These Images Induce Sudden California Dreaming
A new photography exhibit that showcases complex life in the golden state
"In “Golden State,” examples from Lange's series mingle with Catherine Opie’s 1990s portraits of lesbian friends—imagery that, though familiar now, was groundbreaking at the time—and Larry Sultan’s pastoral photographs of day laborers from 2006 to 2009."
"No American state looms larger in our collective imagination than California—territory that's sparked a gold rush, an entire entertainment industry, and hit songs by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Tupac Shakur, to say nothing of countless other cultural phenomena.As a thought-provoking new exhibition at Manhattan's Marianne Boesky Gallery reveals, this sunny stronghold of liberal thinking has been especially fertile ground for photographers. Organized by rising star Drew Sawyer, a curator at Ohio's Columbus Museum of Art, the group show “Golden State” brings together images by seven photographers taken from the 1970s until the present day, exposing the contradictions and complexities of dreamy California living.
'I proposed the show in the wake of the election, reflecting a lot about the direction of the country and California’s role as a sanctuary state,' says Sawyer. 'It’s a place that gives many hope, a bastion of progressiveness, but it's also riddled with problems, like the highest rate of homelessness.'"— Sam Cochran, Apr. 11, 2017
Read the full article at the Architectural Digest website.