Linda Alpern. Photo: Gianna Volpe
Creative Lab is a series of interdisciplinary workshops designed and led by Guild Hall’s Visiting, Exhibiting, and Resident artists. Each Creative Lab invites participants to learn about an artist’s practice through an open lecture and a participatory workshop.
This evening’s Lab is led by documentary photographer, Linda K Alpern. Alpern has spent decades photographing subjects in and around New York City and at her home on the East End of Long Island. Among them are poignant portraits of her communities, patients, and close relationships with artists such as Alfonso Ossorio, Chuck Close, and Mable D’Amico.
The Lab will focus on Alpern’s photography practice, evoking ideas of time & memory, experimentation with film & various reflective surfaces, and her work currently on view in the Guild Hall exhibition, A Creative Retreat – Portraits of Artists.
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Linda K Alpern
Linda K. Alpern was born in Long Beach New York and raised in Fort Lauderdale Florida.
Her self-taught career in photography spans 25 years. Alpern’s work appears in three permanent collections: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York and The Parrish Museum, in Watermill, New York, where she has participated in many group shows. In 2003, she was an Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. In 2005, Linda entered one photograph in a Guild Hall competition that featured a variety of art forms.
Tracey Bashkoff, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum, found it the best in any medium: the award was a one woman show of 65 photographs; including silver gelatin, black-and-white prints, with a few color ink-jet images – almost all of which were portraits.
A contemporaneous review by Robert Long in the East Hampton Star compares her to major photographers. He writes of her work with reflective mylar for purposes of distortion: “Eccentric Weegee,” she has a fondness for funhouse images. ..The artist Chuck Close, floating on his back, seems to be wearing a life mask, for only the front portion of his face breaks the surface and is sharply focused, while the rest of his head, underwater, seems unreal.” And comments on her photographs from Rome. “Ms. Alpern does as the Romans once did - the Italian filmmakers of the new wave, that is, and their colleagues in the Magnum school of photojournalism.”
Long concludes ,”Ms. Alpern is a photographer who not only has produced enough first-rate work to fill a gallery, but who leaves us wanting more.” Ms. Alpern’s work has become a staple in group shows on the East End of Long Island. – including Juried and Invitational Exhibitions.
Her current photographs reflect affinity for places and subjects from which many look away. Her particular penchant for photographing children is evident in the” Laundromat Series” taken in a resort area where children play as their immigrant parents do their wash and find community, respite from their service jobs.
Photo: Jenny Gorman
Sponsors
Guild Hall’s Learning + New Works programs are made possible through The Patti Kenner Arts Education Fellowship, the Glickberg/Abrahams S.Kutler Foundation, Stephanie Joyce & Jim Vos, the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Endowment Fund, and The Melville Straus Family Endowment.
Museum programs are supported by Crozier Fine Arts and funding from The Michael Lynne Museum Endowment and The Melville Straus Family Endowment.
Free gallery admission is sponsored, in part, by Landscape Details.