Contact: Jason A. Smith, communications director, or Jody Clowes, exhibitions manager / 608-265-2500
Side-by-side solo exhibitions open March 14 at James Watrous Gallery:
Ida Wyman: The Chords of Memory
and
Kevin Miyazaki: Camp Home
MADISON– Solo exhibitions by photographers Ida Wyman (Madison) and Kevin Miyazaki (Wauwatosa) will be on view beginning March 14, 2014, at the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery, located on the 3rd floor of Overture Center for the Arts in Madison. Details are as follows:
Exhibition dates: March 14 – May 4, 2014
Opening reception (free and open to the public): Sunday, March 16, 2:00-5:00 pm, with a conversation between Ida Wyman and art historian Melanie Herzog at 2:30 pm. Wisconsin Studio, across from the James Watrous Gallery, 3rd floor, Overture Center for the Arts.
RELATED PROGRAMS
Free and open to the public. To register for these free events, visit wisconsinacademy.org.
Thursday, March 27, 7:00-8:30 pm: The Photography of Witness, Wisconsin Studio, 3rd floor, Overture Center for the Arts, Madison. Photographers Michael Kienitz, Kevin Miyazaki, and Craig Schreiner discuss how photographic images can be used to record personal narrative, document conflict, capture a cultural landscape, and share the human experience.
Thursday, April 3, 7:00-8:30 pm: Camp Home: Documenting the Japanese Internment Camps, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, 30 W. Mifflin St., Madison. Photographer Kevin Miyazaki and UW-Milwaukee historian Jasmine Alinder share their investigations of the camps where Japanese Americans were forcibly held during World War II. Co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Veterans’ Museum.
EXHIBITION DESCRIPTIONS
These paired exhibitions present the work of photographers Ida Wyman and Kevin Miyazaki, who both began their careers as photojournalists and have developed personal bodies of work that transcend editorial photography. Their beautiful, richly evocative images raise important questions about social conditions, economic issues, and racial and political tensions.
Ida Wyman: The Chords of Memory
Wyman began working as a photojournalist in the 1940s and quickly developed into a serious artist. A pioneer in her field as a young woman, Wyman was the first female printer at Manhattan’s Acme Newspictures (now UPI). She became a successful freelance photographer for publications like Life, Colliers, and The New York Times, and later worked as a scientific photographer for Columbia University. Now 87, she is intensely involved in curating and printing her early work.
Wyman’s photographs capture intimate moments from daily life and reflect her concern for social justice and the dignity of ordinary people. Whether they depict children at play, men and women at work, or a moment on an urban street, her images are infused with warmth and compassion. This exhibit will focus on new prints of Wyman’s work from the 1940s and 1950s, when she worked on assignment for many national publications, but will also include a collection of vintage prints and ephemera and a number of more recent works. While Wyman works primarily in black and white, the exhibit will include several of her exquisite color photographs as well.
More complete biographical information can be found at wisconsinacademy.org.
Kevin Miyazaki: Camp Home
Miyazaki’s work often explores family history and memory. He will be showing prints from his series Camp Home, which documents repurposed barracks used as internment camps for Japanese Americans (including some of Miyazaki’s own relatives) during WWII. These internment camps were sited in dusty, barren landscapes, and the barracks in which Japanese cilivians were housed were severely utilitarian structures. After the war, the barracks were distributed to returning veterans, who used them as homes, barns, and outbuildings. Miyazaki’s images capture the experience of the Nisei as well as the barracks’ subsequent owners. He writes, “The act of searching for the buildings and approaching their owners is important to my process. Family histories intersect and are connected by the history of these buildings, and by the lives lived within their walls.”
The exhibition will also include Miyazaki’s recent artist’s book inspired by a 1940 catalog of Sears home models. This “fictional but factual” publication is full of period photographs and quotes that lend context to his lovely but spare photographs.
More complete biographical information can be found at wisconsinacademy.org.
This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Dane Arts and the Wisconsin Arts Board, with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts. The James Watrous Gallery also receives ongoing support from Doubletree Hotel-Madison and the members of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
About the James Watrous Gallery
The James Watrous Gallery is dedicated to Wisconsin visual art and artists. A program of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, the Watrous Gallery’s mission is to promote the visual arts in Wisconsin through quality exhibitions and educational programs. For gallery hours and more information on exhibiting artists, please visit wisconsinacademy.org/gallery or call 608-265-2500.
