Gagosian, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Biennial 2017, March 17–June 11, 2017 (another example exhibited)
New York, 125 Newbury, Wild Strawberries, September 30–November 19, 2022 (another example exhibited)
Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art; New York, MoMA PS1; Atlanta, High Museum of Art, Deana Lawson, November 4, 2021–February 19, 2023, pp. 127, 129 (another example exhibited and illustrated, p. 127, front cover)
"Escaping Hades: Deana Lawson's "Portal", 2017, at the Whitney Biennial," Minus Plato, April 30, 2017, online (another example illustrated)
Lucrezia Sgualdino, "Deana Lawson and Sally Mann," Muse Magazine, November 7, 2020, online (another example illustrated)
Scott Ferguson, "Decolonizing Money Through Deana Lawson's “Portal”," Money on the Left, June 2021, online (another example illustrated)
Chloe Pingeon, "Visual Arts Review: The Photographs of Deana Lawson — Portals to Possibilities," The Arts Fuse, November 15, 2021, online
Nivia Hernandez, "Trends in Contemporary Art with Brian Appel," School of Visual Arts: Features, May 24, 2023, online (another example illustrated)
American • 1979
Deana Lawson’s strikingly intimate photographs examine themes of family, cultural legacy, sexuality, spirituality and employ black aesthetics as the cornerstone of her distinctive oeuvre. Her works draw upon visual traditions such as formal portraiture, social documentary, and personal family albums, expertly recording social narratives of African American day-to-day life in contemporary America.
Lawson’s subjects are often strangers she meets in public spaces, yet she refers to them as “her family”. She arranges her models in domestic settings, paying particular attention to lighting and pose, which the artist utilizes to transform and intensify these intimate spaces. Lawson painstakingly arranges her subjects – a young man holding up a West Side symbol, a mother cradling her crying child, and an elderly woman she met at a corner store with a prosthetic foot – and her environments – lace curtains, plastic couch covers, and peeling wallpaper. She embraces her models’ bodies, their lives, and their collective histories, explaining: “they are displaced kings and queens of the diaspora. There’s something beautiful and powerful that hasn’t been taken away”.
Lawson was the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, affording her the opportunity to practice photography on an international scale. Recently, her large-scale work, Ring Bearer, 2016, was exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and earlier this year the artist had her first solo show with Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York.
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