Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. The first large-scale retrospective of her fifty-year career, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory demonstrates this celebrated artist’s experimental approaches to art-making.
Made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. At KAM, the exhibition is supported by the Rosann Gelvin Noel Fund. Co-sponsored by the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Paid for in part by the Student Cultural Programming Fee.
Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand‐coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in the lives of women, often with autobiographic undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.
Recognized for her innovations in mixed media photography, Nettles has taught photography and visual book-making since 1970, when she completed her MFA in the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she later taught from 1984 to 2008. Her alternative processes textbook Breaking the Rules: A Photo Media Cookbook has influenced generations of readers, and she has delivered lectures and workshops internationally. Her work is in museum collections throughout the United States and Canada, and her artists’ books can be found in special collections libraries, including significant holdings at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Illinois.
A 200+ page, fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Jamie M. Allen, George Eastman Museum; Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, former Director, The Sheldon Art Galleries; and Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Krannert Art Museum accompanies the exhibition.
See Art by Bea Nettles in the KAM Collection
Organized by the George Eastman Museum and the Sheldon Art Galleries. Co-curated by by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, former Director, the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis, Missouri; and Jamie Allen, Associate Curator, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York
Curated at Krannert Art Museum by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
