Renowned Artists Exhibit at Guilford Works by Dawoud Bey, Marie Cosindas, Daniel Heyman Included in "About Face" Portraiture Exhibition

The Guilford Art Center's 2008 exhibition season kicks off in a major way with the exhibition About Face: The Relevance of Portraiture in the 21st Century. On view at the Center's Mill Gallery March 14 through April 25, this exhibition includes paintings, prints, photographs, digital collages, animation and more that pose provocative questions about the relationship of portraiture to identity, gender, class, likeness, and the notion of "inner truth."

About Face includes work by seven artists, including three of international stature who are lending their work to this project: Dawoud Bey, Marie Cosindas, and Daniel Heyman.

"Traditionally, exhibitions at the Guilford Handcraft Center were media-specific, and there was an appropriate emphasis on fine craft" says Guilford Art Center Executive Director Jean Perkins. "But we rightfully changed our name in 2005, to reflect the broadened scope of the art we teach here. We want our exhibitions to also reflect the richness and diversity of contemporary art, in terms of themes, concepts and approaches, as well as materials. And we are thrilled to showcase work by red-hot artists Dawoud Bey and Daniel Heyman, and the legendary Marie Cosindas."

Curated by art historian Samantha Pinckney, About Face represents this departure for the Guilford Art Center, featuring the type of cutting-edge contemporary art, by emerging and renowned artists, that will now be regularly shown in the gallery. "Here we are," Perkins continues, "right down the road from New Haven, one of the most cultured and arts-oriented cities in the northeast, and a train ride away from New York City. We are surrounded by artists of great stature an accomplishment. And we are excited to showcase their work, among a wide range of work, as a way to demonstrate their talent and inspire our students and visitors."

Dawoud Bey's photographic career began in 1975 with a series of photographs, "Harlem, USA" that were later shown in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Bey's portraits probe the relationship between photographer and sitter, and his frequent use of large-scale, multiple panels are meant to convey fleeting changes in expression, gestures, and mood. Since 1992 his main subject has been teenagers, as his images attempt to portray essential social, emotional, physical, and psychological aspects, and present complex visual descriptions. His most recent work also includes texts by his subjects that create an added layer of meaning.

Bey's work has been included in exhibitions worldwide, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe, and which also produced a major publication. Aperture published his latest project Class Pictures in September 2007 and an exhibition of this work that will have a five-year museums tour throughout the United States. Bey's works are in the permanent collections the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums world wide. He has received numerous fellowships, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His critical writings have appeared in numerous publications and he has curated exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, and is currently Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where has taught since 1998.

Marie Cosindas is a legendary photographer and revered teacher whose career took a crucial turning-point in 1962, when she was one of a small number of artists invited by Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid technology, to test his new instant-developing color film. For decades she has been mining the possibilities of color photography, manipulating facets of the process to produce her preferred warm tones and focusing on her images, since she is freed from the technical aspects of creating color prints.

Cosindas' early work had a critical influence on the use of color in fine art photography during the 1960's. the Museum of Modern Art's one-person exhibition of her work in ---- was one of that venerable institution's first to feature color photography. Cosindas also worked in the movie industry and was a fixture in the art world of the 1960s and'70s. She created unforgettable images of a veritable "who's who" of luminaries from that era, including Hollywood stars like Paul Newman and Robert Redford, as well as Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and Ezra Pound. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Cosindas lives and works in Boston.

Daniel Heyman's most recent work has focused on images about the abuse of innocent at Abu Ghraib and other prisons during the Iraq war. Heyman met with former detainees in Jordan and Turkey, creating portraits that include text of their own recounting of their experiences at the hands of their American captors. His work is featured in the February 2008 Esquire

Originally a painter, Heyman was drawn to subjects of violence, and eventually found that the medium of printmaking created a greater and more appropriate sense of visual immediacy for his subjects. In March 2006, Heyman traveled to Amman, Jordan, and Istanbul, joining human rights attorney Susan Burke on a fact-finding mission. Burke intuited that an artist's work could garner much more immediate press and public attention than a lengthy lawsuit, and believed Heyman would create art that could also bear witness. Heyman's courtroom sketches came to include his subjects' statements, which haunted him as they were interpreted through a translator. "I went to Jordan and Turkey convinced that artists have a role to play in the great issues of their times," Heyman says. "My goal is to reclaim for the victims of torture their right to describe what happened in their own words."

Heyman's works are in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Princeton University Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the New York Public Library, Spencer Museum, University of Kansas, among many others. His works have been included in exhibitions at the DePaul University Art Museum, the Print Center, Philadelphia, the Tyler School of Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, the New York Public Library, the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, and the International Print Center in New York. He lives in Philadelphia.

Other artists included in About Face are Linda Abadjian, Beverly Strom Bluth, Margaret Zox Brown, Fritz Drury, and June Bisantz-Evans.

Admission to About Face is free. Docent-led tours can be scheduled by appointment. For more information contact the Guilford Art Center at 203-453-5947 or www.guilfordartcenter.org.