Salon #72 — New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellows: Audra Wolowiec, Michelle Maguire and Noah Doely

Join us for a 10×10 Salon featuring the current projects of New York Public Library Picture Collection Artist Fellows: Audra Wolowiec, Michelle Maguire and Noah Doely.

Audra Wolowiec will present WAV,  a project initiated during her Artist Fellowship at the NYPL Picture Collection, to locate images that evoke sound, silence, and noise. In addition, she will share AIR, an artist book edition and vinyl LP published by her publishing platform Gravel Projects, inviting sonic and visual interpretations of breath.

Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York whose work explores sound and the material qualities of language. Her work has been shown internationally and across the United States. Wolowiec teaches at Parsons School of Design and directs the publishing platform Gravel Projects. 

For their collaborative NYPL Picture Collection fellowship, Michelle Maguire and Noah Doely browsed the collection, searching for a diverse range of subject matter that illustrates things hiding in plain sight. Their goal was to spotlight veiled examples from the natural and human-made worlds that embody a broad spectrum of the things that are not what they seem—from masters of imitation to clumsy disguises and everything in between—compiling visual material that will ultimately become a book. Maguire will also share Leaks, Squeaks and Cheeks, a side project focusing on three commonplace, straight-faced subjects that evoke Ed Ruscha’s playful use of serial sequences and rhyme schemes.

Maguire is drawn to things that are deadpan, things that contain layered and ambiguous meanings, and things that surprise and delight. Her self-published books about family anecdotes and the extension of memory are in the permanent collections of Yale, Harvard, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Center for Book Arts.

Doely’s work explores the paradoxical relationship between seeing and belief through photography, sculpture, and video. He received an MFA from UC San Diego and has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, MacDowell and the Penumbra Foundation, where he regularly teaches workshops. 

This salon is graciously hosted by the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library.