Center for Creative Photography Presents Joe Deal West and West Through 5/8

Joe DeAl West and West: Reimagining The Great Plains currently on view at Robert Mann Gallery through May 8, 2010 has been acquired by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.  Robert Mann Gallery located at 210 Eleventh Avenue New York NY 10001 (between 24th & 25th Streets) is open Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm. Gallery information is available www.robertmann.com.  

The Joe Deal Archive joins comprehensive collections of 20th century American photography including the archives of luminaries such as Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, W. EuGene Smith, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand. Along with work prints, negatives and related material, Deal's master vintage prints will all be reconstituted in the Center's collection. The Center's archives already include more than 80,000 works by 2,000 photographers.

The acquisition of the Joe Deal Archive was enabled by a number of passionate photography collectors, several of whom are particularly committed to the New Topographic movement in fine art photography. Joe Deal was included in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House in 1975. In addition to having his work included in the original exhibition, Deal was a crucial advisor to curator William Jenkins in conceiving of the show and also contributed to the exhibition and catalogue designs. New Topographics has been re-created by Dr. Alison Nordström, curator at George Eastman House, and Dr. Britt Salvesen, formerly director and chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography and now Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the exhibition is currently on view at CCP through May 16th.

In addition to Deal's vintage prints, a complete set of the artist's recent series, West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains has also been acquired by a private collector for the Center's collection. This body of work was first exhibited at the RISD Museum of Art and is currently on view at Robert Mann Gallery (through May 8, 2010), after which it travels to CCP where it will be on view from June 5 - August 1, 2010. A monograph of the same title published by the Center for American Studies accompanies this exhibition. (See below for recent reviews in the New Yorker, Aperture and Afterimage.)

Robert Mann has been working exclusively with Joe Deal since the early 1980's, presenting three solo exhibitions of Deal's work since 2003. "I find it particularly gratifying that this project was accomplished with the Center's participation and with the help of collectors that truly appreciate the importance of this significant artist," says Mann. "The Center could not be a more appropriate and appreciative destination for Joe's archive."

In addition to his artistic production, Deal has been an influential educator and academic having taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of California at Riverside. From 1999-2005 he served as Provost at RISD, and prior to that was Dean of the School of Art (1989-1999) at Washington University. Deal has also completed portfolios commissioned to document the construction of major building projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, and the Richard Meier-designed Getty Center in Brentwood, California.

Deal's photographs are held in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, Joe Deal lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Joe Deal's current exhibition West & West: Reimagining the Great Plains can be viewed on the Rpbert Mann Gallery's website.

The New Yorker
April 26, 2010
Deal, one of the influential New Topographics crew in the nineteen-seventies, continues to photograph the American landscape in his spare, understated style, balancing a sure sense of its history with a genuine concern for its future. The subject of his fine new exhibition is the Great Plains, seen in crisp black-and-white and from a discreet middle ground that recalls classic surveyors' views, with the horizon dividing the frame into land and sky. Like Sugimoto's seascapes, the resulting images suggest variations on a theme. But Deal isn't just recording weather and terrain - the gathering storm, the passing cloud, the sinkhole - he's making detailed portraits of the Plains that appreciate its complex personality. Through May 8.

Aperture
Issue 199: Summer 2010
Exhibition Review by Brian Sholis
Deal has compared the camera's imposition of a frame on this environment to the mechanical act performed by surveyors. Yet early rationalist grids - such as Thomas Jefferson's proposed division of the land west of the Appalachians, or the Kansas-Nebraska Act - caused speculators to disregard the landscape's variety. Deal's camera, by contrast, lovingly catalogs its diversity. The startling incongruity from picture to picture is highlighted by a trio of images hung close to one another in the show: Wash, Red Hills (2007), in which a shallow natural depression reveals stratified layers of rock; Horizon and Night Sky, High Plains (2005), in which thin clouds hover just above a featureless black expanse; and Flint Hills (2006), which is strewn with lunar-looking rocks. The tension Deal achieves between strict regularity and variety, between grid and ground, is in large measure the source of these photographs' power.

To read the complete review, click here.

Afterimage
January/February 2010
Book Review by Stephen Longmire
Even as the New Topographics exhibition that made his name in 1975 is being reprised (at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through January 3, 2010), Joe Deal has released a new book, which is, quite literally, sublime. If Deal's aesthetic showed what happened when minimalism and commercial culture collided to revise the idealizing tradition of western landscape photography, his new book, West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains, shows this most invisible part of the American West in its full minimalist glory, reminding readers that land survives our ideas for its use. Deal's recent square-format, black-and-white images reinhabit the grid of the government surveys that laid out this arid region for settlement (a questionable idea, as time would tell) and grazing. A Kansas native, Deal writes with intelligence and insight about this depopulated, lunar landscape, evolving from the cool detachment of his youthful work:

If the square, as employed in the surveys of public lands, could function like a telescope, framing smaller and smaller sections of the plains, it can also be used as a window, equilaterally divided by the horizon, that begins with a finite section of earth and sky and restores them in the imagination to the vastness that now can only exist as an idea: the landscape contained within the perfect symmetry of the square implies infinity. (14-15)

Deal recently retired from teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, and RISD's Museum of Art will be showing this new work - with an additional series not included in the book, Karst and Psuedokarst - through January 3, 2010.