Weinstein Hammons Gallery

A modern-day Renaissance man, Gordon Parks was one of the most prolific artists of the 20th century, whose creative practice extended beyond photography to encompass writing, musical composition, filmmaking, and painting. Taking its title from a line in Parks' poem “Come Sing with Me”, The Song Called Hope focuses on one of the most persistent subjects of Parks’ photographs over the years – children. Renowned for his profound and compassionate portrayal of American life for over five decades, Parks often turned his lens to children to use the “camera to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves”.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by Ruben Nusz, his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST Wednesday, June 14th, 2023, 6-8pm With this recent exhibition of 19 paintings, Ruben Nusz (he/him) continues his decades-long exploration of what is still possible within the expanded lexicon of painting. Rooted in idiosyncratic and well-researched color theory, Nusz returns to the geometric abstraction he first established with the gallery a decade ago. Paintings in this exhibition feature an illusory still-life structure that appears spatially incongruous; scenarios he describes in terms of theater, “I’m merging the ‘theater of the absurd’ with Malevich’s nonobjective abstraction. The distorted still life is like a theater stage, and the circles in the paintings serve as actors. Over time, these circles take on their own personality and hint at representation. It’s like the Myth of Sisyphus, except the story isn’t about Sisyphus, but rather the stone.” Nusz’s work is inspired by a variety of influences, from Cezanne’s still-life paintings of apples to Viking shields, Ms. Pacman, Anni Albers textiles and the comedy of Mitch Hedberg. The small scale of the works, most measuring eight-by-ten inches, are, as Nusz describes them, “lyric poems, not novels.” By distorting the phenomenology of a picture, one warps space and time because the two are interrelated. As the viewer looks at these paintings, they are inclined to try to decode the image. The whole effort grounds perception in the present moment. The spatial contradictions act like a visual koan. The exhibition’s title, How to Look Wrong addresses not only the distorted aesthetics of the pictures but also the artist’s ongoing vision problems and the difficulties of making art in 2023. “Most days, I’m riddled with doubt; I’m not sure if I can make work that addresses the suffering and the absurdity of the world. But, I can make work that shares my own idiosyncratic perspective, my affection for introspection, and my thirst for color and brightness in a world that is often bleak.” … Painter and writer Ruben Nusz (pronounced news) was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the son of a carpenter and a bookkeeper. He has exhibited paintings and sculptures at galleries and museums across the United States, including New Orleans Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego). His work is featured in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Minnesota Museum of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, Weisman Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Visual Arts Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. Nusz is also co-founder of Location Books, an independent publisher that provides contemporary artists opportunities to produce new work in book form. Location artist books are found in art libraries throughout the United States, including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His writing has been featured online and in various print journals, including The Walker Art Center Magazine, Kenyon Review, New American Writing (forthcoming), and The Georgia Review (forthcoming). He lives and works in Arden Hills and Minneapolis, MN.

OPENING RECEPTION ON THURSDAY, APRIL 20TH 6:00-8:00 PM Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present an exclusive exhibition of Milano Per Filo e Per Segno, sixteen new works by internationally renowned artist Paolo Ventura. The show will be on view beginning Thursday, April 20th. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Paolo Ventura’s (b. 1968, Milan, Italy) family background is steeped in the art of storytelling. His father, Piero Ventura, was an internationally prominent children’s book author and illustrator. His grandmother shared vivid recollections of her experiences living in the Italian countryside through World Wars I and II. These formative experiences inspired Ventura to develop his distinctive approach to visual storytelling, one that combines historical events and pure imagination. His storytelling often blurs the line between fact and fiction, inviting the viewer to enter into a dreamlike realm that is both familiar and otherworldly. In Milano Per Filo e Per Segno, Ventura pays homage to his native Milan, one of the oldest cities in Europe, by focusing his lens on its storied and historic architecture. His artistic process begins with a photograph printed on multiple panels. After the photographs are stitched together, Ventura uses paint to omit and highlight the imagery, creating stark cityscapes that evoke wonder and nostalgia. Per File e Per Segno is an Italian expression meaning word for word, and its direct translation by line and by thread, is a tongue and cheek double entendre on the photographic representation of these Milanese buildings and the perspective lines drawn throughout. Paolo Ventura studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in the early 1990s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Forma International Center for Photography, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art of Roma (MACRO), Rome; The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome and during the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles. In 2012, he was selected to create a series of works for the Italian national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; he also received a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. Additionally, Ventura was recently commissioned by the MART, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy. Four monographs of Paolo Ventura's work have been published: War Souvenir (Contrasto, 2006), Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), The Automaton (Peliti Associati, 2011) and Lo Zuavo Scomparso (Punctum Press, 2012). A book accompanying the exhibition Milano Per Filo e Per Segno is being published by Danilo Montanari Editore (Ravenna, 2023).

