Nymphoto on NPR's Picture Show

Nymphoto's "good old-fashioned girl power" is featured on NPR's Picture Show.

On View thru 4/17: Seen In China

from Emily Davis Gallery

SEEN IN CHINA: AN EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Seen in China will present historical photographic images and work by some of the most interesting photographers working in China today who address the profound social, political and environmental changes that have accelerated during the last twenty years.

Featured in the exhibition will be work by Linda Butler, Peikwen Cheng, Daniel Traub, Joseph Vitone and Garie Waltzer.

The exhibition is a multi-media event with artists’ photographic prints displayed in conjunction with digital projections of historical photographs by Chinese photographers. The Historical images on DVDs were organized in cooperation with FotoFest and FOTOFEST2008 - CHINA and its curators, Wendy Watriss and Frederick Baldwin. FotoFest is providing the DVD of Chinese photographers Zhuang Xueben, Sha Fei, Wang Shilong, Weng Naiqiang, and Xiao Zhuang whose work from the 1930's through 1970’s formed the historical section of Photography from China, 1934-2008 curated for FOTOFEST2008 - CHINA in Houston, Texas.

Curated by Professors Mark Soppeland, Penny Rakoff, and Rod Bengston, Director of University Galleries with special consultation and assistance by Dr. Barbara Tannenbaum, Director of Public Programs at the Akron Art Museum.

The Emily Davis Gallery is in Folk Hall, 150 E. Exchange St., on the UA campus. Folk Hall is the home of UA’s Mary Schiller Myers School of Art. Gallery hours are 10-5 Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday and 10-9 Wednesday and Thursday. For details call Rod Bengston at 330-972-5950.

Nymphoto: 2 Shows, 1 Book & 1 Call for Entries

UPDATE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS EXTENDED UNTIL APRIL 7, 2009 11:59 PM!

The Nymphoto Collective is pleased to announce its first self-published book & the accompanying exhibit at Sasha Wolf Gallery.

"Nymphoto: Conversations Volume 1" is a collection of interviews (initially published as blog entries) with various women photographers in varying stages of their careers. The interviews reveal not just the work of the artist, but discuss the thought process involved in the creation of work. While some conversations are more revealing than others, they all expose the persona behind the work; they are all a brief glimpse into the minds and thoughts behind the art. In order to establish continuity, all of the questions in the interviews are in essence the same. General and non-specific, they allow the artist to determine how much of the process and self she wants to expose, lending her the power to dictate.

Accompanying the release of "Nymphoto: Conversations Volume 1" is the exhibit of the same title at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York.

Nymphoto: Conversations Volume 1
Group Show III
Sasha Wolf Gallery
10 Leonard Street
New York, NY
May 6 – 20, 2009
Opening Reception: May 6, 6 – 8PM.

Work by Michele Abeles, Juliana Beasley, Rona Chang, Nina Buesing Corvallo, Candace Gottschalk, Jessica M. Kaufman, Klea McKenna, Michal Chelbin, Talia Greene, Maria Passarotti, Susana Raab, Emily Shur, Tema Stauffer, Jane Tam, Garie Waltzer & Jennifer Williams.


Nymphoto is equally excited to announce its 4th group show and the collective's first public call for entries.

Nymphoto Presents @ Sasha Wolf Gallery - Call for Entries

Nymphoto is looking for the best in female contemporary and emerging photography. Work will be curated by the core members of the collective in conjunction with highly respected curator and gallery owner Sasha Wolf. Works selected will be included in "Nymphoto Presents at Sasha Wolf Gallery" and be on view from May 23 to June 6, 2009. Sasha Wolf Gallery is located in lower Manhattan, conveniently located and easily accessible from both Chelsea and Dumbo, two of New York's artistic centers.

Nymphoto Presents @ Sasha Wolf Gallery
Group Show IV
10 Leonard Street
New York, NY
May 23-June 6, 2009
Opening Reception: May 28, 6-8 PM
Nymphoto is a collective of women in photography that provides a supportive community for (its) artists and strives to send a positive message to the creative world: We firmly believe in the power of community. Through "Conversations" we are able to expand our community by including new artists in each interview and present their work to our growing audience. The collective is a fusion of disciplines: the scholastic, the representative and the museum. The call for entries exhibit serves to expand on this idea and our growing community, and aims to encourage connections and discourse among female photographers. The efforts of the collective are directed to correct the gender imbalance that continues to prevail in today's (art) world.

