Robert Mann Gallery Honors The Late Joe Deal

Joe Deal passed away Friday, June 18, 2010 in Providence, Rhode Island following an eight year battle against cancer. Over the course of a 40-year career, he developed one of the signature bodies of work in American post-war photography. Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, Deal studied graphic design at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving into photography; he went on to earn advanced degrees in photography from the University of New Mexico.

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 in his capacity as Director of Exhibitions at George Eastman House. In recognition of its enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists, New Topographics has been re-created for an international exhibition currently on tour.

Deal began exhibiting with Light Gallery in New York in the 1970s prior to the widespread acceptance of photography as a fine art. He presented his first exhibition there in 1973, to be followed by three additional shows by 1981. Throughout the 1980s he continued to explore the development of the arid western landscape and the expansive suburban subdivisions of Southern California. During this time Deal was commissioned to document the construction of major building projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art (1984-86) in downtown Los Angeles, and the Getty Center designed by Richard Meier (1984-1997) in Brentwood, California.

In the 2000s Deal created two significant bodies of work that took him back to the prairie landscapes of his childhood on the Great Plains. These two series, West and West: Reimagining the Great Plains and Karst and Pseudokarst, each continued Deal's thoughtful examination of the basic meaning of what constitutes landscape, and the genre's broader historical and epistemological implications. West and West was first exhibited at the RISD Museum of Art in 2009 and was on view at Robert Mann Gallery earlier this year. The exhibition is currently on view at the Center for Creative Photography through August 1st, 2010.

In addition to his significant artistic production, Deal was an influential educator and academic; Deal was Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design until his retirement last year, and previously held positions at 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. His service to the academic and fine arts community was extensive, sitting on the College Art Association board of directors, as well as on numerous committees and panels for the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the recipient of two NEA Artist's Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Earlier this year Robert Mann Gallery placed the Joe Deal Archive with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona; the archive includes negatives, work prints, and ephemera, as well as a complete set of master vintage prints. Deal's photographs are held in numerous public collections internationally. His sensitive approach to photographing the tensions between human effects and the natural landscape earned the admiration of many artists, curators, and critics. He will be deeply missed.

For more information please contact Robert Mann Gallery at mail@robertmann.com or 212-989-7600.