Documentary: Breaking the Code
I was interviewed early in this new film about the time I spent with artist Vernon Fisher when we were both graduate painting students at the University of Illinos. You can see the full documentary here.
MOMA and the Whitney book purchases.
Very pleased that The Nymph of the Highlands,1974 and Dream Pages,1975 have been added to these two libraries. These books were some of my earliest mixed media (offset and screen printed) publishing ventures made in limited editions.
NY Review of Books Covers
The New York Review of Books has just released two books by Diana Athill that use my images as covers.
Museum of New Mexico exhibition and lecture.
Young B and the Pines, 1976 is one of the prints on view currently in Transgressions and Amplifications: Mixed-media Photography of the 1960s and 1970s.
Eminent photo-historian Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator emerita of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will give a lecture on Friday, Nov. 4, at 5:30 p.m., in the St. Francis Auditorium. Speaking in conjunction with the exhibition Transgressions and Amplifications: Mixed-media Photography of the 1960s and 1970s, Tucker will address the challenges of being female in the art world in the 1970s and discuss various image series and limited-edition books of artists Joan Lyons, Bea Nettles, and Marcia Resnick. Each woman used their own lives to tell very different stories of home turf, dreams, memories and urban fictionhttps://www.nmartmuseum.org/events/photo-historian-anne-wilkes-tucker-lecture/
Conversation now live at Lens/Scratch
A conversation with Liliana Guzman can now be seen at the Lens/Scratch blog.
Honored Art & Design Alumna Lecture is now live (click for link).
Here is a link to my discussion of works made during and influenced by my life in Illinois. It emphasizes PLACE, PEOPLE and TIME, three of the dominant themes.
Collecting Conversations: Ransom Center online presentation March 3.
You can register to watch my March 3rd conversation with Jessica McDonald at the Ransom Center about my career. https://allevents.in/online/collecting-conversations-bea-nettles/10000262260788077
Register to watch this interview with Jessica McDonald, part of a series she did with five photographers who have recently been added to their collection.
https://allevents.in/online/collecting-conversations-bea-nettles/10000262260788077
In Conversation with Artists Bea Nettles & Joan Lyons
Listen to an in-depth conversation with artists Bea Nettles and Joan Lyons as they discuss their formative work from the 1970s and the photographic community in Rochester at that time, including Rochester Institute of Technology and Visual Studies Workshop.
Listen to an in-depth conversation with artists Bea Nettles and Joan Lyons as they discuss their formative work from the 1970s and the photographic community in Rochester at that time, including Rochester Institute of Technology and Visual Studies Workshop.
The video includes images by both artists and is moderated by Jamie Allen, Associate Curator, George Eastman Museum. Further videos about Nettles work can be seen on Youtube including a complete tour of the show, a live (pre-Covid) gallery talk between Allen and Nettles, and a presentation by Allen about the themes of motherhood in Nettles work.
These offset books which investigate being an artist and mother are available from this website. For a full description and to order using Paypal, visit the store.
More than Retro: Art Photography of the 1970s opens at MFA St Petersburg
My image St Croix Stairway is on view until April 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, Florida in a show entitled More Than Retro: Art Photography of the 1970s.
My image St Croix Stairway is on view from now until April 3, 2022 in this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, Florida. The image is shown here on the exhibit brochure. They have featured works from their extensive photography collection.
St Croix Stairway was one of 16 hand colored and machine stitched photographs that I made during the dark Rochester, NY winters of 1975 and 1977 that featured landscapes where I would have rather been.
Playa Benefit Auction is now live.
You can bid on my Playa ABC book online at the benefit auction to support this residency in Southern Oregon for artists and scientists. The book was created in 2014 after a productive visit. Auction site
Artist’s portrait by Deborah Ford, Playa, Summer Lake, Oregon.
Playa Benefit Auction has begun online. Above is a sample of the letters of the alphabet that are found in the book.
Eastman Museum reopens Harvest of Memory: July 9-October 10, 2021
The Eastman Museum has brought the Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory exhibition back to their galleries for visitors to explore in person.
Garden with Statue, 9-1969, mixed media: toned photo, screen prints, cloth.
“Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory originally opened at the George Eastman Museum on January 31, 2020, and was planned to be on view through June 14. Six weeks after opening the exhibition, the museum had to close due to COVID-19 and a virtual version of the exhibition was offered online. Now, the Eastman Museum is pleased to bring the exhibition back to our galleries for visitors to explore in person.
Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. The first large-scale retrospective of her fifty-year career, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory demonstrates this celebrated artist’s experimental approaches to art-making. Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand-coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in the lives of women, often with autobiographic undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.”
Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory is co-organized by the George Eastman Museum and the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis. It was co-curated by Jamie M. Allen and Olivia Lahs-Gonzales.
Magic in the Everyday: NY Review of Books
Nicole Rudick has written an extensive review of Bea Nettles:Harvest of Memory with special mention of the book Flamingo in the Dark. The review can be read online at the New York Review of Books website.
Magic in the Everyday-The Art of Bea Nettles, and article by Nicole Rudick appeared on March 1 in the New York Review of Books online version.
