We will be hosting a special closing reception for Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber: Empire and Barbara Crane: The Polaroid Years on Saturday, April 28, 2018. If you missed the opening night reception, this is your last chance to enjoy both exhibitions before they close. Barbara Crane will be in attendance. Coffee and doughnuts will be provided from 10:00 am – 12:00 pm.

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LORI NIX / KATHLEEN GERBER: EMPIRE

(http://www.edelmangallery.com/exhibitions-and-projects/exhibition-pages/2018/lori-nix-empire.html)

Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber have been making art collaboratively for over sixteen years. Based in Brooklyn, they construct meticulously detailed model environments and photograph the results. For the last decade they have found inspiration in their urban surroundings, imagining a future mysteriously devoid of mankind.

Their miniature fake landscapes and interiors reflect a love of science fiction and dystopian entertainment (think Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run), an appreciation for great architecture, and an affinity with the Sublime painters of the Hudson River School. Because the work is of a model and not a real place, it creates a safe space to consider the larger ideas of disaster and our collective future. Devoid of people, these spaces become meditative, revealing not just mankind’s errors, but also our optimism, ambition and love of life.

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BARBARA CRANE: THE POLAROID YEARS

(http://www.edelmangallery.com/exhibitions-and-projects/exhibition-pages/2018/crane-polaroid.html)

Barbara Crane, a pioneering internationally renowned art photographer and influential educator, has explored photography as a vehicle for creative expression for over sixty years. A forerunner in experimental and abstract photography, Crane has explored numerous photographic processes throughout her extensive career. The result has been an ongoing evolving body of conceptually consistent work, varied in approach and experimental in style. An early investigator of repetition and deconstruction of visual information, she has experimented extensively with sequences, grids, scrolls, and large modular murals. Crane has worked in many formats and materials, ranging from intimate in size to large scale, utilizing such diverse photographic approaches as platinum palladium, Polaroid processes, image transfers, gelatin silver and digital.

Born in Chicago in 1928, Crane studied at Mills College in California, completing her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History at New York University, and in 1966 received her Master of Science Degree from the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She began teaching photography in 1964 and in 1967 joined the faculty at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago, retiring from teaching in 1995 as Professor Emerita of Photography.

Crane’s photographic work has been featured in over ninety solo exhibitions since 1965 and seven retrospective exhibitions of her work have been mounted to date. The most recent, “Barbara Crane: Challenging Vision,” an extensive career retrospective, was accompanied by a major monograph of the same title. The exhibition opened at the Chicago Cultural Center in October 2009 and has traveled to the Amon Carter Museum in Texas and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts.

One of America’s leading photographic artists, Crane’s work is included in numerous national and international collections including George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography, Rochester, NY, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, Bibliotheque Nationale and FNDC, Paris, France, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece, and WestLicht Museum of Photography, Vienna, Austria, in addition to private and corporate collections worldwide.

Crane has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1974 and 1988, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Photography in 1979, and an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award in Photography in 2001. In 2006 she was honored as a Distinguished Artist by both the Union League Club of Chicago and Brown University, and was named the first recipient of the Ruth Horwich Award to a Famous Chicago Artist conferred by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in 2009. In 2013 she was honored by the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and in 2015 received the Silver Camera Award from the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago. In April 2016 she received the Professional Achievement Award from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

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Tags: Barbara Crane, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, Empire, Illinois, Kathleen Gerber, Lori Nix, Near North Side, The Polaroid Years