News / Richard Avedon

On View

Richard Avedon
Murals

Through October 1, 2023
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
www.metmuseum.org

In 1969, Richard Avedon started making portraits with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting the subjects’ outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, this exhibition brings together three of these monumental works, some as wide as thirty-five feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.

On View

X
A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022

Through December 21, 2023
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
sheldonartmuseum.org

X: A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022 is a survey of artworks acquired for the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection over the past decade. The chosen works demonstrate the breadth of collecting efforts and are a modest representation of the approximately 1,875 pieces that have entered the museum’s holdings since 2012. The exhibition seeks to present a snapshot of how the collection continues to evolve. Work by Richard Avedon, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Andy Warhol, and Stanley Whitney is included.

Closed

Presence
The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder

September 30, 2022–January 15, 2023
Portland Museum of Art, Maine
www.portlandmuseum.org

Presence aims to capture the full spectrum of the human experience, from the anonymous to the celebrity and from the everyday to era-defining events such as the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the civil rights movement. With approximately 140 photographs by seventy artists, the exhibition is drawn entirely from the collection of Judy Glickman Lauder. Work by Richard Avedon and Sally Mann is included.

Closed

American Photography

August 24–November 28, 2021
Albertina, Vienna
www.albertina.at

This exhibition centers on the reimagining of iconography in American photography after 1945, when exaggeratedly idealized landscapes were replaced by everyday imagery that had previously been considered unworthy of portrayal. Some photographers captured the dynamic of big cities through a spontaneous pictorial language that often portrayed American society in a critical light. And, in a contrasting approach, others staged elaborate cinematic tableaux that grappled with photographic reality and illusion as well as with societal developments. Work by Richard Avedon and Gregory Crewdson is included.

Closed

Avedon in Texas
Selections from In the American West

February 25–July 2, 2017
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
www.cartermuseum.org

In spring 1979, Richard Avedon went to the Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas, and created six evocative portraits that would set the tone for his work of the next five years. In these settings, he discovered people who conveyed through their faces, clothes, and postures not merely hard living but the full embrace of existence, which is evident in this selection of seventeen of the project’s Texas images.