Collection Exhibitions

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Bea Nettles: A Harvest of Memory

Completed
10/4/2019 - 3/6/2021
Organizing institution: The Sheldon Art Galleries
Primary Curator: Sheldon Art Galleries

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 experimental approaches to art-making. Combining craft and photography, her 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. Recognized for her innovations in mixed media photography, Nettles has taught photography and visual book-making since 1970, when she completed her MFA in the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she later taught from 1984 to 2008. Her alternative processes textbook Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook has influenced generations of readers, and she has delivered lectures and workshops internationally. Her work is in museum collections throughout the United States and Canada, and her artist books can be found in special collections libraries, including significant holdings at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Illinois. [Organized by the George Eastman Museum and the Sheldon Art Galleries. Co-curated by by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, former Director, the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, Missouri; and Jamie Allen, Associate Curator, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. Curated at Krannert Art Museum by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art]

This exhibition has been displayed at the following venues: