Exhibitions
Exhibitions
Tanya Marcuse: Laws of Nature, Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, CO
November 19, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Tanya Marcuse: Laws of Nature is a solo exhibition of Marcuse’s large-scale photographs that evoke awe and wonder for the natural world. Interspersing flowers, fruits, plants, and animals at different stages of life, her artworks resemble incredibly detailed still lifes up close, while from afar, they appear like abstract paintings. In an intensive process that often lasts months, Marcuse collects flora and fauna from her surrounding environment and composes and photographs them in intricate tableaux. Marcuse’s works hover between beauty and destruction, landscape and still life, and fact and fiction, inviting viewers to reflect on the laws of nature.
Social bodies
Documenting the individual as a social being : rules, codes and paradoxes
Works by Merry Alpern, Peggy Anderson, Martine Fougeron, Dave Heath, Tanya Marcuse
Galerie Miranda, Paris, France
March 12 - April 13th, 2024
Merry Alpern | Tanya Marcuse
Women Reframe American Landscape, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
November 18, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Susie M. Barstow, “Landscape,” 1865, oil on canvas, 30x22 in., Scott Collection,
Illuminating the artistic contributions and perspectives of women, this two-part exhibition includes the first retrospective of the nineteenth-century American artist Susie M. Barstow (1836–1923) and a presentation of contemporary works by artists Teresita Fernández, Guerrilla Girls, Marie Lorenz, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Ebony G. Patterson, Anna Plesset, Wendy Red Star, Jean Shin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk. Engaging multigenerational perspectives, this exhibition recenters women in the canon of American art and expands how we think about land and landscape.
Here Now: Contemporary photographers of the Hudson Valley, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock, NY
August 12, 2023 - September 24, 2023
An exhibition of acclaimed Hudson Valley photo-based contemporary artists who each employ various approaches and techniques to relay stories — primarily of differing cultural backgrounds, identity issues, and a relationship to nature. Their works vary in terms of aesthetics — ranging from highly refined formalism, to capturing candid moments of current societal mores. The collective works present a compelling and insightful reflection into this present moment.
Participating Artists: Sharon Core, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Tim Davis, Phyllis Galembo, Lyle Ashton Harris, Marvin Heiferman, Dana Hoey, Carmen Lizardo, Tanya Marcuse, Pete Mauney, Qiana Mestrich, Jeffrey Milstein, Andrew Moore, Carla Rhodes, Seth David Rubin, Ryan Rusiecki, and Oliver Wasow.
Women reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle/ Contemporary Practices, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, NY
May 06, 2023 - October 29, 2023
Woven Nº 33 featured in Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle/Contemporary Practices
Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle/ Contemporary Practices is a two-part exhibition and accompanying publication illuminating the artistic contributions and perspectives of women. The project reinserts the accomplished 19th-century American artist Susie Barstow (1836-1923) into the history of the Hudson River School of landscape painting and presents work by contemporary artists who expand and challenge how we think about “land” and “landscape” today. The internationally acclaimed contemporary artists include: Teresita Fernández, Guerrilla Girls, Marie Lorenz, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Ebony G. Patterson, Anna Plesset, Jean Shin, Wendy Red Star, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk.
Undergarments & Armor, Galerie Miranda, Paris, France
November 17, 2022 - February 18, 2023
Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale, International Center of Photography curated by David Campany
New York, NY
Jan 28, 2022 – May 02, 2022
How big can a photograph be? From postcards to giant billboards, they are almost any dimension, but what happens when they are the very same scale as their subject matter? A photo of a bus the size of a bus? An actual-size image of Muhammad Ali’s fist? Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale is a playful yet philosophical exhibition that offers viewers a diverse group of images that all share the same dimension as life itself. Conceived especially for ICP’s unique double-height gallery, it is a rethinking of the fundamental qualities of this perplexing and elastic medium.
Image makers of every kind, from fine artists to advertisers, have explored the strange magic that happens when the photograph becomes an uncanny double for the world it depicts. Works by Jeff Wall, Ace Lehner, Laura Letinsky, Kija Lucas, Aspen Mays, Tanya Marcuse, and others share the walls with anonymous posters, magazine spreads, and book covers.
