After thirty-six years of teaching at Princeton University, photographer Emmet Gowin retires at the end of 2009. To mark the occasion, to honor Gowin’s generosity as a teacher and perpetual student, and to celebrate his artistic legacy, the Princeton University Art Museum will present Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait, on view October 24, 2009, through February 21, 2010.
Sam Fentress, Emmet Gowin, ca. 1982. Gelatin silver print, 20.3 x 25.4 cm. From the collection of Emmet Gowin Photo: Bruce M. White
The exhibition features nearly fifty-five works including photographs by Gowin’s principal mentors, Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer; highlights from Gowin’s multifaceted body of work; and photographs by twenty of his students, ranging in graduation year from 1976 to 2008. Since engaging with photography at Gowin’s side, the students have gone on to pursue paths as diverse as anthropology, social activism, education, publishing, the fine arts, filmmaking, and design, but all of them locate the roots of their inspiration in Gowin’s depthless faith in the power of photography as a medium, a discipline, and a way of life.
“I can think of nothing more fitting for Princeton than celebrating Emmet’s legacy as teacher and artist,” said Museum director James Steward. “In both modes, he has fundamentally helped to shape how we look at the world, influencing generations of students who carry on this tradition of close-looking, documenting, and experimenting.”
As the exhibition reveals, Gowin has taught a diverse array of major figures at work in photography today. Andrew Moore (Class of 1979), a widely published photographer of cities and architecture, is represented by an outtake from his new series on the decline and transformation of Detroit. Landscapist Laura McPhee (Class of 1980) contributes a study of an enormous banyan tree sprouting from the roof of a temple in India. David Maisel (Class of 1984) has donated a triptych portraying sealed copper cans containing the ashes of inhabitants of an asylum; over the years, each canister has developed colorful chemical blooms that hint at the complexity of the human histories it contains. Fazal Sheikh (Class of 1988), a Macarthur Prize-winning portraitist of subjects in troubled regions of Africa, Afghanistan, and India, is represented by a portrait he made in Kenya while still a student in Gowin’s class.
By Gowin’s reckoning, his own creative maturation started in the late 1960s, just a few years before he was hired at Princeton. The key, for him, lay in photographing what was nearest to him in proximity, scale, and emotional resonance: his wife, Edith, their sons Elijah and Isaac, and Edith’s extended family in Danville, Virginia. His scope of concern widened to embrace landscape in the 1970s, and during the next decade, with the adoption of an aerial viewpoint, Gowin bore witness to the earth’s large-scale alteration by the forces of modern history. Recently he has recalibrated his attention to still another scale, creating minute color studies of the moths of Central and South America.
Born in Danville, Virginia, in 1941, Emmet Gowin has taught in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton since 1973. He received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1967. While at RISD, he studied under Harry Callahan, one of his principal mentors and greatest influences. Gowin is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974); two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1977 and 1979); a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for 1993–94; the 1983 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Pennsylvania; the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 1997; and the Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 2006.
Gowin’s work is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, including solo shows and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Espace Photographique, Paris; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; and the Princeton University Art Museum, where a solo exhibition was previously mounted in 1998. Gowin’s photographs are held in museum collections worldwide.
Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Exhibition Support
The exhibition and publication have been made possible by the Charina Foundation; Philip F. Maritz, Class of 1983, and Jennifer Shaffer Maritz; Mark Schwartz; Naomi Wolfensohn, Class of 1987; and Adam Wolfensohn, Class of 1992; the Minor White Photography Publications Fund; the Frances E. and Elias Wolf Fund; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The opening reception and associated programming have been supported by the Friends and Partners of the Princeton University Art Museum and the Lewis Center for the Arts.
About the Museum
Founded in 1882, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the finest art museums in the country. Its collections feature approximately 72,000 works ranging from ancient to contemporary art, and concentrating geographically on the Mediterranean regions, Western Europe, China, the United States, and Latin America, with particular strengths in Chinese painting and calligraphy, art of the ancient Americas, and pictorial photography. As a public institution, the Museum is committed to serving the local community, the region, and beyond through innovative and dynamic programming, original research and new scholarship, an active loan program, and the organization of touring exhibitions. By collaborating with experts across many disciplines, fostering sustained study of original works of art, and uniting scholarship with broad accessibility, the Museum contributes to the development of critical thinking and visual literacy at Princeton University and enhances the civic fabric of our nation.
The Princeton University Art Museum is located at the heart of the Princeton University campus, and only a short walk from the shops and restaurants on Princeton’s Nassau Street. Museum admission is free and open to the public. Hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; Thursday, 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.; and Sunday, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Free highlights tours of the collection are given every Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. The Museum is closed Mondays and major holidays. For information, please visit the Museum’s Web site at http://artmuseum.princeton.edu or call (609) 258-3788.
