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August Issue 2003
Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Features Photographs by John Cohen
The first major retrospective exhibition of photographs
by John Cohen - the artist and musician who inspired the Grateful
Dead song, Uncle John's Band - will be on view at the Weatherspoon
Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, through Aug. 17, 2003. Cohen's body
of work chronicles the major figures of New York City's avant-garde
literary, musical, and visual arts culture during the 1950s and
1960s, including writers Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg; musicians
Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie, and Doc Watson; and artists Red Grooms
and Josef Albers. The title of this nationally traveling exhibition
is derived from the liner notes to Bob Dylan's 1965 album, Highway
61 Revisited.
Cohen became interested in photography after studying at Yale University with Josef Albers and Herbert Matter. He then moved to New York where he mixed with a burgeoning art world, including many of the Abstract Expressionists and Beatnik poets. During that period, he photographed stills for the Beat Generation's defining film, Pull My Daisy, by Robert Frank.
Later, Cohen's work focused on the roots revival music scene. He made his first photographic series while assisting Matter on a film about the roots of jazz in Black gospel. He also photographed musicians he knew through his band, the New Lost City Ramblers, which appeared several times at the renowned Newport Folk Festival, and was instrumental in documenting and reviving traditional music. They attempted to recapture the authentic string band sound of the 1920s and 1930s, which so influenced Dylan and others. It was Cohen who coined the phrase, "high lonesome sound," in reference to this genre; his film of the same name is legendary.
Cohen's immersion into the period's culture as an artist and musician is central to his photography. Through the camera lens, he captured the energy and insight of that groundbreaking time and produced some of the most recognizable images of that era. His artistic and cultural interests also led him to Peru and the American South, settings from which he drew more photographic subject matter. "I've been called a musician, folklorist, visual anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, photographer, ethnographer, visual artist, teacher," says Cohen in an interview. "I see it all as one work, emanating from one central point in myself." (Boston Sunday Globe, Feb. 3, 2002)
The exhibition includes more than 130 black and white images and was organized and circulated by the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, in cooperation with John P. Jacob, independent curator and Deborah Bell Photographs, New York. In addition, Cohen's work is housed in such major collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and in Washington, DC, at the National Portrait Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
A 200-page monograph, with an essay by art and culture critic, Greil Marcus, and more than 150 reproductions of Cohen's photographs, has been published by PowerHouse Books. In addition, Smithsonian Folkways has released a companion CD, There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs, with a number of previously unreleased songs by Cohen and some of his musical photographic subjects. Both the catalogue and the music CD will be on sale in the Weatherspoon Museum Shop during the exhibition.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call 336/334-5770 or at (www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu).
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