Auction Walkthrough and Coffee Discussion with Executive Director Olivia Lahs-Gonzales
And artists Adam Chin, Zackary Drucker, Larry Fink, Michael Light, and Darcy Padilla
Saturday, September 18, 2021
10:00 - 11:30 AM PDT
Zackary Drucker, Rosalyne, 2019/2021
On Saturday, September 18th from 10:00 - 11:30 AM PDT, SF Camerawork hosted an auction walkthrough and coffee discussion with Executive Director Olivia Lahs-Gonzales. She spoke with Auction Chair Jonathan Calm and introduced some of the artists in the auction who talked about the works they contributed. In a casual atmosphere, those in attendance had a wonderful opportunity to familiarize themselves with the creative vision behind several pieces put up for bidding.
ABOUT OLIVIA LAHS-GONZALES
Olivia Lahs-Gonzales (she/her) is a curator, non-profit arts director, writer, and artist. For 17 years, she was director of the Sheldon Art Galleries , where she developed and curated an art exhibition program of between 13-15 exhibitions annually weighted on diversity, inclusion and community. She came to the Sheldon from The Saint Louis Art Museum where she was Assistant Curator and Curatorial Assistant in the department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs for 9 years. Most recently, she was Associate Director of Artist Programs at the Regional Arts Commission in St. Louis and also ran a fine arts consulting business. Major exhibitions and publications include Bea Nettles: A Harvest of Memory, organized in partnership with the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (catalogue, traveling exhibit, 2019); Ralston Crawford and Jazz (catalogue, traveling exhibit, 2011; Josephine Baker: Image and Icon, (catalogue, traveled to the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., 2006-2007); Secrets of Real Estate: John Gossage; Candida Höfer; My Nature: Works with Paper by Kiki Smith (1999), Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century (1997); Photography in Modern Europe: The Spring 1996 Bulletin of The Saint Louis Art Museum, and Currents 81: Glenn Ligon (2000), among others. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia College, Chicago, working at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as Curatorial Assistant and Education Manager. Lahs-Gonzales was Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where for 3 years she taught a class in the history of photography. She received her B.A. (Honors) degree from West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, Surrey, England, and as a working artist, has exhibited her own photographs and drawings in Chicago, London, Taipei, Tokyo, and St. Louis.
ABOUT ADAM CHIN
Adam Chin is a fine art photographer who spent a career as a computer graphics artist for TV and film. He was one of the original employees of Pacific Data Images, a pioneering computer graphics studio that later became part of Dreamworks Animation. Adam did computer graphics lighting on the Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda series of animated feature films. Adam practices using machine learning neural networks trained on databases of real photography to render images. By augmenting traditional photography with neural networks, he explores the concept of how much information is contained in a given photograph. In doing this work, he also examines the problematic issues created by this new medium. Adam studied photography and printmaking under Barry Umstead at Rayko Photography in San Francisco. In 2020, he was named one of the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 photo portfolio award winners.
ABOUT ZACKARY DRUCKER
Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, filmmaker, and cultural producer. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Whitney Biennial 2014 and MoMA PS1, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Art Gallery of Ontario; MCA San Diego; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among others. Drucker is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docuseries This Is Me and was a producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy Award–winning Amazon show Transparent. The Lady and The Dale, her directorial debut for television, premiered on HBO in early 2021.
ABOUT LARRY FINK
Working as a professional photographer for over 60 years, Larry Fink has had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He has shown work in museums all over the world. Larry currently has a retrospective of his work at Galerie Bene Taschen in Cologne, Germany. He recently exhibited a retrospective of his work at Fotografia Europea in Italy, and also had a 2019 solo show at the deCordova Sculpture Park Museum in Boston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In 2017, Larry was the recipient of the Lucie Award for Documentary Photography. In 2015, he received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Fine Art Photography. He has also been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Photography Fellowships. He taught for over 50 years, with professorial positions held at Yale University, New Haven, CT; Cooper Union, New York; and lastly at Bard College, New York, where he is an honored professor emeritus.
Larry’s first monograph, the seminal Social Graces (Aperture, 1984), left a lasting impression in the photographic community. Twelve other monographs have been published, with the subject matter crossing the class barrier in unexpected ways. Two of his most recently published books were on several “Best Of” lists of the year: The Beats (Artiere/powerhouse) and Larry Fink on Composition and Improvisation (Aperture). Fink on Warhol: New York Photographs of the 1960s (2017) features rare photographs of Andy Warhol and his friends at the Factory interspersed with street scenes and the political atmosphere of 1960s New York. Also released in 2017 was The Polarities, chronicling five years of recent work, and The Outpour, containing images taken at and around the Women’s March on Washington, DC.
ABOUT MICHAEL LIGHT
Michael Light (b. 1963) is a Bay Area photographer, bookmaker, and pilot. He has exhibited globally including solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, the Chrysler Museum, VA, the Knoxville Museum of Art, TN, and the Hayward Gallery, London. His work is in numerous museum collections including SFMOMA, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Hasselblad Center, Sweden and the Victoria & Albert, London. Over the course of his career the artist has published 23 editions of 7 monographs. His awards include: The John Simon Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography the Artadia Award. Light’s work has been written about and published in such publications as Art in America, Artforum, Time, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, British Journal of Photography, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Wired. His series FULL MOON is permanently displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
ABOUT DARCY PADILLA
Darcy Padilla is a documentary photographer based in San Francisco and a member photographer of Agence VU' in Paris. Padilla earned her MFA from the University of California, Davis, and she is an associate professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Padilla’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Open Society Institute Individual Fellowship, Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, Getty Images Grant, International Photo-reporter Grant, Canon Female Photojournalist Award, World Report Master Award, three World Press Photo Awards, and a W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. She was a judge on Sky Arts’ Master of Photography, a television program simulcast to Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The novelist Emmanuel Carrère profiled her for the premiere issue of 6Mois (France) and selected it for his collection 97,196 Words: Essays.
Her photographs have been exhibited and published internationally, including in Granta, Stern, The New Yorker, Le Monde, and The New York Times, with solo exhibitions at Cortona On The Move (Italy), Festival Nicéphore (France), Visa pour l’image (France), and DOCfield Festival (Spain) at the contemporary art museum Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona. Her work is held in the collections of the Chazen Museum, Madison, WI; Soros Foundation, New York; and Banco Sabadell Art Collection, Barcelona.
Padilla’s monograph Family Love, published by Éditions de La Martinière in France, follows a family for 21 years—an intimate story of poverty, AIDS, and social issues. Her work focuses on long-term projects about struggle and the transgenerational effects.
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