OCTOBER 4, 2018
7 PM Free Lecture // Amarillo College Concert Hall Theater
Reception and Book Signing to follow, AMoA
Richard Misrach is widely recognized as one of the most influential photographers of his generation, and has been photographing in the American West for more than 40 years. Since 2004, he has focused on the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. His photographs, organized into eight groups, explore different facets and implications of the border. From the various implementations of the wall that separate the two countries from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, and the resulting creation of a "third nation", to a meditation on the personal items abandoned by migrants crossing the wilderness, Misrach’s work explores a wide array of meaning.
In 2011, Misrach enlisted Mexican-American composer Guillermo Galindo to participate in a dynamic bilingual, multimedia collaboration. Out of found migrant belongings and Border Patrol artifacts mostly retrieved by Misrach, Galindo fabricated sculptural instruments which can be played and for which he created haunting compositions. The resulting project, Border Cantos | Sonic Border, includes large-scale photographs, instruments and sound installations. The exhibition is touring museums throughout the U.S. and is currently on view at the Amarillo Museum of Art. Misrach will be lecturing on the extensive photographic component, the partnership with Galindo and its larger political, cultural and esthetic context.
Richard Misrach was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, and is widely recognized as one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years.
The recent chapter of the series, Border Cantos, made in collaboration with the experimental composer Guillermo Galindo, explores the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands. This work was exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and San Jose Museum of Art in 2016-17. Border Cantos | Sonic Border, a smaller traveling exhibition of this collaboration organized by the Crystal Bridges Museum, is currently on view at the Amarillo Museum of Art.
Other notable bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley”, the study of weather, time, color and light in his serial photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, and On The Beach, an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation.
Misrach has had one-person exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. A mid-career traveling survey was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996. His photographs are held in the collections of most major institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Misrach's book Desert Cantos received the 1988 Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography. He has received numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an International Center of Photography Infinity Award for a Publication, and the Distinguished Career in Photography Award from the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. In 2002 he was given the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography, and in 2008 he received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography.
More than twenty monographs have been published on Misrach’s work, among them Telegraph 3 A.M.: The Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley; Richard Misrach:1975-1987; Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West; Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach; Violent Legacies: Three Cantos; The Sky Book; Richard Misrach: Golden Gate; Pictures of Paintings; Chronologies; On the Beach; Destroy this Memory; 1991 —The Oakland/Berkeley Fire Aftermath; Petrochemical America; 11.21.11 5:40pm; The Mysterious Opacity of Other Beings; and Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo | Border Cantos.
Sponsored by Art Bridges
Season Sponsors
Anonymous
Dr. & Mrs. Michael Engler
Mr. & Mrs. Alfred Smith
Mr. & Mrs. Stuart West
Texas Commission on the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
Amarillo Convetion and Visitor Council Arts Committee
AMoA can be reached by calling: 806-371-5050 or 806-371-5392, or
e-mailing amoa@actx.edu.
Location address: 2200 S. Van Buren Street, Amarillo, TX, 79109
Mailing address: P.O. Box 447, Amarillo, TX, 79178
The Amarillo Museum of Art is open:
Tuesday through Friday from 10 am - 5 pm.
Saturday and Sunday the Museum is open from 1 pm - 5 pm
(except for exhibition installation weeks)
CLOSED on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
There is no admission fee.
The Amarillo Museum of Art publishes and distributes numerous fine art catalogues and posters. Southeast Asian and East Indian artifacts are featured as well as renowned modernist artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin.
