FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 18, 2014 MEDIA CONTACTS:
Rebecca Baldwin
(312) 443-3625
[email protected]
Nina Litoff
(312) 443-3363
[email protected]
SARAH CHARLESWORTH’S 1980 SERIES STILLS REPRISED AT ART INSTITUTE
Debut of Complete 14–Part Series Includes Six Images Never Seen Before
Stills, a photographic series shown by Sarah Charlesworth
(1947-2013) in February 1980, helped to define a
photography-driven movement in American art that remains a
cornerstone of contemporary art: the Pictures Generation.
The series of appropriated newspaper photographs, cropped
and blown up to 78 inches tall, depicts people falling or
leaping from buildings at life-threatening heights. The very
title “Stills” evokes a movie still, or a moment frozen in time.
These images are particularly haunting in an era when selfies
and social media have partly eclipsed the tabloid press.
These over-lifesize images of frozen moments ask us to
consider how our most private, existential experiences will
play out in the public eye.
The Art Institute is proud to show Stills, together for the first
time since 1980, in a set of 14 prints made exclusively for the
museum. The set—including six works that have never been
seen before—was commissioned from the artist in 2012. Stills
will be on view from September 18, 2014, through January 4,
2015, in the Modern Wing’s Bucksbaum Gallery for
Photography.
To create Stills, Charlesworth combed news wire services and the New York Public Library for
images of individuals, some named, some anonymous, falling from tall buildings to end or to save
their lives. Through the omission of both text and context, the artist deliberately made it impossible
to know the motivation for their leaps. Charlesworth cropped and tore the images into rectangles,
leaving ragged edges reminiscent of a homemade clippings file. The source images were then
mounted on mat board, re-photographed, and blown up to over-lifesize proportions.
The original exhibition of Stills took place in the East Village apartment of fledgling dealer Tony
Shafrazi and included just seven photographs; constraints of time, space, and cost prevented
Charlesworth from making and showing more. The works, each made as a unique print, were
never exhibited together again. However, individual Stills found their way into collections like that
of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and into important museum shows. In 2009,
Charlesworth printed an eighth work from her original collected source material for a commission.
Then in 2012, at the request of the Art Institute, the artist reprised the project, doubling the original
number of works in the series. Each gelatin silver print was made and mounted exactly as had
been done in 1980; the set is held complete only at the Art Institute.
Associations with the imagery of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is both coincidental
and inevitable today. In the wake of the attacks, Charlesworth accepted this added layer of
resonance in which personal and public histories are intertwined—just as in the original news
photographs, and in all private stories that reach the wider world in our media-saturated age.
Stills is the first U.S. museum solo show of Charlesworth’s work in 15 years. It will open with a
public conversation on September 17, 2014, led by Laurie Simmons with fellow artists Sara
VanDerBeek and Liz Deschenes, as well as Kate Linker, an activist and former art critic. The
exhibition is accompanied by a monograph that includes an essay on Stills by Matthew S.
Witkovsky, Sandor Chair of Photography at the Art Institute, and an interview with Matthew C.
Lange, Charlesworth’s last studio assistant. The exhibition and discussion are part of
Photography Is ____________ , a nine-month celebration of photography at the Art Institute that
includes pop-up gallery talks, online events, and the presentation of the museum’s most treasured
photographs.
Lead sponsorship for this exhibition has been generously provided by Liz and Eric Lefkofsky.
Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Goldman Sachs, Kenneth and Anne
Griffin, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.
Images: Sarah Charlesworth. Patricia Cawlings, Los Angeles, 1980, printed 2012, No. 10 of 14 from
the series Stills. The Art Institute of Chicago, Krueck Foundation and Photography Gala Funds,
2013.129. © Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and
Maccarone.
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