Eastman Museum reopens Harvest of Memory: July 9-October 10, 2021

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.