Venus Williams Photo by Laura Metzler, Courtesy the Carnegie Museum of Art
The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is focussing on art and landscape with a suite of projects—including a six-episode podcast hosted by the tennis legend and frequent art-fair attendee Venus Williams—to coincide with an upcoming exhibition on photography and the environment.
Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology and the Contemporary Landscape (11 May-12 January 2025) will feature nearly 100 works by 19 artists, highlighting the diversity and artistic progressivism of environmental photography. Ranging from black-and-white prints to immersive installations, the show will "defy traditional concepts of photography" while tracking the nuanced relationship between artist and nature. The companion podcast premieres on 26 June. There will also be a series of performances, readings and educational events.
A.K. Burns, before the wake, 2014 © A.K. Burns, Courtesy the artist and Michel Rein
Widening the Lens is designed around four themes that interrogate colonial legacies, position nature as a memorial landscape, consider the human impact on the environment and centre ecological anxiety and anticipation. Artists will include A.K. Burns, Dionne Lee, Xaviera Simmons, Sky Hopinka, Sam Contis, Justine Kurland, Chanell Stone and Tomás Saraceno.
“The project explicitly looks at how the camera can act as a tool to question inherited narratives about people and ecology, and foreground stories that are often overlooked or excluded,” Dan Leers, the Carnegie's curator of photography, said in a statement.
Dionne Lee, Breaking the Fall, 2016 Courtesy the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
The accompanying podcast will feature the voices of guest scholars, writers and artists. As host, Williams seeks to underscore the legacies of artists of colour while forging a partnership with the Carnegie based on her tandem interests in expanding her photographic knowledge and attracting an underrepresented audience to the museum.
In a statement, Williams called the exhibition "a deeply meaningful project
that integrates art, environment and intentional storytelling. The participating artists and thinkers you'll hear on the Widening the Lens podcast reflect diverse, global perspectives and a vast range of backgrounds and experiences; I am proud to help amplify their voices as they prompt us to consider new and alternative ways of relating to our landscapes through photography.”