"With this project, I hope to continue raising awareness about the cost of growing our civilization without the necessary consideration for sustainable industrial practices and the dire need for implementing globally organized governmental initiatives, with binding international legislations, in order to protect present and future generations from what stands to be forever lost." - Edward Burtynsky Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present African Studies, an exhibition of fourteen large format photographs by the internationally renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. This will be Burtynsky's third solo exhibition with the gallery and is the debut of African Studies in the United States. Since the early 1980’s, Burtynsky’s work has depicted large-scale industrial projects and their effects on the environment, telling a comprehensive visual story of human alteration. This ambitious project, seven years in the making, is inspired by the arc themes of Burtynsky’s career: extractions, agriculture, and urbanization, this time shot exclusively across the second largest continent in the world, Africa. Alongside images of the extractive industries which impact nature and all life, the exhibition also includes a selection of unaltered landscapes, which provide a strong visual contrast to the images of human impact. African Studies features photographs taken at resource mines in South Africa and Botswana, salt ponds in Senegal, lakes and tea farms in Kenya, sulfur springs in Ethiopia, and the Namib Desert in Namibia. Using high technology equipment such as fixed-wing aircrafts, helicopters and drones, Burtynsky creates otherworldly landscape images that border between realism and abstraction. Overlapping exposures, seamlessly stitched together, provide compelling scene detail not visible to the naked eye. As the human-induced rapid environmental change continues, Burtunsky’s work remains more relevant than ever. Edward Burtynsky’s photographic depictions of industrialized landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty museums around the world, including: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; the National Gallery of Canada, Toronto; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Los Angeles Museum of Art. A new book of the same name published by Steidl will also be released this fall.

Lisa Lyon, 1982, gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches, edition of 10.© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present A Pound of Pictures, an exhibition of sixteen large format works by the internationally renowned artist Alec Soth. The works will be on view beginning Friday, January 28th. A Pound of Pictures is a stream of consciousness and celebration of the photographic medium, representing a new collection of work shot between 2018 and 2021. The project takes its title from Soth’s encounter with a vendor in Los Angeles who sold photographs “by the pound.” The series depicts a sprawling array of subjects, from statues of Buddha to sunseekers on Fire Island to a bust of Abraham Lincoln buckled up in the backseat of a Honda Odyssey, this project reflects on the photographic desire to pin down and crystallize experiences, especially as they are represented and recollected as printed images. Resulting from a winding, ruminative road trip, Soth’s photographs are about the process of their own making, creating a connection between the ephemeral (light and time) and the physical (eyeballs, film). A Pound of Pictures is a highly self reflective project which draws on themes and ideas found in Sleeping by the Mississippi and later bodies of work. Alec Soth lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published over twenty-five books, including his first critically acclaimed monograph Sleeping by the Mississippi, in 2004. He has gone on to publish titles such as NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogotá (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), Broken Manual (2010), Songbook (2015), Gathered Leaves (2015) and most recently I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating (2019). In 2008 Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom, which is based in Minnesota. Soth’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums including the Deichtorhallen Internationale Kunst und Fotografie, Hamburg; the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK; The Finnish Museum, Helsinki; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; El museo de Bogotá, Colombia; the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others. A Pound of Pictures will have three concurrent presentations with slight content variations at Sean Kelly in New York (January 14-February 26, 2022) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (February 3-March 26th, 2022). Coinciding with the exhibition, MACK Books will publish a new monograph titled A Pound of Pictures in 2022.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present SILVER, an exhibition of sixteen unique works by the internationally renowned artist Matthew Brandt. The works will be on view by appointment starting Friday, November 12th. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. SILVER is comprised of two bodies of work in which Matthew Brandt uses experimental processes to reconstruct two traditional genres in photography: landscape and portraiture. Using science, experimentation, and a bit of magic, Brandt’s artistic practice continues to be inspired by scientists’ invention of photography in the early 19th century. SILVER is the last exhibition of 2021 to mark the gallery’s 25th anniversary, and fittingly so, since the metal is often associated with quarter century celebrations. Brandt began working on the silver tree images in 2018 when he was in Minneapolis for his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Gold Medal. Taken at the Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve, the source images were then transformed through the process of being silverized, an inherent element to traditional darkroom black and white photography. The end result is a stunning obscured image that has an overall reflective effect, allowing the viewer to see themselves as they are looking at the work. This exhibition also presents Brandt’s portraits of acclaimed female authors throughout history. The portraits in this exhibition include Maya Angelou, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, and Edith Wharton. He begins the process by turning sourced images to silk screen prints and then carefully applying molten type metal from a century old typesetting technology. Through this fitting and appropriate process, the portraits become a tactile, three dimensional object. Time and time again, Brandt uses physical materials to push the boundaries of what a photograph can be. Work by Matthew Brandt is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Cincinnati Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Royal Danish Library, National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Brandt was born in California in 1982, received his BFA from The Cooper Union in New York and his MFA from UCLA. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Weinstein Hammons gallery remains deeply grateful to our artists, colleagues, and friends who have been supportive over the years.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present Out My Window, an exhibition of fifteen large-format photographs by the internationally recognized, New York based artist Gail Albert Halaban. The works will be on view by appointment beginning September 10, 2021, and will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Out My Window began in 2007 when Albert Halaban moved to New York City from Los Angeles, and it has now expanded to five continents and over twenty five cities. In an attempt to foster new connections, she started using her camera to interact with the people and architecture she encountered in the city. Always connecting with the subjects before photoshoots, Albert Halaban creates unexpected interactions between strangers in close proximity beyond the camera. In each city, these connections and the resulting works often prove emblematic of her location, representing individuals and architecture in the same frame. Included in this exhibition are photographs from New York City, Paris, Venice, Rome, Naples, Milan, Istanbul, and Buenos Aires. Revealing the tensions between private and public life, Albert Halaban has a unique way of bringing observers and their subjects together. Despite appearing “natural”, each image is a result of a collaboration with her subjects. Both photographer and sitter participate in the making of the image, including the location, time of day, and the sitter’s activity. Gail Albert Halaban redefines how we see and interact with one another in our communities. Gail Albert Halaban received her BA from Brown University and earned her MFA in Photography from Yale University. The artist has three monographs of her work, including Out My Window (PowerHouse, 2012), Paris Views (Aperture, 2014) and Italian Views (Aperture, 2019). Her work is in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Cape Ann Museum, Getty Museum and Wichita Art Museum.

Works by: Nicolas Africano Cass Bird Matthew Brandt Gail Albert Halaban Erik Madigan Heck James Kielkopf Vera Lutter Ruben Nusz Alec Soth Andrea Ventura

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present Music Box, a historical group exhibition devoted to music and musical expression in celebration of our 25th year. Comprising works by more than 40 artists, the exhibition encompasses over nine decades of music, in photography and related media. Ever since the gallery began in 1996, it has periodically presented unique historical group shows with the aim of delving deeper into specific, interesting themes and times in history. Past exhibitions, for example, include The Fashion Show, works by women fashion photographers spanning over nine decades, The Pyramids: 150 Years of Photographic Fascination, and Rites of Assembly the first show dedicated to photographers who specialized in images of large groups of people. The inspiration for the current exhibition comes from August Sander’s famous Circus Artists, in which he captured seven circus artists in their most candid moments. Caught up in the intense expressions of the circus artists sitting around in a circle, a detail often overlooked is the record player that not only holds the photograph compositionally, but also characterizes the spirit of the era in which it was taken. Music Box seeks to visually explore this spirit and the timeless emotional response it brings. The works selected for the exhibition illustrate different facets of the long relationship between music and photography, traversing through such quiet moments as the photograph of John Lennon's lips and a still life of a disco ball, to the intense reaction of a crowd taking in a performance by Lil’ Bow Wow. Visually, the content varies from still lives and portraits of performing musicians to the people for whom they perform, through such disparate settings as recording studios, city streets, domestic spaces of performance, bar scenes, and concert venues. Throughout the exhibition the presence of music becomes extractible through one of the most realistic art forms: photography. Viewed all together, Music Box is an eclectic exhibition that aims to magnify the emotional ethos of music and photography. Included are works by Tom Arndt, Dawoud Bey, Bruce Davidson, Ed Van Der Elsken, Eliott Erwitt, Gail Albert Halaban, Erik Madigan Heck, Andre Kertesz, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Luis González Palma, Gordon Parks, Marcia Resnick, Nancy Rexroth, August Sander, Martin Schoeller, Sanlé Sory, Alec Soth, Mike and Doug Starn and Weegee, among many others, including unknown 20th century photographers.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present Erik Madigan Heck’s new body of work, The Garden, an exhibition of 13 new photographs. The exhibition will be open by appointment starting October 15th. Drawing inspiration from Catholic iconography, landscape paintings, and color theory, The Garden depicts Heck’s family and the surrounding environs. Complementing the dreamlike aesthetic with colorful and lavish clothing, gestures of poignancy, and a verdant environment, The Garden captures the everyday life lived in beauty. These images are influenced by the ambient light of Edgar Degas, as well as the painting style of Les Nabis, a group of young French painters during the late 19th century. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that will be published by Damiani this November. Erik Madigan Heck is an internationally acclaimed fashion photographer and artist working primarily in photography, painting, and film. His work explores the intersection of photography and painting, and his distinctive use of color pushes the limits of what a camera can capture. Heck is the recipient of the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, the FOAM Fotografiemuseum talent award, the Forbes' 30 under 30 award, and The Art Director’s Club Gold Medal for his Old Masters Portfolio published by The New York Times Magazine. In 2019 Heck had solo museum exhibitions at The Musée des Beaux-Art in Le Locle, Switzerland and The Multimedia Arts Museum in Moscow, Russia; public installations at The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Paris Photo, Photo London, and Photo Shanghai; and relaunched Nomenus – a printed journal focusing on the intersection between photography and painting, where he collaborates with an array of artists and institutions. Heck is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, TIME, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Harper's Bazaar, among many others.

