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Art on the Square
Harvard hosts Gary Schneider and Kehinde Wiley
BY RANDI HOPKINS

The self can be viewed through many lenses. South African–born artist Gary Schneider uses materials ranging from 19th-century negatives found at a flea market to complex modern medical photo microscopy developed in collaboration with scientists to create "portraits" that not only challenge our notions of portraiture and likeness but also push the medium of photography to extremes. Opening at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum on Saturday, "Gary Schneider: Portraits," the first major exhibition to present an overview of this artist’s career, examines the artist’s ongoing absorption with science and his intertwined obsessions with found objects, biography, and autobiography.

Organized by the Fogg’s fab photography curator, Deborah Martin Kao, "Gary Schneider: Portraits" begins with early black-and-white fragmented portraits and multiple-exposure Polaroid SX70s, revealing from the get-go his complex vision of what it means to capture the image of a person. The show includes Schneider’s masterful, 55-panel installation Genetic Self-Portrait (1997-1998), which combines greatly magnified representations of his own chromosomes with handprints and ear-print photographs created using the much lower-tech but equally intensely intimate processes of sweat- and heat-imprinted negatives.

Writing about this body of work in connection with an exhibition presented in New York in 2000, Schneider expressed his personal interest in making images of our genetic make-up: "In 1996, I was approached to make work in response to the Human Genome Project. I decided to marry my obsession with biology and portraiture. My mother had just died of cancer, and I wanted to know if I had a genetic predisposition. . . . I explored images harvested from my own biology, sometimes scientific, sometimes whimsical. It became . . . my emotional response to the issue of privacy in the new World of Genome." Visitors interested in getting behind the images can join curator Deborah Martin Kao for a gallery talk this Sunday, or the artist himself on March 14.

Listening to contemporary artists speak about their work can be ear-opening, and our education-oriented town offers oodles of opportunities to learn how some of these folks’ minds work. Next Thursday at 4 p.m. at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, New York–based painter Kehinde Wiley and curator Christine Y. Kim of Harlem’s Studio Museum engage in a public dialogue on the topic "Revisiting Black Romantic," by which they mean the Studio Museum’s controversial 2002 exhibition featuring figurative painting and sculpture by African-American artists, including Wiley, who refers to the likes of Gainsborough and Titian in his contemporary portraits of young urban black men. His traditional/untraditional art touches the heart of this provocative topic; this dialogue should raise questions, eyebrows, and blood pressure.

"Gary Schneider: Portraits" is at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway in Harvard Square, February 28 through June 13. Curator Deborah Martin Kao gives a gallery talk on February 29 at 2 p.m.; Gary Schneider gives one on March 14 at 2 p.m. Talks are free with museum admission; call (617) 495-9400. Kehinde Wiley and Christine Y. Kim give a free talk, "Revisiting Black Romantic," at Harvard’s Carpenter Center Lecture Hall, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, on March 4 at 4 p.m.; call (617) 495-3251.


Issue Date: February 27 - March 4, 2004
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