The Monson Arts Gallery, in collaboration with the Marlborough Gallery, New York, is pleased to announce its summer exhibition, Berenice Abbott’s Greenwich Village, featuring her original vintage photographs from the 1930’s and 1940’s.
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer. — Berenice Abbott
The above statement describes, in a line, one of the most creative, prolific and single-minded artists in art history. This exhibition of over thirty photographs from Marlborough’s collection includes many of the artist’s most iconic images of Greenwich Village, along with a selection of rare pictures never before published.
The exhibition runs from July 5th through September 15th, 2024.
At the age of nineteen, having left her native Springfield, Ohio, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) arrived in New York City in 1918. She soon found herself among the literary and artistic avant-garde. Intending to pursue journalism and sculpture, it was not until her extended sojourn in Paris, France from 1921 through 1929 that she was introduced to photography, training in the workshop of Man Ray. In Paris, Abbott encountered and photographed many of the modernist figures she had known during her initial stay in Greenwich Village.
To be ‘done’ by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott meant you were rated as somebody.
— Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company, Paris.
Upon her return to New York in 1929, Abbott was struck by the drastic change in architecture and the rapid modernization of the city. She set up a portrait studio, photographing prominent American businessmen for Fortune magazine, as well as the distinguished New Yorkers who ran in her social circle, hoping that the profits would allow her to follow her real passion of documenting the ever-shifting urban landscape. She soon began photographing Greenwich Village. In 1935, Abbott became a member of the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, which helped fund her work. In 1939, she published, Changing New York, featuring ninety-seven photographs she made throughout the five boroughs of New York City in the 1930’s and 40’s.
Berenice Abbott moved from Greenwich Village to Blanchard, Maine in the 1960’s, then to Monson, Maine in 1981. She lived in Monson until her death in 1991.
Time and space to create.
Monson Arts is a new artists’ residency and arts center in Monson, Maine. Programs include residencies for artists and writers, intensive shorter workshops, and educational partnerships with area secondary schools.