About the Exhibition

Larry Silver — a Photo League-inspired photographer still working today — moved from Greater New York to Westport, Connecticut in 1973 and, with his camera, began exploring its regional environs. This exhibition, guest curated by curator and art historian Leslie K. Brown, PhD, will bring together over 40 years of Silver's work made of and in Connecticut and consider how he continues to push the boundaries of what landscape and looking are — and can be.

The first part of the exhibition’s title is a nod to poet Wallace Stevens, who also called Connecticut his home for decades, and specifically his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The exhibition layout will echo Stevens’ iconic poem and be installed in clusters. Similar to what Stevens called “sensations,” each grouping of Silver’s photographs will gather images across several of his series and reflect upon different facets of his work, while offering the audience a unique viewing and spatial experience.

This multifaceted, but still focused, theme will showcase Silver’s work from several areas of the state and different kinds of “-scapes.” Exuding a sense of quiet contemplation and a studied approach, Silver engages ideas of observation and framing in his lyrical compositions. Many of his photographs, for example, feature figures looking out at the view or back towards the photographer, along with scenes seen through and transformed by weather and atmosphere, light and shadow, perspectives and formats, and nature and the built environment.

About the Artist:
Larry Silver was born in the Bronx in 1934, and has called Westport, Connecticut his home since 1973. Silver began photographing while attending High School of Industrial Art, now High School of Art and Design, in Manhattan. During his senior year, he submitted his portfolio to the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards and won a full scholarship to the Art Center School, now the Art Center College of Design, in Los Angeles. While on the West Coast, Silver photographed beachgoers, gymnasts, and bodybuilders at Santa Monica Beach, which resulted in his acclaimed series “Muscle Beach.”

When he was in high school and photographing in the city’s boroughs, Silver met many members of the prestigious and progressive Photo League, a collaborative group of documentary photographers, including Lou Bernstein, Louis Stettner, and W. Eugene Smith. A few years after graduating college, he returned to New York and opened his advertising studio in 1960. For many decades, Silver had a robust and successful career in commercial photography and maintained a personal darkroom, as he feels that creating a print is as important as taking a picture. In between photographing for clients, he also taught studio photography at the School of Visual Arts and took film classes at New York University.

Silver’s work is held in prestigious private, corporate, and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Fogg Museum at Harvard Art Museums, George Eastman Museum, International Center of Photography, Jewish Museum; J. Paul Getty Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. He is represented by the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York, where he has had four solo shows and was recently included in their 20th anniversary exhibition. In 2006, Silver received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Visual Arts from the Westport Arts Advisory Committee. More information and work can be found at www.larrysilver.com.

About the Curator:
Leslie K. Brown is an independent curator, scholar, and educator who specializes in the history of photography and modern and contemporary art. She holds a PhD in the History of Art & Architecture from Boston University and an MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. A former curator at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, Brown has also worked as a museum educator at the Cheekwood Museum of Art and the Austin Museum of Art. In addition to dozens of exhibitions curated or coordinated at the PRC, she has also guest curated exhibitions for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Brown has taught courses at colleges across New England, including BU, College of the Holy Cross, Lesley University’s College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Simmons University, Wellesley College, and University of Massachusetts Boston.

Image: Larry Silver, Sitting at Water's Edge, Sherwood Island State Park, Westport, CT, 2014/2022 (detail), archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York © Larry Silver

Digital paper supplied by Red River Paper and vinyl printing donated by Bee Digital, LLC

Faculty liaisons:
Sonya Huber (Associate Professor, Creative Writing)
Claudia Calhoun (Assistant Professor, Film, TV and Media)

Spanish translations:
Laura Gasca Jiménez (Assistant Professor, Spanish and Translation Studies)

Explore the Exhibition

Browse Selected Artworks

Exhibition Catalogue

Video Tour

Learn

Events listed below with a location are live, in-person programs. When possible, those events will also be streamed on thequicklive.com and the recordings posted to our YouTube channel.

Opening Night Lecture: 13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver’s Connecticut Photographs

Opening Reception: 13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver’s Connecticut Photographs

Family Day: It’s All About Perspective

Conversation: Halima Taha and Leslie K. Brown, PhD in conversation with Adger Cowans and Larry Silver

Press

Additional Information

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