Lecture: Richard Barnes

Join us for a public lecture by Richard Barnes, photographer, on Monday, March 9, 2020.

Barnes will be lecturing on Constructing Illusion: Framing the Wild. Using architecture as a point of departure, Richard Barnes discusses his photographic investigations into the built environment. His practice looks at site and artifact through archaeological excavations, museum dioramas, the Unabomber’s cabin, hybrid bird’s nests, and site-specific installations. The human desire to exert control over nature plays a role in all of these constructions. His work challenges our preconceptions of how architecture functions in the world on a cultural and perceptual level.

Richard Barnes divides his time between commissioned work and personal projects. He looks at architecture as artifact and, placing within the context of archaeology, challenges our conceptions of the way we inhabit and represent the built environment. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and many others. He has had numerous exhibitions in this country and abroad including solo exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the University of Michigan, among others. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2005/06 and his photographs from Rome formed the basis for his book and installation titled, “Animal Logic.” He was the recipient of the Sidman Fellowship for the Arts and Humanities at the University of Michigan in 2009 and was awarded the Julius Shulman Award in Photography for 2011. His body of work on the Unabomber cabin was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. He works on assignment for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and National Geographic.

This lecture is funded by the Robert B. Church Memorial Lecture fund.

Unless otherwise noted, lectures begin at 5:30 p.m. in Rm. 109/McCarty Auditorium in the Art + Architecture Building, 1715 Volunteer Blvd. All are welcome.