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ARTtalk – Joan Myers and Steve Fitch: The New West, An Old Story
Apr 7, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Location: Online – A link to access the event will be emailed to each registrant.
Cost: FREE
Join us as Joan Myers and Steve Fitch share the artistic practice and insights behind their exhibition, The New West, An Old Story, currently being exhibited at the Turchin Center!
Since the 1860s, photographs have been instrumental in promoting the West as an unexplored wilderness and the land of opportunity. Myers and Fitch are challenging the romantic myth of the American West to reflect the cultural, environmental, and racial complexities of our shared histories more accurately in an on-going conversation about what it means to be an American, how identity and the landscape are intertwined and what the real West looks like today.
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About the Artists
Joan Myers
Joan Myers has been taking photographs for more than forty years, exploring the relationships between people and the land. Myers turned to photography during the early 1970s as her life’s work. Her photographs have since appeared in more than fifty solo and eighty group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe including three Smithsonian exhibitions.
Her images are in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Center for Creative Photography, Denver Art Museum, George Eastman House, High Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Nevada Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Her award-winning books include Fire and Ice: Timescapes (Damaiani, 2016), The Jungle at the Door: A Glimpse of Wild India (George F. Thompson, 2012), Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins 2006), Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (New Mexico 1999), Pie Town Woman (New Mexico, 2001), Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II (Washington, 1996), Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds (New Mexico, 1991) and Along the Santa Fe Trail (New Mexico, 1986). Her current work centers on the American West. Myers maintains her studio and residence near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Steve Fitch
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology in 1971, Steve Fitch worked for five years photographing along America’s two-lane highways. In 1976, the photographs were published in a book entitled, Diesels and Dinosaurs: Photographs from the American Highway. After completing his master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from the University of New Mexico in 1878, Fitch worked on several other projects. His photographs have been widely exhibited and collected as well a published in a number of books including Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art (1988), Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains (2003), An Island in the Sky: Llano Estacado (2011), Motel Signs (2011), American Motel Signs, 1980 to 2008 (2016), Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks (2018) and most recently, American Motel Signs, 1980 to 2018 (2020).
Steve Fitch has always been an educator, he taught photography for forty-two years at the University of Colorado, Boulder; The University of Texas, San Antonio; Princeton University and Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Fitch has received four National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships as well as the Eliot Porter Fellowship. Retired from teaching but not from image making, Steve Fitch lives off the grid with his wife and two dogs in a passive solar adobe house they constructed themselves in rural Santa Fe County, New Mexico.
