PAUL MELLON DISTINGUISHED FELLOW
Catherine Opie
Dana Schutz
Teddy Cruz
has produced a complex body of photographic work, creating series of images that explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures to her expansive urban landscapes, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in lush and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects. Last year the Guggenheim Museum, New York, mounted a major mid-career survey of her work entitled Catherine Opie: American Photographer. She has also had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally including such venues as: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; ArtPace, San Antonio; The Photographers' Gallery, London; Saint Louis Art Museum; Walker Art Center; and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Opie has been awarded numerous honors including a United States Artists Fellowship (2006). She lives and works in Los Angeles.
is a New York based painter whose work depicts activities that precede an event, making visible the pictorial moment, frozen and deferred, before an image comes into being and form becomes manifest. Schutz treats the picture as a material, a malleable situation where the rearrangement of objects is implied. Bodies are props and seem to have come from a previous context. Some paintings depict suspended narratives in which the objects and characters appear to have been singed, as if something terrible happened from outside the frame. In Schutz’s new work, preliminary information, such as schematic stains and thumbnail sketches, remains visible and is incorporated into the finished paintings. Linear marks deface the picture. Features peel off their subjects. Spaces dissolve as washes misalign with patterned fields. As Schutz shows us around the sunny and anxious territory of her most recent fiction, the paintings unmake themselves in front of us. Her work has been shown internationally. Schutz attended Skowhegan in 1999.
Teddy Cruz’s groundbreaking work integrates research, theory, and design production to create architecture, interiors, furniture, installations, public art, and landscape interventions in a context that embraces the complexities of cultural exchange and the potential for design to transform urban policy. He founded his architectural practice estudio teddy cruz in San Diego and the city’s porous cultural and demographic border with Tijuana, Mexico, has inspired much of his practice and pedagogy. Reversing the dominant model for exchange in which formal solutions trump the vernacular and improvisatory Cruz’s work brings the vibrancy and practicality of informal architecture to projects on the U.S. side of the border. He is widely recognized for his collaboration with nonprofit community-based organizations to create affordable housing solutions that support the development of a rich civic life. Cruz has also published essays in numerous architectural journals and magazines and has received the Rome Prize for Architecture. estudio teddy cruz has received many awards for projects on both sides of the border, and was most recently featured in the American Pavilion at the 2008 Architectural Biennale in Venice. Cruz is an Associate Professor in Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego.
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