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Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette , 1989 Sally Mann created controversy two decades ago when she published photographs of her three children, Immediate Family . The photos are beautiful, artistic and arresting. The idea of publishing nude pictures of her children is startling, knowing it can and would attract pedophiles.  Did she really think the photos would only attract the photographers and art connoisseurs, as she claims? I would not do the same sharing of my children's private moments, but should I judge her? To me, art is reconciliation.  I look at art to bring opposites together and to negotiate the ambiguities of life, so that is what I am able to find in Sally Mann's work.  She, too, photographed her children to reconcile her need to be a mother without suppressing the artist in her.  They are one and the same. In June Sally Mann spoke at the National Gallery of Art and read excerpts from her book, Hold Still.  She uses language exquisitely, much as she comp...

Rosamond Purcell, Field of the Cloth of Gold , 2010 A group of pictures in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition this past fall, Very Like A Whale, fooled me.   I thought artist Rosamond Purcell’s medium was some inventive watercolor, ink or acrylic technique.   Was the room too dark, or are my eyes are going bad?   To my surprise these pictures were photographs! It was an imaginative way to portray Shakespeare, and artist whose myriads of visions who give us such a breadth of humanity.   Very Like a Whale took its exhibition name from a quote in Hamlet showing the human ability of interpreting single objects in multiple ways.   (Hamlet and Polonius saw different images in the same cloud.) Purcell curated the show, along with Shakespeare scholar and Folger Director Michael Witmore. This pair also collaborated on a book , Landscapes of the Passing Strange , using her photographic images with evocative quotations from Shakespeare. This great review is b...

Sam Gilliam, The Petition, 1990, mixed media Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition, African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Era and Beyond gives a broad overview of 43 artists whose work spanned 8 decades of the 20th century.  Over 40 photographs, as well as paintings, give a provocative picture of urban and rural life during the Depression, the age of segregation and the Civil Rights and later.  Although there is some overlap with other 20th century art movements, the exhibition is mainly art focused on African-Americans and their lives.  Both abstract and figural paintings are included, but also sculpture by Richard Hunt, Sam Gilliam, an important recent figure in the art scene of Washington, DC.   The artists come from the South and North, with a large number from urban areas of Detroit, New York, St. Louis, Baltimore and Washington, DC. Detroit artist Tony Gleaton recorded his travels to Nicaraguain in Family of the Sea, 1988, ...