The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art presents Coyote Park: I Love You Like Mirrors Do. The exhibition explores multi-disciplinary artist Coyote Park’s deep bonds – between loved ones, lands of origin, diasporas, and queer, trans and Indigenous kin – creating spaces of togetherness and liberation. Informed by LGBTQIA+ visual histories, I Love You Like Mirrors Do began with the artist’s research on figurative pairs across the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s collection, from silver prints by fin de siècle Prussian photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, to erotic drawings by twentieth-century Japanese artist Goh Mishima, to the celebration of queer, Black love by contemporary South African artist Zanele Muholi. Gestures, backdrops, props, and other visual elements from collection works are borrowed and interpreted in Park’s tableaux, which centers on the artist’s own constellation of relationships and intimate entanglements.

As a Two-spirit, Indigenous (Yurok), Korean-American artist, Park works to expand the spectrum of queer representation, noting that “we are always looking for ourselves in art.” They embrace photography’s unique capacity for world-building: the single frame that still photography affords the viewer hovers in time, documenting ephemera and energetic connections between the artist’s past lovers, current partners, and those they hold close. In Park’s process of collaborative image-making, they capture the unspoken understandings of how they see and are seen, and the dynamic fluidity of both: a process underscored by the exhibition’s title. Through objects, gestures, and form, I Love You Like Mirrors Do iterates images of the self in relation to others: a self that is not intrinsic or inherent, but continually negotiated and produced. Park envisions love dynamics, lived and represented, as reflective and contingent. We are all mirrored refractions of one another.

Park’s is the first exhibition in The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art’s Interventions series which engages LGBTQIA+ artists and cultural producers to dive into the Museum’s collection and creatively present their research, building new narratives and interpretations from diverse subjectivities. The Interventions series offers a unique platform for public access to the Museum’s artworks, establishing a new avenue for showcasing the expansive and historical collection that Leslie-Lohman has acquired over five decades.

The end result is a dialogue, representing the shared histories and lived realities that influence the LGBTQIA+ community of today and the future.

I Love You Like Mirrors Do marks Park’s first ever museum exhibition. “The Museum is proud to support this pivotal moment in Park’s trajectory as an artist,” says Alyssa Nitchun, Executive Director at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. “Their ability to contextualize works from our collection and to offer a contemporary, intersectional perspective is acutely significant to Leslie-Lohman as a space that affirms and engages the past, present and future realities of LGBTQIA+ lives.”

“In these photographs, as with mirrors, the ocean and with my loved ones, my gender is a prism: it changes color based on the light refracted through it,” says the artist Coyote Park. “As I say to a lover in the film created for the exhibition, ‘I am not just the strength of my body, I am not the amount of hair, the deepness of my voice, I am not just read as boy or girl. I am not what a public perception projects on me.’ The film’s addition to the photographic work serves as a living organ of many voices: an ephemeral experience of memories between me and the loved ones in the photographs (Tee Jaehyung Park, River Gallo, Kaliko Aiu, Em Grotton, Ke’ron J. Wilson, Hercules Goss-Kuehn, and Bones Tan Jones).”

“It has been extraordinary working with Coyote Park for this first iteration of Interventions,” says Stamatina Gregory, Chief Curator at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. “Their process of research into LLMA’s collection, and their deployment of formal references within this new body of work has been playful, open, and intuitive. But more critically, these works are a reclamation: they move our queer visual histories toward more inclusive and radical forms of relation.”

The exhibition also features a section of artworks from the Museum’s collection from which Park drew inspiration. Featured pieces include artwork by Goh Mishima, Leah Michaelson, Li Ming Shun, Luigi & Luca, Marcelina Martin, Marion Pinto, Tee A. Corrine, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Yannis Nomikos, and Zanele Muholi.

About The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art provides a platform for artistic exploration through multi-faceted queer perspectives. We embrace the power of the arts to inspire, explore, and foster understanding of the rich diversity of LGBTQIA+ experiences. We aim to be a home for queer art, artists, scholars, activists and allies, and a catalyst for discourse on art and queerness. With a collection of over 25,000 objects and a research library of over 3,000 volumes, the Museum fosters experimentation and research through exhibitions, programs, educational platforms, and publications.

Coyote Park : I Love You Like Mirrors Do
Through July 16^th, 2023
The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
26 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10013
www.leslielohman.org
@leslielohmanmuseum

This is the 29^th installment of the online series by Peter Fetterman Gallery called the Power of Photography highlighting hope, peace and love in the world. We invite you to enjoy and reflect on these works during this time.

Sarah Moon
L’été (The Summer), 1989
© Sarah Moon/Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

The process of creation. Sarah has always engaged in the great dance of life on a level very few can reach. She has been given a special gift of observation and incredible insight which thankfully she shares with us.

