Janna Ireland Exhibits at SBMA and MCASB
To round out Black History Month, the exhibit by Janna Ireland, titled Janna Ireland: True Story Index, is up through June 2 at both the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art SB. The exhibit was co-curated by SBMA Curator of Photography and New Work Charles Wylie and MCASB President Frederick Janka.
Ireland has been busy with interviews, museum member openings, and her work as an assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. One of her last public info sessions took place at the SBMA titled, “A Morning with Janna Ireland,” on Sunday, February 25.
The talk was well attended and of highlight present was Carmen Beals, the Curator of the Nevada State Museum Associate Curator and Outreach Manager for Ireland’s series on Paul R. Williams.
Ireland presented details on her Pauline series, one which clearly remains close to her vest as she explained, “A lot of my work deals with my family. Artists focus on three main things in their work. For me it is home, hands, and eyes. When my grandmother passed away, I inherited her photographs. I wanted to give them a second life. Doing the work in the darkroom was a part of the process – to add elements and overlay them to her original photographs like flowers, jewelry, and her signature and words. The work is about my mourning her and all my labor to do by hand took me five months as an expression of grief. There are 21 individual images, but I consider it one work. I teach my students about how a photograph itself survives and that the life of the image can continue.”
Wylie, Janka, and the attendees posed questions after her presentation. Remarks made by Ireland included, “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the future of my practice or the people looking at my images. My work on Paul Williams will not continue. It took me seven years and feels done.”
The talk was followed by a walk through the SBMA galleries showing her works. The SBMA acquired 17 photographs for their permanent collection. The joint museum show has works selected from Family Album: Dannielle Bowman, Janna Ireland’s personal collection, and her Contemporary Works from LACMA, The Spotless Mirror series, the Milk and Honey series, and her photography of the architectural works by Black architect Paul R. Williams, which were featured in exhibitions at the Nevada State Museum and the AIA Center for Architecture in NYC. There was a reception for Ireland and attendees of the talk at the MCASB afterwards.
Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.
411: www.sbma.net/exhibitions/jannaireland
www.mcasantabarbara.org/exhibition/janna-ireland/
