This exhibition, coinciding with the release of Keith Carter’s book, Ghostlight, features photographs that were taken in the mysterious swamp land and forest of the Big Thicket in Texas.

Keith Carter (b. 1948, Madison, Wisconsin), is known for his regional images of Texas, especially around his home town of Beaumont. Although he has traveled the world to create poetic images of interesting people, animals and nature, he spent several years before and during the pandemic, walking through this extraterrestrial land that is nearby.

The book is an extraordinary compilation of images and text that immerse the viewer in this hauntingly beautiful landscape. Keith will be signing copies of the University of Texas Press monograph, designed by Pentagram’s DJ Stout and Michelle Maudet, on Saturday, December 9th, from 3 – 6 PM.

Keith’s photographs can be found in many major museum collections including the Amon Carter Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, George Eastman House, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Special collections include Elton John, Michelle & Barack Obama, Diane Keaton, and Horton Foote, who wrote a forward in Keith’s first book.

This exhibition is free, and the Artist Reception/Book Signing event is open to the public.

Books can be purchased at PDNB Gallery, or online via the gallery website,

https://www.pdnbgallery.com/books 

Michael Kenna (b. 1953, Widnes, Lancashire, England) will have his fifth solo show at PDNB Gallery this fall season. His show coincides with the release of his book, TREES, published by Èditions Skira, Paris and another stunningly beautiful new book, Photographs and Stories, published by Nazraeli Press.

About two years ago, PDNB Gallery Co-Director, Missy Finger, read Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Overstory. In this novel, there are individual stories with characters that find common connection with trees. One of the main characters is a woman who is a botanist that believes that trees talk to another. “The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community,”

This storytelling was quite compelling, and the botanist character helped define the importance of trees.  She speaks of forests as an ecosystem that cannot be separated, cleaned out, but must remain intact, the dead with the living.

“There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer…”

At the end of reading this novel, one can hopefully appreciate the tree in a different light. Can we save our own lives by saving the trees? 

When Michael Kenna’s book came out it made so much sense to elevate the tree, which is embedded in the crises of our time, climate change. 

Kenna has been a master at documenting beauty in nature and industrial design.

His photographs of French gardens brought him recognition in the Western world. Then the industrial design of the River Rouge Plant in Detroit and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York gained his respect and off he went to photograph the world, using the perfect light, long exposures and tremendous reverence for his subject.

Kenna found perhaps his favorite landscapes in Japan. The perfect match of subject matter and artist methodology. Kenna’s work has always had a quiet, piercing simplicity that is often found in Asian art and design. His Japan images, especially from Hokkaido, are some of his masterpieces.

This exhibition and book include images from his 50-year career that highlight trees that have introduced themselves to his lens. We can pay homage to their awesomeness through the beauty of Kenna’s photographs.

In the botanist’s book that she is writing in the novel, the end quote is from Buddha,

“A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feed, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.”

Michael Kenna’s photographs can be found in many museum collections, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York;  National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan.

This exhibition is free, and the Artist Reception/Book Signing event is open to the public.

Books can be purchased at PDNB Gallery, or online via the gallery website,

https://www.pdnbgallery.com/books

DALLAS in the Fall is an art lover’s paradise! This year’s CADD GALLERY WALK - #SaturdayIsGalleryDay, on Saturday, September 23rd is an event not to be missed.

The day of art brings together a vibrant tapestry of contemporary art and culture, with new shows to see at each CADD member gallery. #SaturdayIsGalleryDay promises to captivate art enthusiasts and collectors alike showcasing a diverse range of mediums and styles, a chance to meet exhibition artists, and walkthroughs of current exhibitions.

PARTICIPATING CADD MEMBERS:

Conduit Gallery, Craighead Green Gallery, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Erin Cluley Gallery & Cluley Projects, Galleri Urbane, Holly Johnson Gallery, Keijsers Koning, Laura Rathe Fine Art, Meliksetian | Briggs, PDNB Gallery, Pencil on Paper Gallery, Ro2 Art, and Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden.

The first 10 visitors to CADD member galleries will receive a complimentary CADD ball cap and tote…so plan to arrive early!

This event is FREE.

For more information, please contact Missy@pdnbgallery.com.

For Immediate Release, Dallas, TX

Can the words, “Beauty” and “Violence” work together? Maybe when we look at a painting, for example, Pablo Picasso’s, Guernica, we can see beauty in Picasso’s depiction of the 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian bombers during the Spanish Civil War. Or maybe there is beauty in a Venus fly-trap plant, designed to kill in a subtle, menacing manner.

PDNB Gallery presents an exhibition of Don Netzer’s photographs depicting sleek, streamlined cartridges, presented as portraits, the artist’s specialty. The magnified images of these projectiles elicit a response of danger and perhaps awe in the design. The cartridge contains the explosive charge and the bullet that, when loaded into a weapon, becomes the lethal component.