Ralph Gibson
White Nude, 1989
© Ralph Gibson /Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Much of Ralph’s work is spare, sensual and profound like this image. He has lived a full and rich life which is thankfully still ongoing with great travel, adventures and deep encounters with many of world’s greatest painters, writers and photographers from Dorothea Lange to Marguerite Duras. But he can hold his own with them in terms of sophistication and productivity.Perhaps the hardest subject to contribute something fresh and inventive to is the female nude but here it is in front of you to marvel at in all its beauty.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)
Swan Lake, Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, USSR, 1954
© Henri Cartier-Bresson, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Henri was always very self-deprecating. I don’t think I ever heard the word “art” come out of his mouth when talking to him about his work. To call one of the greatest bodies of work produced in the 20th Century in any medium as a “trade” is of course quite amusing. No one was more a witness to the great moments of history than he was. He was the first Western photographer to be allowed to work in the Soviet Union and given incredible access because of his international reputation. No more so than the permission to photograph behind the scenes of the celebrated Bolshoi Ballet. His long out of print book “The People of Moscow” is a book collector’s gem. Of course, for me it was always a dream to own a great Degas painting but this image is up there with one.

Emmet Gowin
Edith, Chincoteague, Virginia, 1967
© Emmet Gowin Estate/Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

I don’t think there is a more powerful, romantic, tender, intimate image in the history of photography than this one. Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. Emmet Gowin has spent many years photographing his wife Edith. They are more than just a series of images of her. He has created a novel about her. I find the emotion permeating this special one so intense and universal. It is almost a summation of a life fully lived through all its stages in one single frame. But in the end it is really about what it is to love and be loved.

Arnold Newman (1918-2006)
Martha Graham, 1961
© Arnold Newman, Arnold Newman Estate / Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Arnold Newman loved to shoot his subjects in their natural environments. That’s why he took his cameras over to 316 E 63rd Street on March 2nd, 1961 to capture the formidable Martha Graham. She was known as the Mother of Modern Dance, as important to her profession as Picasso was to painting or Stravinsky was to music or Frank Lloyd Wright was to architecture.

She stands in front of her rehearsal barre almost as if an arrow is about to pierce through her heart and she is ready to move to escape it and in the process move us with her power and sheer force of nature as she did in each her performances and creations.

Louis Stettner (1922-2016)
Times Square at Night, New York, 1952
© Estate of Louis Stettner / Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Louis was mentored and encouraged by the great Paris-based, Hungarian-born photographer, Brassaï. Brassaï was renown more than anything for his incredible night time images shot in Paris in the 1930’s.

It was hard for Stettner not to have been influenced by one of his key teachers. Louis always told me that “Times Square” was the belly button of New York. He lived nearby and would often go there in the evening with his camera. People would come from all over New York to take in a movie, or a play or just to walk around. He was fascinated by the constant waves of humanity to be found there.

I also think on this particular night he must have also been stimulated into action by the billboard for Elia Kazan’s great, great film “On The Waterfront”. No one who ever saw it when they were young could ever forget the power of it not to mention Brando’s haunting performance.

Wynn Bullock (1902-1975)
Child in Forest, 1951
© Estate of Wynn Bullock / Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

I think Wynn is being perhaps being a little too modest here. I think to create an image of such beauty and power you would have had to devote a lifetime of dedication and experience to the task at hand. It is so far removed from just a simple act.

It was one of the stand out and most popular images in Edward Steichen’s 1955’s celebrated “Family of Man Exhibition” which later toured the world to enormous acclaim. This is an image one can stare at for hours and meditate on its various layers of meaning. But the one thing everyone can agree on is its luminosity as a print.

Neil Leifer
Portrait of Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers posing during Camera Day at Ebbets Field. Brooklyn, New York, 8/12/1956
© Neil Leifer / Iconic Images / Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

This is a remarkable photograph of Jackie Robinson, one of Baseball’s all-time greats and the first player to break down the game’s racial barriers. What makes it remarkable is that Neil was only 14 years old at the time. He went on to have an illustrious career turning sports photography into an acknowledged art form. It was taken on “Camera Day” at Ebbets Field, a tradition where once a year the players posed for the youngsters in the stadium before the game began. Neil managed to hustle his way into a great position and created an iconic image of one of his heroes in his final year in the Major Leagues. Pure magic.

William Klein
Wings of the Hawk, 42nd Street, New York, 1955
© William Klein / William Klein Estate / Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

Here William Klein captures all the edginess and allure in the signage and lighting of a pre-Disney clean up of Times Square. It’s like Scorsese in “Taxi Driver” but a generation or two before. You are caught up in the crowd, in the energy of the street and the allure of the movie marquee lighting. Cinema would be an allure for Klein too and he spent a big part of his career making films like the fashion world send up “Who are you Polly Magoo?” and the wonderful documentary “Muhammed Ali: The Greatest.”

