In advance of the 99th ANNUAL deadline of June 17th, we asked jurors Drew Sawyer and Claudia E. Zapata four questions.
Drew Sawyer
You were appointed the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year. How do you endeavor to shape conversations around contemporary photography in this role?
I’m Drew Sawyer and I’m the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum. One of the more exciting things for me about my role at the Whitney is that photography has always been fairly integrated into the collection, collection presentations, special exhibitions, as not a separate history or a separate medium onto its own in the way that many other institutions, especially even around modern art have siloed the history of photography into its own galleries or collection presentations. The Whitney has always been very expansive about the way it's treated photography, and I think that's partially to do with the fact that the museum has always been very focused on living artists. That’s maybe in part because of the Biennial, which really drives so much of what the Whitney does. In that way, it's always followed what artists are doing. I think, of course, so many artists who use photography have always integrated it into a much more expansive practice. You can think of the avant-garde artists in the 20s and 30s using photography alongside film, or printed matter, or incorporating it into collage all the way through today. That’s one of the more interesting aspects for me in this role, which is fairly new.
I started at the Whitney about a year ago, so I'm really excited to think, just for example, in the Whitney Biennial right now, there are not many artists using photography that go out into the world and make pictures with a camera in that sense, but are using it in many other ways. Carmen Winant is featured in the Biennial who also had a solo show at The Print Center. Some of the work that was presented there was actually in the Biennial along with other [work]. Carmen is probably most well-known for using found images, particularly around second-wave feminisms or histories of feminist thought and practice. And too, somebody like Lotus Laurie Kang who is making very large, sort of sculptural installations that integrate photographic film. For me, that’s the exciting thing, that I don't feel like I have to follow one thread of photography or tell a separate story. It's all kind of integrated.
Your exhibition Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines presented self-published booklets, many of which were made by artists with marginalized identities. What did you learn about printmaking and photography from working on this show?
A recent show I worked on, Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, ended up being a lot about photography, which is not something I thought about when I first started conceiving of the show with my co-curator, Brandon Joseph. But of course, as a specialist in photography, one thing I was thinking a lot about was the copy machine as a photographic technology in and of itself. So in some ways, inherently, a lot of the show ended up being about the medium in different ways, but not so many artists making, again, photographs with a camera going out into the world to make it make pictures. I did start thinking a lot about the copy machine technology and how it's transformed, not just printed matter and the way we communicate, especially in the second half of the 20th century, but also photography itself. In my essay in the catalog, one thing I wrote about was the aesthetics of the copy machine; the sort of degraded quality to the images, which a lot of artists, especially in the 1970s, used not just because it was a way to more affordably make multiple copies of something and distribute it widely. Of course, wheat paste it in the city, where you have a more portable, mobile exhibitionary practice that's not beholden to institutions or commercial galleries. So, of course, that was part of it.
But also thinking about the way that a lot of artists who were making zines and using the photocopy in particular, from an artist like Mark Morrisroe in the mid-1970s in Boston who started making a zine called Dirt with Lynelle White while they were in high school in 1975, to somebody like Barbara Ess, who was located in New York in the late 1970s and started the zine Just Another Asshole, and thinking about their work in zines, in some ways, first before they really entered into using photography as their main medium.
When reviewing work for a competition, what do you take into consideration? Form? Process? Content?
When reviewing work for the competition, I'm really interested in looking at artists who are thinking about form, process, and content together. I don't necessarily see those as separate or one being prioritized over the other. I’m really interested in artists who are thinking about if they're interested in specific content, specific subject matter, what is the right form that should take and what does that relationship look like, and similar with process.
One of the challenges with a lot of these portfolio reviews is they’re now digital. Even previously, of course, you were looking at slides, or printouts, or reproductions. This is something I generally try to push against being a curator of photography or anything that is works on paper is paying attention to its materiality so it's not just a print that is framed on the wall. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I am interested in artists that are really thinking about the materiality of their work and how that material or process and form relates to the content directly.
What projects are you excited to be working on right now and/or in the coming months?
I’m really excited about an upcoming project, my first show that I'll be organizing here at the Whitney. It's a solo show with Mark Armijo McKnight, a photographer who has been working over the last decade, mostly in large format analog photography. He makes beautiful, high contrast, black and white prints of photographs that he makes largely in the high desert of Southern California, an area where he grew up, as well as New Mexico where his maternal homeland is. He operates in what could be seen as a fairly traditional landscape genre within the United States, especially the U.S. West. And he quite knowingly plays off modernist photographers who shot their work in those regions.
What I love about his work is the tension between these images, which often feature sort of nude anonymous figures, some of them partaking in erotic play within the landscape and this sort of tension between liberation and oppression, which I think is inherent to that region, broadly given its history. But he doesn't imagine that a work of art can be fully liberatory, so it's this tension both in the form that his photographs take; the high contrast, he’s using a large format camera so there’s really rich detail. But then he overexposes or overprints, so there are these rich, deep blacks that then bury a lot of the detail intentionally. The figures are anonymous, and they’re kind of sensuous, and partaking in this erotic play. At the same time, it's this barren landscape that seems to be holding these individuals almost in not like a purgatory setting and for sure there's a sense of spirituality to the images as well.
