Artist Tina Barney to Speak at Williams College
Williamstown - Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) presents a season premiere party to celebrate its new fall exhibitions, which include Beyond the Familiar: Photography and the Construction of Community, Fiona Tan: Countenance, and Independent Film and Ethnography.WCMA will host an opening reception for these exhibitions from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 16 at the museum. Light party fare and hors d’oeurve will be served. A talk, given by artist Tina Barney, will follow at Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall on the Williams College campus at 7:00 p.m. These are both free public events and all are invited to attend.
Tina Barney’s talk, entitled “People, Places, and Things,” will take place in conjunction with the exhibition Beyond the Familiar, a photography exhibition which features selections from Barney’s photo project, “The Europeans.” In this project, Barney used her connections to meet and photography members of the upper class in Spain, Italy, England, Germany, Austria, and France. John Stomberg, curator of the exhibition, explains that Barney’s large-scaled photographs “take on a quality of history paintings. In this way their [Barney’s subjects] stories take on historic proportions and seem to be of major consequence even when they are doing simple things.”
Tina Barney was born in 1945 in New York. Barney is best known for her photographs documenting the lifestyle and relationships of her family and close friends, many of whom belong to the social elite of New York and New England. She was also one of the first photographers to explore working in a “directorial” mode in the 1980s. Her photographs are often carefully constructed, from the lighting to the poses and gestures of her subjects. Barney received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Artist’s Fellowship in 1991. Barney’s work can be found in the collections of the George Eastman House, Yale University Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and many others. She currently lives and works in Rhode Island.