Find the submissions guidelines at www.nymphoto.com.
(ed.) Submission Deadline: extended until Tuesday April 7, 2009 11:59 PM EST
For more information, please contact Nymphoto at contact(at)nymphoto.com.

A Conversation with Garie Waltzer

Shanghai, Overpass #1 and Paris, Eiffel Tower ©Garie Waltzer

Rona and I had the pleasure of seeing Garie Waltzer's photographic prints in person and were instantly drawn to the entire series of wonderfully crafted urban landscapes. Garie has traveled extensively throughout the world, exploring the the dense histories with modern complexities. We're honored to present a conversation with Garie, a photographer who is recipient of many artist grants including the National Endowment of the Arts and from the Ohio Arts Council.

Nymphoto: Tell us a little about yourself.

Garie Waltzer: I grew up in New York- first the Bronx, then Long Island. My father had a music store (Banner Music) on Broadway between 48th and 49th street, where he sold and repaired instruments, gave lessons and did a lot of schmoozing. My uncles were all musicians - a few who played Broadway musicals, so backstage passes were dreamy highlights of my childhood.

I don’t remember ever not thinking of myself as an artist – I was always drawing or painting. I had a painter friend when I was 15 who thought of the German Expressionists as his soul mates, and we’d take the LIRR into the city, go to the museums, hang out in the Village, and talk about art. I still have a great painting of his from that time, which I’ve carted around with me everywhere I’ve ever lived! A close friend when I was 10, was Arthur Leipzig’s daughter. I had no idea at the time that he was a magazine photographer, with work in The Family of Man. I remember going to her house and looking at his b+w photographs hanging in their living room, one in particular of my friend. I knew these photos were special, and mused, “I wish my father took pictures of me that looked like that”! Years later, I went to a retrospective of Leipzig’s work at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and hanging in the entranc eway to the show was the small photo of my friend as a child – the same image that had hung in their living room long ago.



Istanbul, Street and New York, Coney Island ©Garie Waltzer

NP: How did you discover photography?

GW: When you look back, the path is pretty clear. I can see myself with my new Brownie camera at age 10, a Sinclair dinosaur sticker on the back. I still have my very first photos taken on a 5th grade field trip of the tugboats around the Statue of Liberty. I remember sitting for hours, nerdy as hell, with a huge National Geographic book my family had of American landscapes. After high school, my plan was to study painting, but I was repeatedly drawn to the power and immediacy of photography during the volatile years of the late 60’s when I was a student at SUNY Buffalo, a large state campus that came to national attention in ’68/‘69 during the anti-war demonstrations that surrounded the trial of the Buffalo Nine. I would have long conversations with fellow students about what it meant to be an artist during these times as I struggled to find a way to make work that was connected to what was happening in the world. It was at that time that I saw an exhibit of photographs by Milton Rogovin, made in the Lower West Side neighborhood of Buffalo, and was blown away by their tangible power. I also saw a wonderfully idiosyncratic exhibit of collaborative images by the painter Charles Gill and the photographer Donald Blumberg, both faculty at Buffalo. They were very huge photographs on canvas that had been painted into. I knew this was the arena for me. During my last year at Buffalo, I took a photography class with Donald, and when I finished school, the first thing I did was buy darkroom equipment and move back to the city.


Tokyo, Hanayashiki Amusement Park ©Garie Waltzer

NP: Where do you find inspiration?

GW: There is nothing I like better than exploring a new city. Wandering its streets, looking for keys to understanding the place- studying its energy, synergy, physical peculiarities, the magic of its people walking their daily paths. I am often inspired by books- by other artists’ work- and by good conversation over a glass of wine - but the thing that really gets me going is a crazy busy chaotic place to photograph.


Tokyo, International Forum ©Garie Waltzer

NP: How has teaching influenced your work?

GW: I taught for about 30 years at a large county community college in Cleveland. I loved the students, and loved getting to know them through their pictures. The richness and breadth of human narrative oozing out of a really diverse classroom of students was almost operatic; turning students on to thinking critically about their images and their power was endlessly compelling. I learned a lot over the years about balancing something you value (teaching students) with the necessities of survival in an increasingly bureaucratic educational system. A lot of change happened in those 30 years: the role of photography in our culture, its position in the art + communications worlds, its technological morphing, not to mention the ways we teach photography- the pace of change only increasing, and the traditional boundaries between media shifting and blurring. Being in the midst of all that change was gratifying when it wasn’t making me nuts. Teaching takes you out of yourself, it’s endlessly collaborative, and that’s what I loved the most and miss the most about it.


