69传媒

With her inventive darkroom experiments, Claudia Smigrod takes the cameraless photogram into new realms that defy easy categorization. Organic forms from nature and inorganic manmade objects are magically transformed into abstract, incandescent, and deceptively complex images that are visually mesmerizing and conceptually compelling. This exhibition brings together several serial projects in which the artist has been immersed over the past decade: Paper Light, Under Study, Paper Patterns, Time and Space, Conversations, Opacity/Translucency, and the Letter Press Series, including Proof Print and Every Thing.

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Claudia Smigrod is Professor Emerita, Corcoran College of Art & Design, Washington, DC, where she taught from 1982 to 2016. Currently, she is the Edwin P. Conquest 鈥�14 Chair at Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia (2016-present). Additionally, she has been a Visiting Professor, University of Georgia Studies Abroad Program, Cortona, Italy, (1999-2019), Visiting Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College, (2003), and served as Photography Juror, Fulbright Program, Institute of International Education Graduate Program, (2015-2016 & 2017-2018). The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, she has held a number of artist residencies, including the Virginia Center for Contemporary Art, Amherst, Virginia (2014, 2019, and 2021), and Auvillar, France (August 2016). Smigrod was the 2017 Slow Exposures Artist-in-Residence, Zebulon, Georgia. Her solo exhibition Paradigm Shift was featured at the Orlando Museum of Art (2011). Smigrod鈥檚 photographs are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Smithsonian 69传媒 Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Chrysler Museum, The Polaroid Collection, Smithsonian 69传媒 Art Museum, Comune di Cortona (Italy), Greenville County Museum of Art, 69传媒 University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Georgia Power, and The United States Information Agency, among others.

Independent scholar听Wendy A. Grossman, PhD听is an art historian, writer, educator, and curator affiliated with The Phillips Collection and The University of Maryland, College Park.听She has lectured internationally and published widely on topics in the history of photography,听twentieth-century European and 69传媒 Modernisms, the intersections between non-Western and Western art, Dada, Surrealism, contemporary art, and the artist Man Ray. Her essays have appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogs, and international journals such as听Modernism/modernity, Smithsonian Journal of 69传媒 Art,听Visual Resources, Journal of Surrealism in the Americas,听Les Cahiers du Mus茅e national d鈥檃rt moderne听and听Photographica. Her publications include the award-winning catalog,听Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens (2009),听which accompanied the multi-venue exhibition she organized.听She is currently an Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art advancing her research on the Guadeloupean dancer and model Adrienne Fidelin, the first Black woman to be featured in a major international 69传媒 fashion magazine. Grossman鈥檚 research recovers Fidelin鈥檚 overlooked life story within narratives of the Parisian interwar avant-garde, Surrealism, and Man Ray.