Deana Lawson
Deana Lawson

Deana Lawson
Deana Lawson
MACK
English

Essays by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tina M. Campt, Alexander Nemerov and Greg Tate.
Edited by Eva Respini and Peter Eleey.

Hardcover
144 pages
190 × 250 mm
2021
ISBN 9781912339983

Deana Lawson, the first scholarly publication on the artist Deana Lawson, surveying fifteen years of her photography, will be published to accompany the first comprehensive museum survey exhibition featuring Lawson’s artwork. A singular voice in contemporary photography, Lawson has been investigating and challenging conventional representations of black identities in the African American and African diaspora for over fifteen years. Her work samples numerous photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and found images, creating narratives of family, love, and desire. Lawson’s photographs are made in collaboration with her subjects, who are sometimes nude, embracing, and directly confronting the camera, destabilizing the notion of photography as a passively voyeuristic medium. Whether in posed photographs or assembled collages, Lawson’s works channel broader ideas about personal and social histories of black life, love, sexuality, family, and spiritual beliefs. This publication will include selections from Lawson’s personal family photographs and archives of vernacular images that have profoundly informed her work.

About the Artist
Deana Lawson (b. 1979 Rochester, NY) is a photo-based artist whose work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and spiritual aesthetics. Her practice borrows from simultaneous visual traditions, ranging from photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the materiality of black culture and its expression as seen through the body and in domestic environments. Careful attention is given to lighting and pose, both formal constructs used to transform and intensify representations of power and liberation through the personal and intimate space.
(source: https://www.rhoffmangallery.com/artists/deana-lawson#:~:text=Deana%20Lawson%20(b.,%2C%20romance%2C%20and%20spiritual%20aesthetics.)

About the Editors
Eva Respini is the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the ICA/Boston, where she has been leading the vision of the program since 2015. She is the curator and co-commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion’s historic Simone Leigh presentation for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. She was Curator at the Museum of Modern Art for over a decade, where she organized numerous exhibitions of contemporary art and photography.
evarespini.com
(source: https://evarespini.com/)

Peter Eleey is the chief curator at MoMA PS1. Since joining the museum in 2010, he has organized or co-organized more than 30 exhibitions.
(source: https://www.pewcenterarts.org/people/peter-eleey)