Odessa, Gazebo ©Garie Waltzer

NP: How did this project come about?

GW: I had been working in a radically different way before I left teaching: using a color electrostatic printer as a camera and making large allegorical images that were cut and collaged and painted into- very physical, and evocative. And then there had been a period of about ten years in which I was consumed with running the photo department, building new facilities and dealing with technological change, during which I had not made much new work. In returning to my studio, I revisited old impulses to make work that was more concretely connected to the world I saw, more observational and outward looking. I had never thought of myself as a landscape photographer, but in fact, that’s where the work took me. I had amassed a large inventory of images made over that decade, primarily of the made landscape, it’s structure and spirit. Determined to “catch up” on my printing, I went back to these images and picked up new threads in the visual narrative. This was the jumping off point for a continuing body of work that is about the inhabited landscape.

I am photographing civic spaces - parks, plazas, pools and busy intersections - recording the confluence of time, place and populace. The images explore place as an intricately detailed organism with structure, flow, synchronicity, and collective narrative. They often use elevated vantage points and deep vistas, creating bird’s eye views that hover above the fray. I am interested in capturing the gestalt of a place simultaneously with the specificity of detail that is abundant, embedded and particular to the ways we inhabit a place.



Kunming, Street and Shanghai, Overpass #3 ©Garie Waltzer

NP: What's next?

GW: I have a show of this work coming up in Miami, Florida at Chelsea Galleria, 2441 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami (opening Feb. 14 - March 10) and another at Akron University Galleries, Akron, Ohio (opening March 2 - April 17). Akron’s "Seen in China" will include work made in China by five photographers, including Daniel Traub, Linda Butler, Peikwen Cheng, and Joe Vitone. I’m also working on a project with Leslie Rose Close, a landscape historian, photographing cultural landscapes in New York. She just wrote a wonderful essay to accompany my work in Light Work’s Contact Sheet 2008 Annual, due out soon. Inspired by Philip Lopate’s Waterfront : A Walk Around Manhattan , I recently photographed the Hudson River landscape near the Statue of Liberty, homage to my first tugboat pictures.

Last year I worked on a great project to photograph the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland for the George Gund Foundation’s annual report. Photographing in my own town, something I haven’t been doing for a while, was inspiring, so when I was recently asked to participate in a project called Lake Effect, to photograph Lake Erie, I gladly agreed. The light is wonderful today, two feet of snow covers the ground, and it’s 5 degrees below zero- the crusty post-industrial landscape of Cleveland is so beautiful it could break your heart.

NP: Thank you very much, Garie!

To see more of Garie's work, go to : www.gariewaltzer.com

Also, opening on Saturday, the 14th:

Garie Waltzer: Walking on Air
Chelsea Galleria
February 14 through March 10
2441 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL

Big Barack

Big Barack © Garie Waltzer

One of the reasons the election went smoothly is that many people voted early. Photographer Garie Waltzer sent me these two photos of the Big Barack puppet that her friend Robin Van Lear of the Cleveland Museum of Art made. They took him out on the streets of Cleveland to pass out leaflets to promote early voting.


Big Barack © Garie Waltzer

Everyone can make a difference.

Garie Waltzer in Cleveland

Garie Waltzer will be exhibition a large portfolio of carbon pigmented prints, commissioned by The George Gund Foundaton for their 2007 annual report, and which explores Cleveland's vibrant University Circle neighborhood.

From the press release:
Garie Waltzer's elegant images capture the complexity of University Circle - a unique neighborhood of astonishing naturla beauty, magnificent communtiy institutions, intricate urban densivy and intense creative energy. Her images - many of them taken from elevated vantage points - provide a fresh and unexpected glimpse into what she calls "the convergence of time, place and populace" in the Circle. The University Circle print portfolio includes images of many of Cleveland's finest cultural institutions, recording the Circle's broad, dramatic and diverse landscape along with intimate views of its magical, creative spaces.

Bonfoey Gallery
Grit and Glory: Clevelad Urbanscapes
Featuring: Garie Waltzer and Andrew Borowiec
October 3 - November 8,2008

Opening Reception: October 3, 5-8pm
Book Signing and Artists' Talks: October 4, 11am

1710 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44115

Garie Waltzer

The amazingly beautiful work of Garie Waltzer will be on view through September in Cleveland. (tx, Jane)

Garie Waltzer
June 23 - Sept. 5, 2008
Humphrey Atrium Gallery at University Hospitals
11100 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH