Salon #12-Barbara Tannenbaum and TR Ericsson

9 September 2016: 10×10 Salon with Barbara Tannenbaum and TR Ericsson hosted by Richard and Ronnie Grosbard at their home in Manhattan.

We enjoyed a fantastic salon focused on photo-zines, DIY photobooks and artists’ books with presentations by artist TR Ericsson, the creative voice behind the 150-issue Crackle & Drag Zines, and Cleveland Museum of Art Photography Curator Barbara Tannenbaum, who organized DIY: Photographers & Books, one of the first American museum exhibitions on DIY and indie photobooks.

In 2015, Tannebaum curated TR Ericsson: Crackle & Drag at the Transformer Station, a free space for contemporary art in Cleveland. The show presented Ericsson’s zines and mixed-media works, which mine photographs, documents, writings, film stills, and artifacts from his family archives dating back to the 1930s. Chronicling several generations of his Midwestern American family—with many of the pictures of his mother, who committed suicide in 2003—the series evokes universal themes of love and loss. The Crackle & Drag exhibition catalogue was shortlisted in 2015 for the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook Awards.

Barbara Tannenbaum, Curator of Photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been involved with artists’ books since the mid-1970s. She has organized almost 100 exhibitions including solo shows of TR Ericsson, Adam Fuss, Hank Willis Thomas, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lois Conner, and Andrew Moore as well as the first museum show of print-on-demand photobooks, DIY: Photographers & Books.

TR Ericsson’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad including those with Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Switzerland; Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery, NY, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels. Ericsson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Yale University Library (Special Collections) and the Progressive Art Collection as well as numerous private collections. The artist’s first solo museum exhibition TR Ericsson: Crackle & Drag opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art on May 23, 2015. A hybrid artist’s book and scholarly monograph published by the Cleveland Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press accompanied the exhibition.

Richard and Ronnie Grosbard hosted the the event at her home in Manhattan. Thank you Richard and Ronnie!