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February Issue 2006
Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, Features Works by Wendy Ewald & Her Collaboration with Children
The
exhibition, SECRET GAMES: Wendy Ewald, Collaborative Works
with Children 1969-1999, will be on view at the Mint Museum
of Art in Charlotte, NC, from Feb. 11 through May 7, 2006.
Award-winning photographer Wendy Ewald has likened herself to a "translator" of the images that her subjects create with the camera; a translator who "acknowledges her own part in making the story." Over a 30 year period, Ewald's unusual artistic path has taken her around the world exploring the visual imaginations of children and adults in a sustained and evolving artistic project.
SECRET GAMES. Wendy Ewald, Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999 is the first major retrospective exhibition of the photographic work of Ewald. The exhibition consists of approximately 200 photographs presenting 13 bodies of work made from 1969 to 1999. Each group varies in its presentation, befitting the character of each project from 4" x 4" images created by children in Appalachia, to a recent video installation in which Ewald's NC students take on the roles of Holocaust survivors.
Addressing conceptual, formal and narrative concerns, Ewald's work challenges traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Using creative collaboration with children as the basis for the artistic process, she has traveled throughout the world working in communities in Labrador, Appalachia, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, and Durham, North Carolina. This exhibition presents groups of work made in each of these areas.
Starting initially as a documentary investigation of places and communities connected to teaching, SECRET GAMES evolved over the years to focus on the question of identity and cultural difference. Redefining the roles of artist and subject, Ewald encouraged the children she worked with to use cameras to create portraits of themselves and their community, to articulate their own personal fantasies, dreams and hopes, and to work directly with her in visual and verbal collaboration.
On occasion, Ewald gave some of her negatives to collaborators to make and write giving the children voice and vision. How the children interpreted and revamped Ewald's images are in turn comical, sobering and haunting. By mixing the images it is challenging to know who actually created a given image, and thereby blurring the distinction of individual authorship, Ewald crosses the line that separates the photographer from the subject and creates a new artistic form.
Ewald, who currently works at Duke University where she is Senior Research Associate at The Center for Documentary Studies and Project Director of Literacy Through Photography, is one of North Carolina's most significant contemporary artists; she defies the traditional notions of the artist and the "subject." Ewald' s artistic collaborations have been widely published and exhibited, and she has received recognition for her innovative creative practice, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a series of major grants from arts funders including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, among others.
SECRET GAMES: Wendy
Ewald Collaborative Works with Children, 1969-1999, co-organized by the Addison
Gallery and the Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland, has been
presented at a number of significant institutions, including the
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, the Kemper
Museum of Contemporary Art, and most recently the Queens Museum.
Ewald will lecture on the SECRET GAMES exhibition on Saturday,
Feb. 11, 2006 at 2pm in the Van Every Auditorium of the Mint Museum
of Art. A book signing of the exhibition catalogue (available
for purchase from the Museum Shop) will follow the lecture. This
lecture is free with museum admission.
For more information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at
704/337-2000 or at (www.mintmuseum.org).
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