2018 GRANTEES

Carnegie Museum of Art

Today, the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) is one of the most dynamic major art institutions in America. CMOA’s collection of more than 30,000 objects features a broad spectrum of visual arts, including painting and sculpture; prints and drawings; photographs; architectural casts, renderings, and models; decorative arts and design; and film, video, and digital imagery. Through their programming, exhibitions, and publications, CMOA frequently explores the role of art and artists in confronting key social issues of our time, combining and juxtaposing local and global perspectives. With CMOA’s unique history and resources, the museum strives to become a leader in defining the role of art museums for the 21st century.

Marcia Resnick, born in Brooklyn, NY in 1950, received her BFA from Cooper Union where she first experimented with photography. Eventually, she would obtain an MFA from CalArts where she studied with John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis and her advisor Ben Lifson. Despite being heavily involved with and influenced by the California conceptual art scene, Resnick returned to New York in the 1970s to embark on several important bodies of work. One of those was her Landscape/Loftscape series begun in 1976. Using her own existing landscape photographs (mostly made in the American West), Resnick set about recreating those scenes in her New York City apartment with crude and playful props. Speaking about the series, Resnick notes, “I had all these landscape images in my house, and I was stuck in New York so I started to recreate the landscapes in miniature and photograph them… It’s a comment on photography and how it flattens dimensions and how a photograph isn’t really the thing itself.”

AE&E Fund is proud to underwrite the acquisition of this pair of Marcia Resnick’s photographs and aid in Carnegie Museum of Art’s efforts to broaden its collection. These works by a female artist at the cutting-edge of conceptual photography in the 1970s contributes to CMOA’s continued interests in expanding their holdings to include important, yet overlooked artists whose contributions to the field deserve recognition.

Photos below courtesy of Deborah Bell Photographs, New York,
and Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., San Francisco
© 2018 Marcia Resnick

These recreated landscapes bring a refreshing whimsy to a long-established photographic tradition and invite viewers to reconsider their own relationship to their environment. The chocolate jelly rings Resnick uses as stand-ins for the discarded tires in Landscape/Loftscape 13, 1976 are comical acknowledgements of the referent and also a cynical commentary on America’s consumerist tendencies. This work is also an important commentary on the nature and function of photography as something that represents reality, but is not necessarily “real” itself.