The artist Bea Nettles was born in 1946 in Gainesville, Florida, and grew up with a love of the natural world. A drawing made when she was in grade school contains, she writes in her 1979 photobook, Flamingo in the Dark, the seeds of her mature work: “plants…an exotic bird, moonlight, water, reflections, and the Florida night air”:
As children we spent most of our summers at our lake house. My resourceful father built the house in a hundred year old orange grove on the banks of Santa Fe Lake. Here we found Indian arrowheads, tadpoles, snakes, fish of all descriptions, turtles, weeds, birds, waterbugs and water lilies. The image of a rainstorm moving towards us across the lake, the smell of the orange blossoms while I lay in the shade on cool chickweed, the feel of hot sandy roads and sandspurs under my bare feet, and all the wildflowers I can no longer name are my resources.
The book’s images were made between 1976 and 1979 using multilayered large contact negatives, including some that belonged to her father, and a light-sensitive, applied-color process called Kwik-Print. Blush pink, goldenrod, burnt orange, and cotton-candy blue predominate, as do rounded forms: saucers, faces, Nettles’s pregnant belly, tomatoes, hills, the moon. Nettles pieced the photobook together from memories, “starting with my girlhood in Florida and starting over again with my daughter Rachel’s first year.” The story is linear—Nettles’s life from childhood to motherhood; palimpsestic—with different photographs layered to make up a single image; and circular—from childhood back around to childhood. She has called Flamingo in the Dark a “visual autobiography,” a phrase that can be applied to all of her work…. Nicole Rudick
Register for a Virtual Gallery Tour of Harvest of Memory
Join Curator Amy Powell for a virtual gallery tour and discussion with me of Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory.
On January 28 there will be a guided gallery tour and discussion of Harvest of Memory, my fifty year retrospective currently installed at the Krannert Museum. You will need to pre-register to attend this event. It will be at 4 Central time.
Hunting “Goodenough” Days.
Recently I wrote a blog post for the University of Illinois about the production of Head Lines: Worlds Warning.
Here’s a link to the recent blog post for the University of Illinois homepage about finding the name “Goodenough” which was used in my artists book project Head Lines: Worlds Warning. I photograph surnames on gravestones that can be used to write poetry.
Order a copy of the book from the webstore.
Harvest of Memory opens November 5-March 6 at the Krannert Museum, at the University of Illinois.
Visit the Krannert Museum’s website to book timed entry to Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory, a traveling retrospective featuring over 50 years of work. The show will be on view until March 6 as long as the University is open to the public.
This week this traveling exhibition with features work from 50 years will make its final stop in the same museum where my graduate thesis show was held in the lobby in 1970.Some work from that time will be shown as it has made a full circle back to its origin. Go online to book tickets for timed entry.
Watch the WCIA short video of the Krannert Show.
Additional videos and reviews can be found on the News Gazette site, and Critics at Large.
Head Lines: Worlds Warning. A new book just released.
I have photographed almost seven thousand last names on headstones that are parts of speech. With these words I have created poems. Near this summer’s end, I wrote my chronology of the outbreak of COVID19 from its arrival through the end of August 2020: Head Lines: Worlds Warning.
During my travels to cemeteries since 2011, I have photographed almost seven thousand last names on headstones that are parts of speech. With these words I have created poems that investigate language, history, and some of life’s events. Near this summer’s end, I wrote my chronology of the outbreak of COVID19 from its arrival through the end of August 2020 The book is available for shipping from my store.
Knights of Assisi: A Journey Through the Tarot
This 1990 fashion shoot was based on Tarot cards. The hand colored photographs are reproduced in this book which is now available at the store.
This 1990 fashion shoot by Bea Nettles features hand colored photographs based on the Tarot deck. It was created in Assisi, Italy. Copies of the original offset book are now available in the shop.
Temperance from Mountain Dream Tarot in Taschen’s Tarot book.
The chapter heading for Temperance features the original photograph from Mountain Dream Tarot published in 1975.
The chapter heading for Temperance in Tarot: The Library of Esoterica by Taschen books is the original photograph from Mountain Dream Tarot. It was included in the review of the book in The Guardian News:
Webinar on Photographic Artists Books now online.
The full webinar featuring the photographic artists books from Harvest of Memory can now be viewed on https://youtu.be/rXL8BH3bG3Y
The full webinar with Jamie Allen and Bea Nettles has been posted by the Eastman Museum on Youtube. Here you will see inside many of the books as the pages are being turned and hear a discussion of my almost 50 year involvement with making books.
Webinar on visual books included in Harvest of Memory exhibition.
Join Curator Jamie Allen (Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY) and Bea Nettles as they discuss videos of a survey visual books created from the early 70s till last year that are included in the exhibition Harvest of Memory. Go online to sign up and get the link.
Curator Jamie Allen and Bea Nettles discuss videos of a survey visual books created from the early 70s till last year that were included in the exhibition Harvest of Memory. Now this webinar can be viewed at Youtube: https://youtu.be/rXL8BH3bG3Y