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)
Ernest Hemingway, 1957
© Yousuf Karsh, Yousuf Karsh Estate /Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery

I have been enjoying the new Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS series on Ernest Hemingway. They are such superb filmmakers and it seems that whatever subject matter they turn their attention to, they unravel so many new and surprising levels of story-telling. Hemingway is no exception. It is not just a story about one writer’s tempestuous life. It really is a story about America and indeed the human condition itself. And staring at this great Karsh portrait, one of his best, is the perfect complement.

Peter Fetterman Gallery
2525 Michigan Ave, #A1
Santa Monica, CA 90404
http://www.peterfetterman.com

The Power of Photography is now a book published by ACC ART Books.

Peter Fetterman : The Power of Photography
ACC ART Books
Pages: 256 pages
Size: 7.87 in x 9.06 in
ISBN: 9781788841221
$45.00

https://www.accartbooks.com/us/book/the-power-of-photography/
www.accartbooks.com

The Selects Gallery presents an exhibition in collaboration with Par Excellence, the luxury artisan showroom dedicated to French craftsmanship. Entitled “Chic: Capturing that ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi’ in Photography”, the exhibition creates a world centered around the glamour, sexiness, freedom, and creativity of couture fashion and editorial photography. The curation celebrates French style, reimagined by international fashion photographers.

The exhibition features renowned fashion photographers Terry O’Neill, Jacques Olivar, Kenneth Willardt, and Sylvie Castioni, alongside up-and-coming Nigerian photographer Adebayo Jolaoso, with images of supermodels Esther Cañadas, Doutzen Kroes, and the iconic Brigitte Bardot.

Terry O’Neill is one of the most celebrated and collected fashion photographers, best known for his work capturing youth culture in the 1960’s. In photographing the rise of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and Brigitte Bardot, among many others, O’Neill defined celebrity and created a visual language for the representation of icons.

French photographer Jacques Olivar is known for his elegant, narrative-driven photographs; taking formalistic cues from classic film, Olivar imbues his models with a sense of character and mystery. Fashion is a critical element in his work, as he creates the world of the image around the clothes, letting them create the sense of character and mystery.

French photographer Sylvie Castioni is known for her intimate portraits of female models, which aim to connect to the subject’s sacred femininity and soul. Her images create a world of fashion and couture which is centered around women embracing their innate femininity and power.

Danish photographer Kenneth Willardt, a major contributor at Harper’s Bazaar US, is a versatile fashion photographer, known for his beauty images as well as his highly editorial fashion portraits. Marked by a combination of precision and joyful spontaneity, his modern aesthetic is highly emblematic of contemporary fashion photography.

Nigerian photographer Adebayo Jolaoso combines the classic fashion photography imagery he was raised seeing in magazines with a contemporary Nigerian eye. Through his technical, elegant, and imaginative images, he embraces diverse forms of self-expression and celebrates the diversity and beauty of Nigerian models.

The exhibition is the first photography exhibition to be hosted in the space after the renovation by interior designer Thomas Pheasant.

Chic: Capturing that ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi’ in Photography
From March 30th to June 29th, 2023
Par Excellence Showroom
344 Bowery, 5th Floor, NOHO
New York, NY 10012
Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm
Contact us for your private appointment: [email protected]

www.theselectsgallery.com
@theselectsgallery

Produced in 2022 in California, “Le Murmure des Crépuscules” is the new series of images by Benjamin Juhel evoking the silence, the absence, and the long time offered by the night. In this project, he finds an approach to the interval between public space and private space, and questions the necessary distance of viewpoint between the city as a common space and individual habitat. Taken at nightfall, when the streets darken and the interiors light up, these images are a muffled wandering in a zone in transition. By maintaining a distance and a theatrical form, it offers a cinematographic and lively look at the urban territory. Each image offers a waiting situation and opens a narrative field to our imagination.

We find in this series the approach of penumbra and a singular vision of color, chiaroscuro and what light as a glow can give to perceive by taking the time to look. The plasticity of the images, always very pictorialist, close to drawing, the choice of a carbon fiber Japanese paper, continue to support the plastic approach of Benjamin Juhel’s photography, more inclined to make objects/images of fiction, poetic and remote from reality.

Benjamin Juhel uses the societal functions or images of cities to re-examine our relationship to representations, to the society of entertainment and consumption, and to the making of power. Without wanting to denounce it invites to question by creating poetic situations and images where the time of the night makes silence and loneliness exist. Benjamin Juhel offers images with textures and lights close to painting and cinematography. The darkness of the images invites contemplation, to take the time to discover what is given to see, leaving time for the gaze to grasp the details appearing when our eye gets used to the shades of black.

Benjamin Juhel : Le Murmure des Crépuscules
from April 12 to 28, 2023
Galleria Valeria Bella
Via San Damiano
20122 Milan. Italy
www.valeriabella.com