Richard Misrach
The border cantos
Friday, September 16th, 2016 7:30 PM PST
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133
This event is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute
About Richard Misrach:
Richard Misrach has been photographing in the American West for over 40 years. In the last decade he has focused on the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. His photographs, organized into 8 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.
Richard 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. In fall 2010, on the five-year anniversary of Katrina, the exhibition Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 2005] made its debut at the New Orleans Museum of Art and was also shown at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The series, 1991—The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, was presented in the fall of 2011 at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California, concurrently. The body of work, Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley, was inaugurated at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, in summer 2012 and traveled to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in 2013.
Over a dozen 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; and 11.21.11 5:40pm. He is the recipient of numerous awards in the arts including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002 he was given the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography by the German Society for Photography, and in 2008 the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography.