Yancey Richardson

New work by acclaimed photographer Andrew Moore will be on view at Yancey Richardson from November 16, 2023, through January 6, 2024. The exhibition, Whiskey Point and Other Tales, delves into the dazzling scenes and moody vistas of the storied Hudson Valley of New York. Through his vividly colored, large-scale photographs, Andrew Moore is known for investigating the intersections of historical moments in the U.S. and abroad, documenting the natural and built landscapes in places such Detroit, the American South, the Great Plains, New York City, Cuba, and Bosnia.

The emotional power of photography – and the ability of an image to evoke memories – will be illustrated in an exhibition of new photographic work by Japanese artist Yamamoto Masao. The artist’s exhibition, Ambrotypes, titled after a 19th century process that produces a one-of-a-kind image on glass, will be on view at Yancey Richardson from November 16, 2023, through January 6, 2024. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, November 16 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

This fall, multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas will unveil a collection of new work in the exhibition je t’adore, at Yancey Richardson from September 9 through November 11, 2023. In je t’adore, Thomas presents 13 large-scale mixed media photo collages inspired by her research into the imagery of Black female erotica featured in the calendars of Jet magazine and the pages of the 1950s French publication, Nus Exotique.

Intimate Strangers, an exhibition of powerful and highly personal photographs and video made by visual artists who have positioned a parent or parents as central subjects in a body of work, will be on view at Yancey Richardson from July 12 through August 18, 2023. An opening will be held on Wednesday, July 12, from 6 to 8 p.m. The 16 artists featured in the exhibition include Deanna Dikeman, Jess T. Dugan, Mitch Epstein, LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Hilliard, Lisa Kereszi, Tommy Kha, Justine Kurland, Jarod Lew, Marilyn Minter, Zora J Murff, Sage Sohier, Leonard Suryajaya, Mickalene Thomas, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, and Larry Sultan. Intentionally—and sometimes unintentionally—the images in Intimate Strangers reflect on diverse and relevant social issues, ranging from the pursuit of the American dream and stigmas around aging to LGBTQ+ concerns, as well as topics related to immigration, Black masculinity, and addiction. For David Hilliard, Mickalene Thomas, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, and Leonard Suryajaya, photography is used as a means of bridging the relationship between a heterosexual, and sometimes estranged parent, and their queer adult child. For Tommy Kha and Jarod Lew, both children of immigrants, the process of making images assists in unraveling the story of a parent’s past whose previous life has been hidden. In Lew’s case, he discovered that his mother had been engaged to Vincent Chin when he was murdered in a historic anti-Asian hate crime. With the work of Mitch Epstein, Larry Sultan, and Marilyn Minter, the artist looks through the photographic lens to grapple with the vulnerability of an aging or ill parent. Larry Sultan spent a decade photographing his parents, simultaneously exploring the nuances of their daily dynamics and the deception of family mythmaking. Mitch Epstein’s picture of his 82-year-old father, a local business leader in Holyoke, Massachusetts, whose family business collapsed in bankruptcy, also exposes the vulnerable side of his aging father by photographing him from above— bald, grey, and bandaged. D’Angelo Lovell Williams and Zora J Murff both create images that examine Black masculinity and the power dynamics of fathers and children. In Daddy Issues, 2019, Williams photographs themself in an arm-wrestling contest with their father, on a rare visit together. In the image Gas Money, 2019, Murff shows a folded $20 bill being handed from one man to a younger one. Marilyn Minter’s rarely seen black and white photographs of her mother were made in 1969 while she was a student in art school. When classmates first viewed the images, they reacted in shock exclaiming, “Oh my god. That’s your mother?!” She had not realized how intensely the images would resonate as her mother, a drug addict suffering from an anxiety disorder, lived in a nightgown, and rarely left the house. Minter did not show the work again until 1994. The process of portraiture is often an act of collaboration, and in the case of many of the artists, their parents were active participants in the construction of fabricated scenes. From 1998 until his father’s death from COVID in 2020, David Hilliard created a series of quizzical, narrative tableaux featuring his heterosexual, blue-collar parent. As a queer artist son acknowledging his lineage, he replicated his father’s chest tattoo on his own body. The two men visually evoke one other in Hilliard’s father and son triptych, Rock Bottom, 2008. While studying at Yale University with David Hillard in the early 2000s, Mickalene Thomas recalls Hillard saying, “You should photograph someone with whom you have a complex relationship.” Thomas’s choice of her mother as a muse marked a watershed moment, inspiring much of her concurrent and future work celebrating the beauty and sexuality of Black women. In the diptych Madame Mama Bush and Afro Goddess with Hands Between Legs, 2006/2008, Thomas pairs a photograph of her mother as a sensuous odalisque, bare-breasted and eyes closed, with a sexually charged self-portrait staring directly at the camera. Thomas’s mother passed away a few years after the images were made. Sage Sohier’s mother was a professional model in her younger years and the mature woman depicted in her photographs still retains a glamour and grace from that time. In her series Witness to Beauty, Sohier recreates memories from childhood of her mother’s beauty routines, planned and performed in collaboration with an affectionate wry humor. Leonard Suryajaya, a queer Chinese Indonesian artist, immigrated to the U.S. in 2006 to study theater. In his elaborately staged photographs featuring his parents, sister, and husband, the artist combines performance, installation, and photography in an absurd but affectionate montage, which both questions familial authority and asserts his identity. Dressing up and posing for the camera becomes an act of role-playing, providing a space for parents and their nonconformist children to relate. The video Letter to My Father by the queer nonbinary artist Jess T. Dugan offers a platform for the artist to speak directly to their estranged father about the pain of non-acceptance. The work was presented last year in A Trillion Sunsets: A Century of Overload at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

Known for his documentary approach to subjects that range from sublime to ironic, the California-based artist John Divola has mined the territory between photography and conceptual art for more than 40 years. Two of his best-known and iconic series from the 1990s will be on view at Yancey Richardson from June 1 through July 7, 2023. In "Isolated Houses" Divola uses the vernacular architecture of the California desert to explore existential themes of isolation and desire. "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert" reveals the age-old chase between man and beast with a wry and philosophical edge. Photographed between 1995 and 1998, the images in "Isolated Houses" were all made in the high desert of Southern California, including the east end of the Morongo Valley Basin, Wonder Valley, and surrounding the town of 29 Palms. The small, simple box-like structures sitting alone on the vast desert plain are framed in square compositions, echoing the geometry of the flat landscape. They capsulize the artist’s career-long interest in the tension between specificity and abstraction in photography. Illuminated by the extraordinary western light, the structures wear their neglect with a dignity that elevates their humble existence. The artist notes, “The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. Add this to a heightened awareness of your own presence and the desert can take on an existential quality.” While traversing the desert region working on Isolated Houses, Divola frequently came across dogs who would chase his car. In 1996, he started to capture portraits of the dogs while in motion with a motorized 35 mm camera and high-speed film, evoking the spirit of Eadweard Muybridge’s exploration of stop motion photography. The work resulted in the now classic series "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert," a collection of grainy, black and white images that look at the herding relationship between man and animal with a slightly comic approach. “With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film,” Divola explained. “Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.” Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Divola earned a B.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, where he studied under photographer Robert Heinecken. Since 1975, he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Divola was featured in the 1981 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and was the subject of a three-museum retrospective in 2013 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. His various projects have been published in 11 monographs. Since 1975, Divola’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain. Divola’s work is held in numerous prestigious collections including multiple New York institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Among Divola’s awards are multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986), a Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998), a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999), and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998).

Known for his documentary approach to subjects that range from sublime to ironic, the California-based artist John Divola has mined the territory between photography and conceptual art for more than 40 years. Two of his best-known and iconic series from the 1990s will be on view at Yancey Richardson from June 1 through July 7, 2023. In "Isolated Houses" Divola uses the vernacular architecture of the California desert to explore existential themes of isolation and desire. "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert" reveals the age-old chase between man and beast with a wry and philosophical edge. Photographed between 1995 and 1998, the images in "Isolated Houses" were all made in the high desert of Southern California, including the east end of the Morongo Valley Basin, Wonder Valley, and surrounding the town of 29 Palms. The small, simple box-like structures sitting alone on the vast desert plain are framed in square compositions, echoing the geometry of the flat landscape. They capsulize the artist’s career-long interest in the tension between specificity and abstraction in photography. Illuminated by the extraordinary western light, the structures wear their neglect with a dignity that elevates their humble existence. The artist notes, “The desert is not empty. However, it is vacant enough to bestow a certain weight to whatever is present. Add this to a heightened awareness of your own presence and the desert can take on an existential quality.” While traversing the desert region working on Isolated Houses, Divola frequently came across dogs who would chase his car. In 1996, he started to capture portraits of the dogs while in motion with a motorized 35 mm camera and high-speed film, evoking the spirit of Eadweard Muybridge’s exploration of stop motion photography. The work resulted in the now classic series "Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert," a collection of grainy, black and white images that look at the herding relationship between man and animal with a slightly comic approach. “With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film,” Divola explained. “Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. Here we have two vectors and velocities, that of a dog and that of a car and, seeing that a camera will never capture reality and that a dog will never catch a car, evidence of devotion to a hopeless enterprise.” Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Divola earned a B.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971 and an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 1974, where he studied under photographer Robert Heinecken. Since 1975, he has taught photography and art at numerous institutions including California Institute of the Arts (1978-1988), and since 1988 he has been a Professor of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Divola was featured in the 1981 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and was the subject of a three-museum retrospective in 2013 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. His various projects have been published in 11 monographs. Since 1975, Divola’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Japan, Europe, Mexico, and Australia, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain. Divola’s work is held in numerous prestigious collections including multiple New York institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Among Divola’s awards are multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976, 1979, 1990), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1986), a Fintridge Foundation Fellowship (1998), a City of Los Angeles Artist Grant (1999), and a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship (1998).

Water That Dreams, an exhibition of photographs by Czech born, German based artist Jitka Hanzlová, will be on view at Yancey Richardson in Chelsea from April 13 to May 26. Selected from Hanzlová’s extended project WATER 2013-2019, the 46 intimate color photographs will be presented for the first time in the U.S. Known for her poetic approach to landscape, portraiture and still life, in her series WATER 2013-2019, Hanzlová has turned her attention towards the essential and the elemental, exploring water in all its different states of being: liquid, gaseous, solid. The exhibition features selections from six chapters of WATER: Ur, Ice, Clouds, Human Dark, Human Light, and Silent Blue.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Morandi’s Books, photographs by Mary Ellen Bartley, on view from October 27 through December 23, 2022. Morandi’s Books springs from Bartley’s 2020 residency at Casa Morandi in Bologna, Italy, where she was invited to work with the personal library of Giorgio Morandi, the twentieth-century Italian artist whose quiet still life paintings have been an important source of inspiration from the beginning of her practice.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Albeit, an exhibition of photographs by Laura Letinsky. Comprised of photographic assemblages made in 2013 using a flatbed scanner and magazines, the exhibition demonstrates Letinsky’s innovative approach to still life. These early forays in substituting printed matter in place of objects in the studio are being exhibited for the first time, and display experimental methods later developed in her series: Ill Form & Void Full (2014), To Want for Nothing (2019), A Blind Promise Or, A Rash Boon (2020).

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Screened Pictures X, an exhibition of photographs by Anthony Hernandez showcasing the most recent development in the artist’s career-long exploration of the urban landscape of his native Los Angeles.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Swimming Drunk, an exhibition of photographs by John Divola. The exhibition includes two photographic series that represent the breadth of the artist’s more than 40 year career: Zuma Series (1977-1978), and Daybreak (2015-2020). Both series are a result of Divola’s engagement with abandoned buildings, and his interest in transforming a situation through photography. Thus, the photographs do not serve as mere descriptions of the scenes depicted but instead are offered as artifacts from the artist’s physical and experiential interventions within these environments.

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Awe Maaah!, an exhibition of new paintings and photographs by South African artist and visual activist Zanele Muholi. Internationally acclaimed as a photographer, this is the first large-scale exhibition of Muholi’s paintings and the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery.

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Naïveté, an exhibition of new photographs, collage and fabric sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist David Alekhuogie. Informed by his 2019 trip to Nigeria, the birthplace of his father, Alekhuogie’s recent work incorporates African sculpture and textiles to question the route through which African Americans become cognizant of their cultural heritage, authorship, and the hierarchy of art versus craft. A selection of works from the artist’s 2018 series To Live and Die in LA will be featured in the project gallery. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Temporarily Censored Home, Guanyu Xu’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Since 2018, Beijing-born, Chicago-based artist Guanyu Xu has secretly created photographic installations throughout his childhood home in Beijing in order to queer his parents’ domestic space, transforming it into a scene of revelation, protest and reclamation. Using collected images from Western film and fashion magazines, photographs from family albums, as well as portraits of himself with other gay men, Xu enacts a deeply intimate and political performance.

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present East Meets West, a selection of photographic self-portraits made between 1979 and 1987 by Tseng Kwong Chi (1950 - 1990). Combining performance and photography, political satire and personal identity, Tseng’s pioneering series exemplifies the art of the eighties while anticipating the social, political and philosophical themes of the present day.

Yancey Richardson Gallery is pleased to present Itteki, an exhibition of new work by Japanese artist Yamamoto Masao. Focusing on Bonsai, the Japanese art of cultivating miniaturized potted trees, this series of toned, gelatin silver prints continues Yamamoto’s exploration of the emotional power of photography through landscape and his surrounding environment.