Thursday: Women Twirling

from The Getty:

Photographers Gay Block and Catherine Opie join Jo Ann Callis to discuss the works in the exhibition Jo Ann Callis: Woman Twirling and the role domesticity plays in Callis's art-making.

Woman Twirling: Jo Ann Callis, Gay Block, and Catherine Opie in Conversation
Date: Thursday May 21, 2009, at 7 pm
Location: Harold M. Williams Auditorium, Getty Center
Admission: Free. Reservation required (make reservation here)

About the Photographers

Jo Ann Callis
Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the "fabricated photographs" movement, Jo Ann Callis has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. Callis—who launched her art career after raising a family—celebrates and subverts everyday situations through her mesmerizing photographs, which present situations that are as tense as they are comfortable. "I wanted to make photographs that were scary and beautiful, sexy and tactile," she says.

Gay Block
Photographer Gay Block is known for her empathetic, telling portraits of girls and women, members of the Jewish community, and Holocaust survivors and rescuers. In 2003 she published Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed, an acclaimed 30-year portrait of her mother in photographs, video, and words. Several of the works in the exhibition Jo Ann Callis: Woman Twirling were gifts by Block to the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Catherine Opie
Best known for her portraits of gay and transgender men and women, photographer Catherine Opie uses photography to document communities and question our view of the "normal." Her series such as Domestic, Surfers, and Football Players constitute a penetrating social-documentary portrait of contemporary American culture.