Zoe Strauss, a Philadelphia photographer with a growing international reputation, was the subject of a major exhibition January 14 – April 22, 2012 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Zoe Strauss: Ten Years was a mid-career retrospective of this acclaimed artist’s work, representing the first critical assessment of her decade-long project to exhibit annually in a public space beneath Interstate-95 (I-95) in South Philadelphia. The exhibition included 170 prints and a selection of artist-created slideshows, one of which will be projected on the Museum’s exterior façade during the exhibition’s opening week.
Additional images by the artist were displayed on over 50 billboards located throughout the city from Manayunk to West Philadelphia and from Northeast Philadelphia to I-95 South, extending the reach of the exhibition into many of the neighborhoods where Strauss has worked and from which she continues to draw inspiration.
“It is always welcome to encounter a gifted artist who is not only fully engaged with her world and all of its complexities—political, economic, social, and above all personal—but also determined to make something new and compelling of these realities,” notes Timothy Rub, The George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “To share this with others requires a strong sense of commitment and a spirit of generosity, and it is fair to say that Strauss is well endowed with both. She has, from the very beginning of her career, focused both on social change and on the intersection of art and the public realm. Each of these is central to the way she defines her life and her work as an artist.”
Inspired by other photographers of the American scene, including William Eggleston, Walker Evans, and Nan Goldin, Strauss’ art has focused primarily on the fascinating and often disconcerting realities of everyday life. Much of her work has been done in and around Philadelphia, but Strauss has also traveled widely throughout the United States, exploring the South and the West and taking photographs in the aftermath of such catastrophic events as Hurricane Katrina, as seen in
Mom Were OK, (2005), Biloxi, Mississippi.
A critical focus of the exhibition and the accompanying book was a thorough assessment of Strauss' I-95 project. Between 2001 and 2010, she mounted annual one-day exhibitions of her photographs under an elevated section of the interstate highway that runs through South Philadelphia, close to the banks of the Delaware River. In an area roughly the size of a football field, she affixed her photographs to columns supporting the elevated highway, providing visitors with a map keyed to a list of their titles. Color photocopies of the exhibited images were available for sale for five dollars, with volunteers manning a sales table and Strauss stationed at a nearby table for signing. These annual installations animated the site with art, commerce, and social interaction, transforming the unused space into a vibrant public setting.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition examined how, for Strauss, the contrasting settings of the abandoned urban zone under I-95 and the Museum’s galleries complement and, in an important sense, complete each other as spaces from which to address the city.
About the Artist:
Zoe Strauss (American, born 1970) began making photographs in 2000. Although never trained formally as a photographer, Strauss founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995 with the objective of exhibiting art in non-traditional venues. Subsequently, she turned to the camera as the most direct instrument to represent her chosen subjects.
In recent years Strauss has participated in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at the ICA Philadelphia in 2006 and the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in 2007 and 2009. She has participated in group shows or projects at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (2006), PPOW Gallery (2008), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2009). She was a 2005 Pew Fellow and a 2007 United States Artists Gund Fellow in the Visual Arts. In 2008 she published her first book, America, which received an Art Forum “Best of 2008” award.
A catalogue with essays by Peter Barberie and the noted photo historian Sally Stein.
includes more than 150 of Strauss’ photographs, as well as images that document her career to date.
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