Shelf Life: History Biography & Fame
September 29 – December 29, 2018
Opening Reception Saturday, SeptEmber 29 | 4 – 6 pm
Artist-led tour at 5 pm
Lives are adventures full of stories and relationships, and storytelling—perhaps our oldest art—is at the heart of any portrait. Shelf /Life features the work of 11 artists working in a broad range of media including assemblage, photography, printmaking, and painting that celebrates the varied lives of real individuals, catching them at a given moment or reimagining them in a new way. At this particular moment in time, it seems appropriate to stop, take stock of the Institute Library’s historic collection of biographies, filled with the memoirs of past illustrious figures, and to look at artists’ depictions of real people, historic and contemporary, with a lens aimed critically at this disjuncture. Who is visible in our collective consciousness, and who deserves our admiration and accolades?
Adger Cowans, Mary Dwyer, Patricia Fabricant, John T. Hill and Tom Strong, Thomas Mezzanotte, Aly Maderson Quinlog, Allan Rubin, Tina Sarno, Jean Scott, Catherine Vanaria, and Brenda Zlamany with historic biographies from the Institute Library’s collection.
Curated By Martha Willette Lewis
This event is free and open to the public; we do want to remind people who’ve never been here before that the Institute Library can only be reached by walking up a flight of stairs, and the Library is not ADA-compliant.