Visiting Artist Lecture - Photographer Kelli Connell

The Lamar Dodd School of Art welcomes photographer Kelli Connell for a Visiting Artist Lecture, presented in partnership with the High Museum of Art on the occasion of her solo exhibition this fall, Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis. A photo book of Pictures for Charis was co-published by Aperture and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson this spring.

About the artist
Kelli Connell is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity and photographer-sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Publications of her work include Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis (Aperture and Center for Creative Photography, March 2024), PhotoWork: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice (Aperture), Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture), and the monograph Kelli Connell: Double Life (DECODE Books). Connell has received fellowships and residencies from The Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work and The Center for Creative Photography. Connell is a professor at Columbia College Chicago.

About the exhibition
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
Sept. 20, 2024-Jan. 5, 2025
In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with her own and enriches our understanding of the couple from her contemporary queer and feminist perspective. Using Weston’s and Wilson’s publications as a guide, Connell and her partner, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work and spent time together. Along the way, they collaboratively made photographs of Odom that upend conventional notions of photographer and muse. Connell also photographed, in a raw and less idealized manner, the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic 75 years before. The exhibition will bring together Connell’s recent portrait and landscape photographs with Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. “Pictures for Charis” will offer a new perspective about Wilson and Weston while raising important questions about gender, sexuality and relationships in the 21st century. This exhibition is co-organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.