Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Karen Irvine, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, and Kristin Taylor, Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, will lead a discussion with Natalie Krick and Kelli Connell whose collaborative project o_Man! recontextualizes Edward Steichen’s renowned 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, which included 503 photographs narrating the human experience from a distinctly western, patriarchal perspective, and which traveled to thirty-seven countries on six continents until 1994. By removing and reordering the images with text from The Family of Man’s original catalogue and Steichen’s oeuvre, Connell and Krick offer a reconsideration of which stories are told within museum spaces, by whom, and for whom.

About the panelists:

Kelli Connell is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity and photographer / sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Publications of her work include PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice (Aperture), Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture), and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life (DECODE Books). Connell has received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work, and The Center for Creative Photography. Connell is an editor at SKYLARK Editions and a professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Karen Irvine, Chief Curator & Deputy Director, is in charge of the museum’s artistic program and has organized over sixty exhibitions of contemporary photography at the MoCP and other venues including the Hyde Park Art Center; Rockford Art Museum; Lishui International Photography Festival, China; Daegu Photography Biennale, South Korea; and the New York Photo Festival. Known for developing projects with both emerging and established artists that look at pressing justice issues, her most recent projects at MoCP include Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency, co-organized with Kristin Taylor, and American Epidemic: Guns in the United States. Karen has contributed texts to many publications including FOAM, Art on Paper, Panorama, and Contemporary magazines and monographs including Paula McCartney: Non-flights of Fancy (Princeton Architectural Press); Barbara Probst: Exposures (Steidl); Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson (MACK), and Trinity by Brohm and Valentina Seidel (Snoeck), amongst many others. She holds a BA in French and International Relations from Tufts University, Medford, MA, an MFA in Photography from FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic, and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Natalie Krick (b. 1986 Portland Oregon) is a Seattle based artist whose work investigates visual perception and pleasure through complicating the act of looking. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. In 2015 Krick was a recipient of an Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation for her project Natural Deceptions. In 2017 Natural Deceptions was published by Skylark Editions and Krick was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Krick’s work has recently been exhibited at SF Camerawork, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Aperture Foundation, The Museum of Sex, and Blue Sky Gallery. Her photographs has been highlighted in several international publications including BOMB, The New Yorker, Vogue Italia, PDN, Aperture, and Vrij Nederland.

Kristin Taylor, Curator of Academic Programs & Collections, leads the MoCP education programs and curates exhibitions that contextualize the museum’s permanent collection. She organized the MoCP exhibitions Beyond the Frame (2022); Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency (2021); Chicago Stories: Carlos Javier Ortiz and David Schalliol(2019); among others. She manages the museum’s podcast, Focal Point, which engages artists in discussion around the themes and processes in contemporary photography. Kristin holds a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MA in Visual Arts Management from Columbia College Chicago.

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Tags: 21c Museum, Chicago, Karen Irvine, Kelli Connell, Kristin Taylor, Natalie Krick, Near North Side, o_Man! and the Legacy of Curation