Ruth Leonard Secures a Calf in Her Pasture
Continuing my look at graduating student work, from the SVA (School of Visual Art) MFA program, this provocative group of images by Debbie Grossman. Based on Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee's classic 1940 portrait of Pie Town, New Mexico, Grossman appropriates and photoshops Lee's photographs to re-imagine Pie Town as a homestead community populated exclusively by women.
Grossman's website is also worth checking out for a few more Pietown images and a sad but moving work that's a poignant tribute to her mother.
Jessie Evans-Whinery with Her Wife Edith and Their Baby
Community Meeting
Couple at a Square Dance
Jean and Virginia Norris, Homesteaders and Town Founders
And the Russell Lee original:
This also brings to mind this piece by Kathy Grove - a professional retoucher and artist whose conceptual work involved retouching iconic images. Here her ironic prettifying of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother".
