More than 70 photographic portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes, anchored by the diptychs and triptychs that have become St. Paul-based artist JoAnn Verburg's signature, will be on view at the Walker Art Center January 12–April 20.
Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg, organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is presented in a loosely chronological fashion, following Verburg's diverse investigation of different series over long periods of time—many of which are still in progress. The exhibition progresses from Verburg's life-size portraits and images of swimmers made during the 1980s, to still lifes in domestic settings from the 1990s, to recent groups of images of Italian olive groves.
Verburg often works simultaneously on her various subjects, ranging from portraits to composed and "found" still lifes to landscapes. They are frequently presented in diptychs and triptychs that demonstrate how the content of a picture can be enriched by using more than one photograph at a time. Verburg's use of a large-format camera and a radiant color palette make her photographs pleasurable balancing acts that intimately describe the physicality of her subjects while deftly exploring time and space.
Susan Kismaric, curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, explains, "Verburg's work is lyrical and sensuous, and, most compellingly, it is grounded in an attention to human interaction—between the people in her pictures, and between her work and its audience—which keeps both artist and viewers perpetually approaching a threshold between searching and finding. Verburg follows her idiosyncratic impulses about what to photograph. She works in alternating series, and nurtures intuitions and ideas."
Early Years and Influences
Born in 1950, in Summit, New Jersey, Verburg lives and works in St. Paul and Spoleto, Italy. She began taking photographs at age six, in part due to her father's encouragement. He worked as a chemist and then as an executive for Ansco (GAF), the American manufacturer of photographic papers. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1972 with a Bachelor's degree in sociology, Verburg worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1972–1974). During this period, she met many artists working in mediums other than photography—including Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg—and was inspired by the 1972 monograph and exhibition of photographer Diane Arbus that was organized by MoMA.
Verburg earned a Master's degree in photography from Rochester Institute of Photography in 1976, the thesis for which was an exhibition she curated at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester. Titled Locations in Time, it featured 19th- and 20th-century photographs and included the work of such contemporary artists as John Baldessari, Robert Cumming, and Jan Groover, juxtaposed with that of earlier artists such as Antonio Giulio Bragaglia, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Otto Steinert. The exhibition addressed photography's ability to articulate issues of time through serial frames and time-motion studies, ideas that have strongly informed Verburg's own work throughout her career.
Verburg was interested in the way that performance artists of the 1960s and early 1970s, such as Carolee Schneeman and Hannah Wilke, integrated photography into their work as a means of documentation. She came of age in the 1970s among a group of photographers—Rineke Dijkstra, Nicholas Nixon, Judith Joy Ross, and Stephen Shore among them—who shared an enthusiasm and curiosity about the process of photographing realistic subjects and settings, generating new ideas by viewing the real world through the photographic lens.
In 1977, Verburg, along with photographer Mark Klett and photography historian Ellen Manchester, launched the Rephotographic Survey Project, one of several photographic surveys sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. The project retraced the steps of several 19th-century landscape photographers of the American West, such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan, and attempted to make photographs from the precise vantage points that their forebears had used, providing then-and-now views for a book, called Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, and an exhibition. This project prompted her initial interest in multiple-frame works—diptychs, triptychs, and larger serial works.
In 1978, the Polaroid Corporation asked Verburg to launch its visiting-artist program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among the 30 or so photographers who Verburg invited to participate in the program—and to take 40 exposures each on Polaroid's 7-foot-high, 300-pound, 24-by-20-inch camera—were Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Olivia Parker, and William Wegman. Verburg closely observed these artists working, a process through which she gained a new perspective on her own work. She used the camera to make portraits of these artists on the side, including one of Andy Warhol that is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. During her three years at Polaroid, Verburg kept an 8-x-10-inch camera set up with Polaroid film and taught herself to photograph using color film.
Moving to the Twin Cities in the early1980s, Verburg made quick connections to the Walker Art Center and its visiting performing artists, inspiring photographs that are among her best-known images. "I feel a great debt to the Walker's performance curating. The connection with Walker is huge," Verburg says. During her first years in Minnesota, Verburg photographed performers at the Walker, including Ping Chong's Figi Group; the stage director and playwright Robert Wilson, who was working in collaboration with musician David Byrne on the Knee Plays, a music-theater piece; and the Trisha Brown Dance Company, in residence at the Walker in 1981. "The performers really talked about the body, and their language about dance really affected me," she says. "I hadn't really thought about the body as an artist, but I definitely felt something when I made my first image. I pinned it on the wall and it was like a magnet—I couldn't stop looking at it. It gave me more impetus and avenues to pursue in thinking about the viewer as a physical being and not just as a disembodied eye." -- www.walkerart.org
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