillips succeeded Van Deren Coke as head of one of the country’s most active departments of photography. Phillips stepped down from her full time position in 2016. [4]

Contents

Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, said "I think she is one of the best photography curators that anybody has ever known." [5]

Life and work

Phillips' father was Joseph Sammataro, "an immigrant from Sicily who became a New York architect" and her mother was Nelva Weber, "a farmer's daughter from Illinois who became a well-known landscape architect and author." [6] She grew up in New York's Upper East Side. [6] She received a B.A. in art and art history from Bard College in Upstate New York in 1967, [6] [7] an M.A. from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1969, and a Ph.D. in art history in 1985 from City University of New York, where she specialised in the history of photography and American and European art from 1849 to 1940. [7] [6] Her Ph.D dissertation was on André Kertész.

She briefly taught history of photography at Mills College in Oakland, CA, and was a curator at the Vassar Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY. [6]

Phillips' earliest major project was the 1985 exhibition André Kertész: Of Paris and New York, organised by the Art Institute of Chicago and shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in collaboration with the curators of those museums. [2] She is interested in vernacular photography. [2] Her SFMOMA exhibition Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, "examined mug shots and crime scenes and was the first museum show of its kind." [6] Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870, co-curated with Simon Baker at Tate Modern, examined the voyeuristic aspect of photography; [6] [1] it premiered at Tate Modern in London and toured to SFMOMA and to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. [6]

Phillips' first husband was Matt Phillips and her second is Stephen Vincent. [6] She has a son, Joshua E.S. Phillips. [6]

Exhibitions curated by Phillips

Publications

In conjunction with exhibitions curated by Phillips

Writing contributions by Phillips

Awards

Related Research Articles

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Modern and contemporary art museum in San Francisco, California (SFMOMA)

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. The museum's current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts, and moving into the 21st century. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m2) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art.

Diane Arbus American photographer

Diane Arbus was an American photographer. Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people. 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 ".

Garry Winogrand American street photographer

Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.

Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs.

John Szarkowski American photographer, curator, historian, and critic (1925–2007)

Thaddeus John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

The term vernacular photography is used in several related senses. Each is in one way or another meant to contrast with received notions of fine-art photography. Vernacular photography is also distinct from both found photography and amateur photography. The term originated among academics and curators, but has moved into wider usage.

Judith Joy Ross American portrait photographer (born 1946)

Judith Joy Ross is an American portrait photographer. Her books include Contemporaries (1995), Portraits (1996), Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (2006) and Protest the War (2007), "exploring such themes as the innocence of youth, the faces of political power, and the emotional toll of war".

Henry Wessel Jr. American photographer and educator

Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".

Rineke Dijkstra 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.

Miyako Ishiuchi, is a Japanese photographer.

Larry Sultan was an American photographer from the San Fernando Valley in California. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco 1989 to 2009.

Bill Dane North American street photographer

Bill Dane is a North American street photographer. Dane pioneered a way to subsidize his public by using photographic postcards. He has mailed over 50,000 of his pictures as photo-postcards since 1969. As of 2007, Dane's method for making his photographs available shifted from mailing photo-postcards to offering his entire body of work on the internet.

Leo Rubinfien is an American photographer and essayist who lives and works in New York City. Rubinfien first came to prominence as part of the circle of artist-photographers who investigated new color techniques and materials in the 1970s.

New Documents was an influential documentary photography exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. It presented photographs by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand and is said to have "represented a shift in emphasis" and "identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize".

Fraenkel Gallery

Fraenkel Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in San Francisco founded by Jeffrey Fraenkel in 1979. Frish Brandt, president of the gallery, joined in 1985.

Pier 24 Photography is a non-profit art museum located on the Port of San Francisco directly under the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The organization houses the permanent collection of the Pilara Foundation, which collects, preserves and exhibits photography. It produces exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Pier 24 Photography is the largest exhibition space in the world dedicated solely to photography.

Richard Learoyd

Richard Learoyd is a British contemporary artist and photographer.

John Chiara American contemporary artist and photographer

John Chiara is an American contemporary artist and photographer.

Arthur Ollman American photographer, curator, and academic

Arthur Ollman is an American photographer, author, curator, professor emeritus (San Diego State University, and founding director of The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. He served as MoPA director from 1983 to 2006, and as director of the School of Art, Design and Art History, SDSU, from 2006 to 2011. He was president of the board of directors for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and has authored and contributed to more than twenty-five books and catalogs.

Clément Chéroux French photography historian and curator

Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator. He is Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has also held senior curatorial positions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Chéroux has overseen many exhibitions and books on photographers and photography.

References

  1. 1 2 Louise Turner, Cherie (18 November 2010). "Photography that Looks at Us: An Interview with Curator Sandra S. Phillips about Exposed at SFMOMA". The Huffington Post . New York. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
  2. 1 2 3 Desmarais, Charles (13 April 2016). "SFMOMA photography curator Sandra Phillips stepping down". SFGate . San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 29 May 2017.
  3. Gefter, Philip (25 November 2004). "Newly Released". The New York Times . New York. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
  4. Desmarais, Charles (April 13, 2016). "SFMOMA photography curator Sandra Phillips stepping down". SFGATE.
  5. Whiting, Sam (November 14, 2010). "SFMOMA curator brings focus and vision". SFGATE.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Whiting, Sam (14 November 2010). "SFMOMA curator brings focus and vision". SFGate . San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 29 May 2017.
  7. 1 2 "Sandra S. Phillips (2014)". CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Retrieved 29 May 2017.
  8. Whiting, Sam (June 15, 1997). "Wrecked Lives Leave a Trail of Art / Photographer Jim Goldberg's 10-year chronicle of runaways to arrive at SFMOMA". SFGATE.
  9. Baker, Kenneth (October 19, 2003). "Diane Arbus in a new light / SFMOMA exhibition shatters preconceptions about photographer and her subjects". SFGATE.
  10. "Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog". SFMOMA.
  11. http://archv.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactive_features/34 [ dead link ]
  12. "The Stanford Daily Archives". archives.stanforddaily.com.
  13. Baker, Kenneth (October 26, 2005). "REVIEW / Robert Adams' visions of ravaged forests cut deeply". SFGATE.
  14. Gefter, Philip (January 30, 2005). "The Photographer's Curator Curates His Own (Published 2005)" via NYTimes.com.
  15. Baker, Kenneth (September 2, 2006). "REVIEW / Southern exposure -- SFMOMA show captures Mexico in differing lights". SFGATE.
  16. Turner, Cherie Louise; writer, ContributorBay Area-based freelance art (November 18, 2010). "Photography that Looks at Us: An Interview with Curator Sandra S. Phillips about Exposed at SFMOMA". HuffPost.{{cite web}}: |first2= has generic name (help)
  17. "Diverse modern-world views on exhibit at SFMOMA's 'Face of Our Time'". The San Francisco Examiner. September 8, 2011.
  18. Camhi, Leslie. "Forever Young: Rineke Dijkstra Retrospective at SFMOMA". Vogue.
  19. "A Look at Apartheid and After at SFMOMA". 7x7 Bay Area. December 5, 2012.
  20. "On Museum Design | American Academy in Rome". www.aarome.org. Archived from the original on 2016-07-24.
  21. "CPW Awards Honorees". Center for Photography at Woodstock . Retrieved 29 May 2017.
  22. Smart, Paul (17 October 2013). "Center for Photography at Woodstock auction & gala". Hudson Vallery One. Retrieved 29 May 2017.