Mary Mattingly and the Bronx Museum in Havana

Wild Noise: Artwork from The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
May 21 to August 16, 2015 at El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

Gallery artist Mary Mattingly is currently participating in an artist exchange to Havana in cooperation with the Bronx Museum and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana (MNBA). The museum writes,

The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (MNBA) have announced an unprecedented joint arts initiative that is the culmination of years of planning and collaboration. Wild Noise: Artwork from The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes represents the most extensive visual arts exchange between the two countries in more than 50 years, and will include major exhibitions at MNBA and the Bronx Museum; an artist exchange with U.S. artist Mary Mattingly and Cuban artist Humberto Diaz; a teen exchange program; a series of educational and public programs; and the publication of a dual-language publication that will extend the impact of Wild Noise beyond the audiences that participate directly in the initiative.

Continue reading the press release here.

Cig Harvey's "Gardening at Night" in Vogue's Top Photo Books for Spring

Cig Harvey's newest book, Gardening at Night, is one of Vogue's picks for the top photo books released this spring. Following the sold-out success of Harvey's first book, You Look at Me Like An Emergency, Gardening at Night features works from the artist's new series of the same name in an exploration of home, family, nature, and time. The book is published by Schilt Publishing and will be available through the gallery in April.

See the slideshow here.

The Light in Cuban Eyes in PBS Art Beat

Photos: Exhibit allows glimpse at Cuba,
forbidden to Americans for so long
By Victoria Fleischer
March 27, 2015

When Cuban photographer Nelson Ramirez was eight years old, he borrowed his mother’s camera, a twin-lens reflex that requires you to reload film before each shot. Ramirez kept forgetting to reload. When he finally developed the roll of film eight years later, he noticed the negatives had multiple exposures.

“I think those are the first manipulated photography that I did,” Ramirez told Art Beat. This week, the Robert Mann gallery in New York City opened “The Light in Cuban Eyes,” a two-month long exhibit that showcases Ramirez work along with 23 others. The exhibit is an offshoot of a book by the same name, which showcases 50 artists and was published earlier this month.

Continue reading the article here.

The Light in Cuban Eyes on The Leonard Lopate Show

Shining a Light on Cuban Photography
Aired Thursday, March 26th at 1pm

Coinciding with the opening of Robert Mann Gallery's exhibition The Light in Cuban Eyes, Madeleine P. Plonsker—who inspired our exhibition and organized the book of the same name—spoke with Leonard Lopate along with artists Nelson Ramirez and Alejandro Pérez. Listen to the interview below or read more online here.

The Light in Cuban Eyes reviewed in Widewalls

The Cuban art has been marginalized and out of the loop for decades, due to US-Cuban relations. All those years, Cuban artist had opportunities to exhibit and to promote their art mainly in Europe, but the lack of cooperation between the island and its closest neighbor – the US has been causing a serious damage to the Cuban cultural and artistic scene. The situation with Cubans living in the US has been completely different, yet they have always hoped that the isolating wall between these two countries would be demolished. In December, the Obama administration announced tremendous changes regarding US – Cuba relations, with the goal to improve the cooperation between two nations. In this context, Robert Mann Gallery in New York is organizing a group exhibition of contemporary Cuban photography.

Continue reading the article here

Announcing Representation of Mike Mandel

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Mike Mandel. Born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, Mandel is heavily influenced by the period of expansion and franchising in the Los Angeles region during the 1960s and ‘70s. His photographic series utilize elements of popular media to communicate themes of alienation, commercialization, and personal identity in an increasingly public world.

In the series People in Cars, the artist captures reactions to the sudden intrusion of his camera into the private space of the car, a defining element of Southern California culture after an era of massive freeway expansion. In the tongue-in-cheek Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, great photographers of the 20th century appear as exchangeable baseball cards complete with satirical stats and quotations. Evidence, a collaboration with Larry Sultan, marked a pivotal change in the idea of photographic authorship and narrative: using found photos carefully culled from the files of government agencies and corporations, the photographers imparted new meaning solely through context. And wonderfully apropros to our contemporary moment, Mandel’s Myself: Timed Exposures can be seen as the original selfies—endearingly awkward, unpretentiously charismatic, and supremely honest about human interactions in the modern age.

Mike Mandel was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and currently teaches at the School of the Museum Fine Arts, Boston Studio Program at Tufts University. His work is in permanent collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art; The Center for Creative Photography; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His published art books include Myself: Timed Exposures, Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, Evidence (co-authored with Larry Sultan), Making Good Time, and State of Ata, (co-authored with Chantal Zakari), among others. He lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Jennifer Williams at Florida Atlantic University Museum of Art

Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
January 15 - February 28, 2015
Ritter Art Gallery, Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida

Jennifer Williams' small unique collages and archival pigment prints are featured in Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed, which presents works by 23 contemporary artists. While hardly unified in style and content, the artists’ works in Altarations blend photographic images and processes  to produce works that celebrate, contradict and undermine photographic traditions through altered images and references.  The title of the exhibition is derived from Mark C. Taylor’s “Altarity,” a 1987 book of philosopher Taylor’s writing that brings  together his interpretation and synthesis of several modern philosophers’ interpretations of difference and otherness. 

For more information about the exhibition, click here.

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland in Slate Magazine

Maroesjka Lavigne: Ísland is featured as one of Slate Magazine's top ten photography shows of the year. Jordan G. Teicher writes,

Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne was just 21 when she drove for months across Iceland to create the images in her series, “Island,” which I saw in April at Manhattan’s Robert Mann Gallery. Full of cinematic portraits and snowy landscapes featuring small, isolated subjects, the photos suggest a loose narrative of mystery and melancholy. Though they do justice to the country’s ample natural beauty, they’re way more odd and interesting than anything you’d find in a travel magazine. 

To read the full article, click here.

The Light in Cuban Eyes in Cuban Art News

The upcoming book The Light in Cuban Eyes: Lake Forest College's Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection of Contemporary Cuban Photography, which will be accompanied by an exhibition at the gallery in the spring, is listed in Cuban Art News' 'Bookshelf'. This bilingual volume highlights the work of 50 photographers, both emerging and established, who have been active in Cuba from the Special Period to the present, 1992–2012. The photos in the book are accompanied by artists’ statements, collector’s comments, and essays by scholars. Collector Madeleine P. Plonsker observes that “Cuban photography has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past twenty years. Cuba's contemporary photographers are poised to reach a broader international audience, and the intent of my book is to bring you their story.”

For the full article, click here.

Robert Mann in Artnet News

Robert Mann is featured as a contributing expert in Artnet's "Market Snapshot: Ansel Adams," in passages such as the below:

...Adams's estate might not see the hysterical fluctuations of other photographers' markets, but that's not to say his work isn't steadily appreciating. “The values have been steadily increasing over the years as the supply in the secondary market diminishes and the demand for his work increases," said Robert Mann, a key player in Adams's secondary market since the 1970s. “Virtually every institutional art collection and many private collections that include photography begin with Adams," he told Artnet via email, “so it is inevitable that the prints will become more scare and ultimately more valuable." 

Click here to read more about the current market for Ansel Adams' work, currently on display at Robert Mann Gallery.