In 1946, the renowned writer Jorge Luis Borges described a society that wanted a map of its land so detailed that it eventually covered the land itself. Of course, the map was useless, and the inhabitants took to living on it as it disintegrated. Actual Size! is an homage to Borges’s wild but serious idea, showing us new ways to consider what a photograph is, and what it can be.
On the Basis Of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
September 10, 2021 – January 9, 2022
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale celebrates the vital contributions of generations of Yale-trained women artists to the national and international art scene. Through an exploration of their work, the exhibition charts the history of women at the Yale School of Art (formerly Yale School of the Fine Arts) and traces the ways in which they challenged boundaries of time and circumstance and forged avenues of opportunity— attaining gallery and museum representation, developing relationships with dedicated collectors, and securing professorships and teaching posts in a male-dominated art world. On view at the Yale University Art Gallery from September 10, 2021, through January 9, 2022, the exhibition commemorates two recent milestones: the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of Yale University’s admittance of its first female students who, flaunting historical precedent, were welcomed to study at the School of the Fine Arts upon its opening in 1869.
Open on K, Hemphill Artworks, Washington, DC
September 25 – November 24, 2021
Nº 2, Book of Miracles 62 x 124” UV pigment direct to dibond, 2021-22
Featuring: Rush Baker IV, Colby Caldwell, Steven Cushner, Stephanie Garon, Franz Jantzen, Mark Kelner, Tanya Marcuse, Renée Stout, and Julie Wolfe.
12 Portraits: Studies of Women at Yale, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
2020-21
The portraits featured in this exhibit are drawn from a larger series of photographs by Tanya Marcuse (MFA '90). The project was commissioned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in honor of the university-wide 50 Women at Yale 150 celebration, which aims "to showcase the depth of women's contributions to Yale and to the world, to celebrate women at the university, and to inspire thoughtful conversation about the future of women at Yale and in the larger society."
This online exhibit was created to complement the unique installation in the Sterling Library Memorabilia Room. The photographs are presented together with contact sheets and other traces of Marcuse's creative process. Exhibit text and images work together to illuminate Marcuse's process as well as the interpretive nature of the portrait.
Tanya Marcuse’s latest series of photographs, Woven, expands on her long fascination with cycles of growth and decay in the natural world. Her work features flora and fauna gathered from her immediate surroundings and composed into striking arrangements that suggest the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock with the symbolism of medieval tapestries. Woven presents an enlarged view of the world she constructed in a previous project, Fallen—a space teeming with overripe fruit, insect carcasses, bright blooms, living creatures, and other Boschian delights (and terrors). The Woven photographs are each five feet high and ten feet wide, and their intensely compacted array of plant, animal, and mineral minutiae create visually rich all-over compositions.
Each image begins with the artist collecting and arranging on a custom-built structure she designed for the purpose of creating these photographs. Her process is painstaking; in the time it takes to make each photograph, the set becomes a kind of garden or living diorama, changing color and form. The final works provide generous opportunities for up-close visual discovery, while from a distance they emit a powerful, immersive presence. At once bold and delicate, fantastical and believable, these photographs invite the viewer to ponder life and death as intricately interwoven phenomena.
The Julie Saul Gallery will feature the first exhibition of Marcuse's newest body of work, Woven, this upcoming fall. The 5 x 10 foot photographs sometimes takes weeks to compose, and during the process of composition, Marcuse considers each object both allegorically and aesthetically, using mice to represent evil, for example, but pokeweed juice to enrich the color palette. Though all made using the same process, each photograph incorporates a distinct set of conceptual and visual ideas. Some are densely packed with rotting plant and animal life, and others more open, sprinkled with small, brightly colored flowers or verdant moss.
What is common to all, however, is a sense of opulence which verges on excess, a plenty which verges on plunder. In these elaborately artificial tableaux, the inexorable movements of nature are shown. Growth and decay, beauty and terror, life and death are woven together.
