Laura Wexler

Artist lecture Thursday, March 19, 2015 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, San Francisco

Laura Wexler is professor of American Studies, professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale University. Her scholarship primarily centers on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and class in film and photography from the nineteenth century to the present-day in the United States. She teaches courses such as The History of Photography, Visuality and Violence, Photography, History and Memory, Gender & Sexuality in Media & Popular Culture and Digital Humanities. Professor Wexler has authored numerous books on these subjects, including Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co–authored with photographer Sandra Matthews. Most recently, she contributed to A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Professor Wexler completed her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College, having also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied photography. She holds M.A., M. Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature. In addition to Yale University, she has taught at institutions including Columbia University, Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University and Peking University.

Wexler is now at work on a monograph about race and American visual culture, The Awakening of Cultural Memory: Heritage Fiction and Photographic Truth, and a collection of essays, The Look, The Gaze and the Relay Race: Photography and Everyday Memory.  Here she explores of the work of Diane Arbus, Roman Vishniac, and Randolf Linsly Simpson, among others.


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.