Curious Visions

Spanning more than 2,800 square feet on the sixth floor of the Martin Building, the new Delisa & Anthony Mayer Galleries nearly double the space for photography in the museum and will be a place to see regular rotations of work from the permanent collection and beyond.

The inaugural two-part exhibition, Curious Visions: Toward Abstract Photography, explores experimentations with abstraction from the past 100 years. Approximately 60 works are featured, spotlighting historical images by photographers including Berenice Abbott, Eliot Porter, Man Ray, Aaron Siskind, Edward Weston, and Minor White alongside contemporary artworks by Gary Emrich, Jungjin Lee, Laura Letinsky, Alison Rossiter, and others. The exhibition encourages viewers to identify different ways of thinking about abstraction, and to understand techniques that artists have used to explore that aspect of photography.

The new galleries also incorporate opportunities for visitors to engage and rethink their relationships to photography in daily life. An interpretive area, "Through the Lens," explains how cameras work and how different lenses affect the way pictures look. Visitors can look through replica box cameras and watch a video presentation that dives into the work of the abstract photographer Aaron Siskind. Additional prompts inspire visitors to experiment and capture their own images both in the galleries and beyond.