Claudia E. Zapata
Working as a curator of Chicanx and Latinx art often brings you into dialogue with printmakers. The landmark 2020-2021 exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now, curated by E. Carmen Ramos and which you supported, traced the political routes of this connection. What lessons did you learn from the project?
¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now was an exhibition produced by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2020 and there was also an exhibition catalog through Princeton University Press that came along with it that had several essays and color plates. The exhibition featured works of Chicano graphic artists and their cross cultural collaborators. This featured prints from all from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection.
The Smithsonian project, ¡Printing the Revolution! was a wide research project that covered national print programs and print projects and multi-generational artists. We were covering the scope of Chicano graphics that ranged from works on paper to the digital space, and we learned that several of the artists are overlapping with one another or mentoring one another and there's a constant collaboration which is very apparent in the print world, especially in the Chicano print world. Everything is about the activism of sharing with one another and shepherding the next generation, there is not an exclusivity to it. There's very much a connective and collective representation throughout the works and there's a consistent theme of political solidarity with aggrieved communities and across culture collaborations so it's not just Mexican or Mexican-American, it's Pan, Latino and also BIPOC in terms of many of the artists and how they work. So these spaces that they're constantly creating are representative of not just a fine art print center but also a community center, an activist space, a therapy space and a communal space for thinking. It challenges these notions of a very specific fine art print space that’s something else. We kept seeing that throughout the research of ¡Printing the Revolution! was that all these spaces where these artists have been made in different ways in homes and cultural centers and museums and these offshoots to create space for works on paper or other in order to continue the message of a political protest or to continue a message of community education really as a pedagogical practice throughout all of these instances that we were experiencing with the artist.
You have spent much of your career in Texas. Can you share some the unique qualities of the Austin [art/print] community?
I started as a curator in Texas. I originally was a Mayanist for my master's degree so I was an ancient specialist and then I started working at their ethnic specific museum called Mexic-Arte Museum, it's the official Mexican and Mexican-American Museum of Texas. There are very few Latino-centered museums in the country. There's El Museo del Barrio in New York and National Museum of Mexican Art [in Chicago] and Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach for example. There's very few like under 10 total and to the fact that Austin has one is quite the gem, because those institutions tend not to last in funding and life. So it's one of these instances where I kept wanting to collaborate with them and they kept trying to build something so I could stay. And I was their first curator. Before it had just been guest curators and the director and for Latino art, a lot of what we're doing in terms of a career is building our own path and really trying to understand the precedent that we have in American art history of where we fit and kind of demanding space locally, regionally, and nationally. And so in Texas, it was very clear there needed to be a lot more work on Latino art. That was always a challenge because there's a misconception as to the difference between Latino and Latin American in these spaces. There’s a misunderstanding in the academic realm and then local art and things like that of what exactly is constituting fine art versus local arts and what deserves the space. Unfortunately, Latino art and Chicano art are always fighting for a relevancy here in Texas because there's just not enough space or recognition to properly represent the high numbers and the amount of artists that are in the region because there's so many in San Antonio, Austin, El Paso and all of the Rio Grande Valley, there's just a unique experience. And so, when I'm talking about the curatorial development and a curatorial career, it does have this cultural activist lilt to it because there is this constant fight concurrently in addition to academic and scholarship and curatorial projects in addition to cultural relevancy and kind of a demanding of a specific equity.
When reviewing work for a competition, what do you take into consideration? Form? Process? Content?
I've worked with several print centers and print makers and works on paper at all levels from zines, lithos, screenprints, monoprints, you name it in terms of curatorial projects and academic analysis and then also creating myself. So I'm interested in unique approaches obviously in terms of the technique. I mean screen printing and printmaking for example, is always about experimentation. There's not one specific way to do this. So any unique materials or unique approaches, new technologies. I'm also a digital humanist, so I'm a technologist in terms of my academic career as well. So any approach that challenges or incorporates new technologies, not necessarily digital, just technology is of interest to me as well. Also the incorporation of craft, for example, blurring these lines between media is also of interest. So I'm looking at all of those things. I'm also looking at what are the cultural connections to one’s artwork if there's a legacy or there's a specific tradition that's being passed on or reference, that's also of interest to me. And what is the challenge that the artist is posing to themselves? Like is this a new series or is this a new technique? Or is this something they're very much accustomed to? Either one is interesting, but the idea that this is an exceptional artwork that they're presenting to be reviewed is really the case like this isn't just the usual, this is something very exceptional is what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something that sticks out in that regard.
What projects are you excited to be working on right now and/or in the coming months?
Right now I'm the Associate Curator of Latino Art at the Blanton, and that's a new position and that's also a new department basically that didn't exist before. Again, it's one of these unprecedented positions, unprecedented disciplines, Latino Art, and we received a large donation of over 7,000 works from a collector couple, Gilberto Cárdenas and Dolores Garcia, and I'm reviewing that all for the collection and going through all of the works one by one. And the majority is works on paper, a large part is from Self Help Graphics, the print center in Los Angeles, so I'm going through that and I just had an exhibition that I curated at UC Davis at the Manetti Shrem dedicated to the Chicano printmaker Malaquias Montoya and it featured his work and then people he mentored directly as well, and it showed his legacy of being a teacher, and great works on paper. Lots of things.