28 March 2023: 10×10 and the New York Public Library Picture Collection co-hosted a salon with 2022 Artist Fellows Christian Patterson and Laura Glazer in conversation with Jessica Cline, Supervising Librarian of the Picture Collection, at the library.
The Picture Collection Artist Fellowship supports artists or scholars engaged in the research, development, and/or execution of a new creative or scholarly work based on the Collection’s holdings.
For his Picture Collection fellowship, Christian Patterson proposed the difficult task of searching for occurrences of text that are incidental to the collection — words and phrases found in pictures; text that carries linguistic meaning and might also have its own visual qualities. Working with a small team of dedicated assistants, Patterson also decided to take on the monumental task of searching the entire circulating collection, sifting through most of its 12,000 subject folders and 1.5 million clippings. Over the course of six months, the team collected nearly 3,000 pieces of text, which Patterson hopes to eventually edit, juxtapose and recontextualize in book or other printed form.
Christian Patterson’s visually layered work deals with archives, photography, memory, place and time. His books include Redheaded Peckerwood, Bottom of the Lake and the forthcoming Gong Co. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, lectures and teaches widely, and runs the Garage, where he collaborates with artists on books, prints and exhibitions, with proceeds to non-profit organizations. His work will be exhibited at Recontres d’Arles this summer and he will be a resident at the James Castle House later this year. (@christian.patterson)
Laura Glazer’s project See Also responds to the Picture Collection as a social environment and place for sharing knowledge and learning from each other. Working on-site at the Collection, she watched as researchers looked at pictures and talked with them about what they saw. These conversations became a way to meet people, with project participants letting her into their research in the Collection and most importantly, their lives outside the library. The resulting photography book See Also: Making Friends at the NYPL Picture Collection documents the relationships that emerged from looking at pictures together.
Laura Glazer is an artist whose work is socially-engaged and depends on the participation of other people, sometimes a close friend, and other times, complete strangers. She holds a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and is an MFA candidate in Art and Social Practice at Portland State University. She is based in Portland, Oregon. (@helloprettycity)
Since its creation in 1915, the New York Public Library Picture Collection has met the needs of New York’s large community of artists, illustrators, designers, teachers, students and general researchers. Covering over 12,000 subjects, the Picture Collection is an extensive circulating collection and reference archive of picture clippings, the largest of its kind in any public library system. (@nyplpicturecollection)
The Picture Collection Artist Fellowship allows dedicated access to the Collection and guidance from its staff with the goal of highlighting the Collection’s distinctive attributes. The fellowship will also foster community connections with peers and experts allowing for collaborative exchange. Fellowship awards are supported by the generosity of the Anne Levy Charitable Trust.
Thank you to Ellen Mahoney of the Center for Research in the Humanities and Deirdre Donohue of the Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs — and a special thank you to Jessica Cline of the Picture Collection — for coordinating this salon with 10×10.