Philip Gefter and Mike Mandel

Artist lecture Saturday, March 15, 2014 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco
Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Oranges on Fire, 1975

Philip Gefter is an author and photography critic. He was on staff at The New York Times for more than fifteen years, where as page one picture editor and then senior picture editor for culture, he wrote regularly about photography. Early in his career, Gefter was a picture editor at Fortune and an Assistant Editor at Aperture. In 2010, he produced the award-winning documentary Bill Cunningham New York. The recipient of a Museum Scholar residency at the Getty Research Institute, he has recently completed a biography of curator-collector, Sam Wagstaff.

Mike Mandel grew up in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley during a period of expansion and transformation of the landscape that included the appearance of billboards, strip malls, and miles of freeways. This experience informs much of his work, which questions the meaning of photographic imagery within popular culture and draws from snapshots, advertising, news photographs, and public and corporate archives.

In 1977, Mandel and Larry Sultan collaborated on the seminal photographic book Evidence, comprised of file photographs from engineering, corporate and government agencies. Over a period of twenty-five years, Mandel and Sultan designed both temporary and permanent artworks specifically for public sites. Their collaboration has been documented in a recent monograph Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel (2012).

Since the early 1990s, Mandel has worked extensively on public art projects transforming photographic imagery into large scale glass and ceramic tile mosaic murals. He has been awarded several NEA grants and a Fulbright Fellowship. This spring, he will serve as a visiting lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.


Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.


Larry Sultan Photography Award


Jonathan Calm, Double Vision (Recording I), 2018

Jonathan Calm

Fall 2019 Residency
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA

Click HERE for more information on the Larry Sultan Photography Award

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In his most recent work, Calm explores the complex representation of African-American automobility from a historical and contemporary perspective, focusing and drawing on the importance and resonance of the Negro Motorist Green Book. Of this project, he explains, “the image of the infinite highway and the unbridled freedom to roam the land has always been considered a quintessential expression of the modern American spirit, but the black American experience of travel, which involves heightened subjectivity and exposure, has to this day proven a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.”

Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Calm currently lives in Palo Alto, CA where he is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.