Judith Joy Ross: Living with War:
October 7- November 7, 2009 Opening Reception: October 7, 4:30-6:30 Artist talk: October 14, 4:30-5:30Monday, September 14, 2009 11:22 AM
Based in Bethlehem, PA, Judith Ross is a powerful portrait photographer and cultural documentarian, working in the tradition of August Sander and Diane Arbus. Living with War, an exhibit of 45 photographs made over the past twenty years, examines people who have been involved with war and its ramifications, from visitors to the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington DC, to soldiers departing for Iraq during the first Gulf War, to protestors of the current Iraq War. Although this work has been exhibited in New York and in Europe, Muhlenberg will be its only venue in the Lehigh Valley or in Pennsylvania. Ross’s work, even though it is often produced here in the area, has been rarely shown since her first retrospective exhibit at the Allentown Art Museum in 1997. Many photos from her recent series of war protestors were made at nearby locations.
Judith Joy Ross (b. 1946, Hazleton, Pa.) graduated with a BS from the Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, in 1968 and received a MS degree two years later from the Institute of
Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. In the past two decades, Ross has created sensitive and penetrate portraits of school children, teenagers, visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., members of the United States Congress, and most recently, of Americans protesting the U.S. war in Iraq.
In addition to Ross’s first retrospective in 1997 that was organized by the Allentown Art Museum, her work has been the subject of solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993), the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (1996), and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass. (1996). In 2008 the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany, mounted Living with War: Portraits 1983-2007. The exhibit travelled to venues in Leipzig, Berlin and Braunschweig (2008-09). A large-scale retrospective of her work is being planned by the August Sander Archive for exhibition in 2011.
Judith Ross’s work has been featured in over 50 group shows, including, The Persistence of Photography in American Portraiture at the Yale University Art Gallery (2000), Open Ends: Innocence and Experience at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000), and Making Faces: The Death of the Portrait at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and the Hayward Gallery, London (2003-04), and in Face of Our Time: Four Shows - Yto Barrada, Guy Tillim, Judith Joy Ross, Leo Rubinfien at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009).
Judith Ross is a recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1986), a Charles Pratt Memorial Award (1992), and an Andrea Frank Foundation Award (1998).
Her work can be found in numerous permanent collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; the Birmingham Museum of Fine Arts, Ala.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the August Sander Archive, Cologne; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Sprengel Museum, Hannover; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.
Monographs include Judith Joy Ross: Contemporaries/A Photography Series (MoMA, 1995); Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (Yale University Press,2006); Protest the War (Steidl, 2007); and Living With War: Portraits 1983-2007 (Steidl, 2008).
All exhibition and gallery events are open to the public and free of charge. Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon – 8:00 p.m. Closed during major holidays and semester breaks. For information, contact Kathryn Burke, 484.664.3467. (The Martin Art Gallery website is currently under construction.
