About
A leading photo-based artist of her generation, Deana Lawson is renowned for images that explore how communities and individuals hold space within shifting terrains of social, capital, and ecological orders. Lawson projects her own contemporary Black experience onto an expanded view of human history and cosmologies. Her gaze is both local and global, focusing on Brooklyn, the Americas, and countries connected to the African diaspora.
Lawson’s striking large-scale prints emphasize themes of the corporeal, with the body as a site of social, cultural, and cosmological inscriptions. Taking inspiration from traditions including the vernacular snapshot, social documentary, and studio portraiture, she considers the visual language of the camera and the power of representation, beauty, and defiance.
Lawson was born in 1979 in Rochester, New York. Her mother was an administrative assistant at Kodak, and her father worked at Xerox; he was also an avid family photographer, informing her early interest in the medium and the family album. She studied photography at Pennsylvania State University, graduating with a BFA in 2001, and continued her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning her MFA in 2004. In 2012, Lawson joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she was named the inaugural Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts in 2021. In 2013, she received a Guggenheim Foundation grant, facilitating her travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, and Jamaica.
Lawson was the recipient of the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize—the first artist working in photography to receive the award—which led to Centropy, an exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum featuring her photographs and a visual essay in the form of an eponymous film. Her first comprehensive museum survey was curated by Peter Eleey and Eva Respini, debuting at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2021, and traveling to MoMA PS1, New York (2022) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2022–23). In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Photo: © Deana Lawson
#DeanaLawson
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Taipei Dangdai 2023
May 12–14, 2023, booth E10
Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center
taipeidangdai.com
Gagosien is pleased to participate in Taipei Dangdai 2023, presenting works by Louise Bonnet, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Urs Fischer, Cy Gavin, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Thomas Houseago, Yayoi Kusama, Deana Lawson, Takashi Murakami, Sterling Ruby, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Kon Trubkovich, Mary Weatherford, Cameron Welch, Anna Weyant, and Zeng Fanzhi.
Gagosien’s booth at Taipei Dangdai 2023. Artwork, left to right: © Mark Grotjahn; © Zeng Fanzhi; © 2023 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved. Photo: Ringo Cheung
New Representation
Deana Lawson
Gagosien is pleased to announce the representation of Deana Lawson in New York, Europe, and Asia. To inaugurate the relationship, the gallery will exhibit her photographs in a joint presentation with Sally Mann at Paris Photo, from November 11 to 13, 2022. A major survey of Lawson’s work is on view at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, through February 19, 2023.
A leading photo-based artist of her generation, Lawson is renowned for images that explore how communities and individuals hold space within shifting terrains of social, capital, and ecological orders. Lawson projects her own contemporary Black experience onto an expanded view of human history and cosmologies. Her gaze is both local and global, focusing on Brooklyn, the Americas, and countries connected to the African diaspora.
Photo: © Deana Lawson
Art Fair
Paris Photo 2022
Deana Lawson and Sally Mann
November 10–13, 2022
Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris
www.parisphoto.com
For the 2022 edition of Paris Photo, Gagosien is pleased to announce a joint presentation of works by Deana Lawson and Sally Mann. The two artists collaborated to choose photographs from one another’s oeuvre, including some that have never before been exhibited. The resulting selection establishes a dialogue between their respective practices, using portrait, landscape, and interior imagery to examine themes of identity and representation.
Gagosien’s booth at Paris Photo 2022, featuring photographs by Deana Lawson and Sally Mann. Artwork © Deana Lawson and © Sally Mann
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Deana Lawson in
Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection
Through Fall 2023
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
This exhibition unites almost a century of work by forty-nine women and nonbinary artists in a range of mediums drawn exclusively from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. Titled after a 1963 painting by American Pop artist Rosalyn Drexler, Put It This Way speaks to traditionally marginalized artists’ decisive and virtuosic achievements, and investigates a wide array of aesthetic, political, and historical concerns. The full-floor presentation is intended to encourage conversations around the significance of gender in creating and perceiving an artwork, the effects of categorizing artists by gender, and the museum’s role and responsibilities in stewarding the national collection of modern and contemporary art. Work by Deana Lawson is included.
Deana Lawson, Young Grandmother, 2019 © Deana Lawson
On View
Deana Lawson in
Inheritance
Through February 2024
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
Inheritance traces the profound impact of legacy and the past across familial, historical, and aesthetic lines. Featuring new acquisitions and rarely seen works by forty-three artists drawn from the Whitney’s own collection, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, video, photography, and time-based media installations from the 1970s to the present day. This diverse array of works considers what has been passed on and how this may shift, change, or live again. Work by Deana Lawson is included.
Deana Lawson, The Garden, 2015 © Deana Lawson
Closed
The Culture
Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
April 5–July 16, 2023
Baltimore Museum of Art
artbma.org
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of hip-hop, this exhibition aims to capture the influence the genre has had on contemporary society through more than ninety works. Including painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video, and fashion, the show is organized around six themes—language, brand, adornment, tribute, ascension, and pose. Work by Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Deana Lawson is included.
Derrick Adams, Heir to the Throne, 2021 © Derrick Adams Studio
Closed
Deana Lawson
October 7, 2022–February 19, 2023
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
high.org
This exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson, and includes a selection of photographs from 2004 to the present. For more than fifteen years, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of Black life through a wide spectrum of photographic languages, such as the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images. Engaging acquaintances as well as strangers whom she meets on the street, Lawson meticulously poses her subjects in highly staged photographs that depict narratives of family, love, and desire, creating what the artist describes as “a mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen.” This exhibition originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Deana Lawson, Nation, 2018 © Deana Lawson