Director’s Note: The Exciting Future Ahead
We are enthusiastic about the broad range of exhibitions and programs that will be presented at the George Eastman Museum this year. These offerings balance and advance our missions to serve our community and to act as a leader in the fields of photography and cinema.
To enhance our service to the community, we are creating the Gallery Obscura, a space dedicated to exhibitions organized in collaboration with local organizations. Its inaugural exhibition, to open in March, will present photographs by high school students in the Rochester City School District.
Our museum has a long tradition of being the first to present monographic shows of the work of young artists and the first to present major retrospectives of important artists whose work deserves greater attention.
On January 14, we will open Adam Ekberg: Minor Spectacles, in our Project Gallery (see p. 4). The retrospective Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be, opening in our main galleries in early February, is a welcome reminder of the pleasures and persuasion of a wry approach to serious issues (see p. 5). The oeuvre of the two artists are very different, but both have created experimental works with delightful visual wit.
In the second half of the year, our exhibition program turns toward more serious issues. Photographer Gillian Laub has spent the last two decades investigating political conflicts, exploring family relationships, and challenging assumptions about cultural identity. In Southern Rites, she engages her skills as a photographer and filmmaker to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are essential to understanding the American consciousness. In 2002, Laub was sent on a magazine assignment to Mount Vernon, Georgia, to document the lives of teenagers in the American South. There, Laub learned that the joyful adolescent rites of passage celebrated in this rural town — high school homecomings and proms — were still racially segregated. This changed only recently, in response to her work.
In the Project Gallery, Stanley Wolukau Wanambwa’s exhibition Scene at Eastman will stage an installation of photographic, text-based, and sculptural works that interrogate how the legacies of slavery and the settler-colonial past are encoded in American popular culture and the physical landscape. This presentation of works is being conceived by the artist specifically for the Eastman Museum, and will include appropriated archival images alongside new photographs from his ongoing series, Recess, made at night with long exposures. The Dryden Theatre will continue its diverse film program, including an extensive retrospective of motion pictures featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman in lead and supporting roles. This series is a celebration of his contribution to the art of cinema and the recent donation to our museum of a sculpture of the Rochester native.
From June 1 to 4, we will present the Seventh Nitrate Picture Show, with motion pictures on nitrate film from our collection and from film archives around the world. This truly unique festival has attracted cinephiles from as far away as Australia, Japan, and South Africa.
The ongoing moving image program in our multipurpose hall will begin the year with four stencil-colored films (1909–1929) from the museum’s collection, all of which were preserved by students in our L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. Subsequent programs this year will emphasize contemporary moving image artworks.
We are eager to offer an array of artists’ talks, curator-led gallery tours, visiting filmmakers, live music, bike tours about George Eastman, and family programs throughout the year, as well as the return of docent-guided tours and in-person workshops (see p. 14).
Our beloved Dutch Connection flower show will be presented from February 10 to 26. The Schuyler C. Townson Terrace Garden, with its restored pergola, will reopen to the public when weather permits. This summer, Garden Vibes concerts will return to the East Lawn.
We look forward to welcoming you to the George Eastman Museum often in 2023 to enjoy our offerings, as well as our historic mansion and gardens.
Bruce Barnes, Ph.D.
Ron and Donna Fielding Director
January/February 2023 Bulletin