Phantom Bodies, Esther Massry Gallery, College of St. Rose, Albany, NY
2017
This exhibition was co-curated by Esther Massry Gallery director Jeanne Flanagan and Lucy Bowditch, PH.D.
Phantom Bodies brings together two seminal projects, Undergarments and Armor and Wax Bodies. Both probe unsettling tensions between absence and presence, body and image, past and present. Undergarments and Armor draws together opposing categories – underwear/armor, male/female, hard/soft, armed/disarmed. Wax Bodies present haunting images of 18th century wax anatomical models found in museum collections.
Woven: In Process, Richard B. Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY
Nº 21 Woven, 2016 62 x 124"
Woven: In Process is composed of the studio prints from Marcuse's latest body of work.
Fruitless/Fallen/Woven, Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
2016
This exhibition featured seven works by photographer Tanya Marcuse including three new acquisitions. It was the first exhibition to showcase three recent bodies of work all taken in the Hudson Valley; Fruitless, black-and-white images of fruit trees captured in different seasons; Fallen, vividly colored images of fallen fruit among carefully arranged plant materials in various states of decay; and Woven, Marcuse’s newest series of large-scale color images of densely packed detritus from the natural world. For Fruitless, Marcuse traveled throughout the region seeking orchards that are in danger of vanishing as the area becomes more developed—many of those she photographed no longer exist. The resulting images depict single trees in the stark landscape bringing attention to both their grandeur and their vulnerability at once. The artist’s more recent works are created in her back yard where she spends days, sometimes weeks, collecting and arranging fruit, plants, insects, animal carcasses, and other materials to create tapestry-like patterns revealing the lush colors and textures of growth, entropy, and decay. The artist states, “I try to create photographs perched between decay and new life, randomness and order, flatness and depth, the natural and the fantastical.”
In the Garden, The Special Exhibition Galleries at the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
May 9, 2015 - September 6, 2015
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has been used to document plant life and humans’ relationship to nature. Early photographic processes required vast amounts of light during exposure, and subjects were often posed in gardens flooded with sunlight. Both scientists and artists have recorded the beauty of plant structures, watching fiddlehead ferns unfurl and observing flowers as they bloom and decay. For amateur photographers, a photograph could capture a prizewinning flower or the image of a loved one among the splendor of the garden.
George Eastman House holds a unique collection of photographs that explore uses of gardens and how humans cultivate the landscapes that surround them. From famous locations such as Versailles to the simplest home vegetable garden, from worlds imagined by artists to food production recorded by journalists, the subjects in this exhibition broaden our understanding of photography and how it has been used to record the cultivated landscape.
Spanning the history of photography and photographic processes (daguerreotype to inkjet prints), more than 75 photographers were represented, including Anna Atkins, Hippolyte Bayard, Southworth & Hawes, Eugene Atget, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Emmet Gowin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Barbara Norfleet, Mark Klett, Ablardo Morell, Andrew Buurman, Tanya Marcuse, Sharon Core, Ori Gersht, Rachel Sussman, and Brad Temkin.
- From the Eastman House press release
Phantom Bodies, The Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
September 29 - December 13, 2015
Wax Bodies Nº 187, 2007
“Phantom Bodies” brings together unique photographs taken in two parts, Undergarments (2002-2004) and Wax Bodies (2006-2008). This exhibit sets out to explore the idea of the absence of the human body in various forms and how different cultures and time periods had different ways of presenting the human body.
This exhibition was accompanied by an Artist's talk in the Center for the Arts Hall, as well as a later panel discussion on body, memory, and photography in Russel House.
Marcuse’s large-scale landscape/ground images are studies of abundance and decay, fecundity and entropy. Rendered in rich color, her tapestry-like images capture seemingly found views of the forest floor that she constructs over days and weeks using rotting fruits and leaves, along with various blossoms and insects, weaving still lives in a natural environment. Marcuse creates lavish tableaux perched between the plausible and implausible and between the painterly and the photographic. They evoke beauty and sensuality as well as the duality of life and death. Made between 2010 and 2013, the series was shot with a 4” x 5” view camera using film and printed digitally by the artist.
Reviews of the exhibition can be found here.