Debuting at the High this fall and co-organized with the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography and the Cleveland Museum of Art, this groundbreaking exhibition will feature a powerful body of work by Kelli Connell (American, born 1974) that reconsiders the complicated relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston from a contemporary queer and feminist perspective.
Through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s photographs, Connell enriches our understanding of the couple and weaves their stories together with her own artistic practice. Using their publications and archives as a guide, Connell and her partner, Betsy Odom, traveled to locales where Wilson and Weston lived, made work, and spent time together. Along the way, Connell collaboratively made photographs of Odom that upend conventional notions of photographer and muse. She also photographed, in a raw and less idealized manner, the grand Western landscapes that Weston made iconic seventy-five years before.
The exhibition will include more than forty of Connell’s recent large-format portrait and landscape photographs, along with dozens of Weston’s classic figure studies and landscapes made between 1934 and 1945, one of his most productive periods and the span of his relationship with Wilson. Four of Connell’s photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the High’s collection, exemplifying the museum’s recent commitment to growing its holdings of work by queer artists.