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present Quarantine Diary, an exhibition of 18 new paintings by internationally renowned artist, Paolo Ventura. The exhibition will be on view by appointment starting July 10th. Originally based in Milan, Paolo Ventura found himself in Anghiari, Tuscany during the heat of the coronavirus pandemic to escape “the red zone”. Under serious lockdown restrictions and without his photographic equipment, Ventura started painting as a means of daily meditation. In contrast to Ventura’s previous work which draws inspiration from history, fiction and the imagined, Quarantine Diary is based on the details of everyday life and the present. The paintings in the exhibition include a portrait of his neighbor smoking a cigarette at her window, an effervescent vitamin c tablet dissolving in water, and a broken butterfly wing –– all reminders of the impermanence of this specific time. This exhibition, though an in-depth exploration of the artist's personal experience, speaks to the global experience of the quarantine and creates a collective permanent diary. Painted on brown wrapping paper with the artist’s limited supplies of acrylic paint, Ventura shows us the adaptability of art making. A book accompanying the exhibition Quarantine Diary is being published by Danilo Montanari Editore (Ravenna, 2020). Paolo Ventura studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in the early 1990s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Forma International Center for Photography, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art of Roma (MACRO), Rome; The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome and during the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles. In 2012, he was selected to create a series of works for the Italian national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; he also received a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. And recently Ventura was invited for a commission by the MART, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy. Four monographs of Paolo Ventura's work have been published: War Souvenir (Contrasto, 2006), Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), The Automaton (Peliti Asociati, 2011) and Lo Zuavo Scomparso (Punctum Press, 2012). A retrospective show of Ventura’s work Carousel is scheduled to open at CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in September 2020.

There is something about both of us that goes deeper than blood or black and white. It is our common search for a better life, a better world. I march now over the same ground you once marched. I fight for the same things you fight for. My children’s needs are the same as your children’s. I too am America. America is me. It gave me the only life I know – so I must share in its survival. Look at me. Listen to me. Try to understand my struggle against your racism. There is yet a chance for us to live in peace beneath these restless skies. – Gordon Parks, 1968 Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present I Am You, an exhibition of 12 photographs by Gordon Parks. The gallery has been working with the Gordon Parks Foundation since 2012 and this will be the third exhibition of his photographs. I Am You will be on view by appointment starting Friday, July 10th. A preeminent photographer, poet, novelist, composer and filmmaker, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was without a doubt one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century. Using his camera as a “weapon against poverty and racism,” Parks has left a remarkable body of work documenting American life for more than five decades. The I Am You portfolio was created in 2017 to bring together important Parks works relevant to the American Civil Rights Movement and social and racial injustice. Featuring an essay by Jelani Cobb, staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, photographs in the series include portraits of Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson and his son, Mahalia Jackson singing at the 1963 March on Washington, and Malcolm X giving a speech in Harlem. Also included is an image of the crowd of 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial listening to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his historic “I Have a Dream” speech. While most of the photographs were taken almost 60 years ago, they are as relevant as ever. Parks' photography has been the subject of national and international exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Fondazione Forma per le Fotographia, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Art institute of Chicago, and the Getty Museum. In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art acquired 55 new limited edition prints of Parks' work on the subject of crime. In recent events surrounding the death of George Floyd, Gordon Parks High School in St Paul, Minnesota was significantly damaged. In order to assist in the school's recovery, The Gordon Parks Foundation, SoulTouch Productions, and Weinstein Hammons Gallery will be donating 25% of the proceeds of the I Am You exhibition to the Gordon Parks legacy initiatives at the Gordon Parks High School. To make a separate or additional donation, please contact the Gordon Parks Foundation at info@mkfound.org. Image courtesy and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.