But the portrait discloses a note of fact in the text below the subject. The viewer discovers the cartridge is related to a particular mass shooting, i.e., Robb Elementary School, Uvalde Texas, May 24, 2022,  .223 inch cartridge, 21 killed.

America is dealing with mass shootings almost on a daily basis. There seems to be no solution to this epidemic. Serious dialogue needs to happen in order to prevent or hopefully cease these grisly attacks. Don Netzer starts the discussion with a single brass case that holds the lethal bullet that ends in death.

 LET’S TALK!

For exhibition images: allison@pdnbgallery.com

For additional information: missy@pdnbgallery.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Dallas, TX

I stepped into a Time Machine to go back to the late 1950’s, to experience the Mad Men, Mid-Century Modern life that my parents lead. I ended up in Palm Springs, California.

It was a beautiful city, with the San Jacinto Mountain range in the background of the Sonoran Desert. The community of homes and hotels designed by famous architects like Richard Neutra, Donald Wexler and Albert Frey represented the swanky life of the movie stars and movie makers of the era.

The fashion was cool, they were wearing 1950’s clothing colored turquoise, mustard yellow, avocado green, pink and red.

But the Time Machine failed me, I never traveled back in time, rather I was in a mid-century modern dream.

Nancy Baron’s photographs of Palm Springs residents, architecture and style illustrate the land where time stood still. Palm Springs has become one of the most popular resorts in the big Grizzly Bear state of California.

Her photographs document a stranger-than-fiction reality. It is an enigma. Residents and visitors love to dress up and live the leisurely lifestyle of this stylish California resort town. Cocktails, kidney shaped swimming pools, golf, modernist architecture and 50’s fashion are all a part of this nostalgic experience.

Her photographs in PDNB Gallery's exhibition include the Piazza de Liberace, with leopard wallpaper and a vintage white 1959 Fleetwood Cadillac parked outside. Nancy's photograph of Bob's Closet reveals a colorful assortment of sport coats happily worn by a very stylish Palm Springs gentleman. And of course, a poolside image is a requisite, since swimming pools are certainly part of the desert landscape.

Nancy’s interpretation of the desert community has been published in several books: The Good Life: Palm Springs, Palm Springs: The Good Life Goes On, and Palm Springs: Modern Dogs at Home.

Nancy Baron will be attending the opening reception on May 20th, and will be signing books.

For more information:

missy@pdnbgallery.com

For press images: 

allison@pdnbgallery.com

For Immediate Release – Dallas, TX

 In 2009, PDNB Gallery hosted a groundbreaking exhibition featuring handmade shoeshine boxes dating as far back as the 1920’s. Along with this extensive collection of boxes and related objects, a collection of vintage photographs of shoeshine entrepreneurs were included. This summer PDNB Gallery will again feature this exhibition with some newly acquired boxes and photographs.

 This exhibition was quite unique for its folk-art content combined with photography. SHINE! was well received by the art community and traveled to other venues. 

Gallery Director, Burt Finger, started collecting shoeshine boxes and related vintage photographs 20 years ago, because it reminded him of his brief experience as a shoeshine boy working in the streets of New York.

Each box has a unique identity revealing the creativity of its owner.

The box must be small enough to carry and large enough to support a shoe. It also requires some storage to carry all the tools. The exhibition will include some of the original tools, including brushes, polish etc. Each box has a different character. It might have handwriting or carving and bold coloring. Some of the boxes in this collection were converted from WWI wooden ammunition containers.

 Many of the photographs in the show were taken in New York City.

Young boys and men lined busy streets looking for their next customer.

Ruth Orkin’s charming suite of 5 photographs illustrates a young aggressive salesman steering his clients to his shoeshine stand.

 SHINE! gives us a window into an earlier time when men’s shoes required a good polish. Men and women dressed well when they stepped out of the house. They wore suits, hats, ties and shined shoes.

 Visitors to this exhibition, young and old, will enjoy these relics of the past. PDNB Gallery is very excited to bring back the exhibition this summer, allowing us to reminisce about a different time, when the American dream was alive, amidst great wars and economic depression, a little shoeshine box could spark the passion to be a successful business owner.

 These remarkable boxes and photographs will be for sale in this final venue of SHINE!

 Photographers included in the show:

 John Albok

Mario Algaze

Morris Engel

Walker Evans

Lewis Wickes Hine

Russell Lee

Ruth Orkin

Edwin Rosskam

Aaron Siskind

And more…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, DALLAS, TX-

PDNB Gallery celebrates the diverse talents that live in our great state of Texas. This exhibition will highlight a rich pool of artists in the upcoming group show, Deep in the Art of Texas.

The photographs range from landscape, portraiture and documentary to abstract and conceptual. The dates span from the 1940’s to present.

There is no theme in common with these Texas artists, each has their own style and vision, which makes for a very eclectic show.

Carlotta Corpron, a professor of art at Texas Women’s University in the mid- 20 th Century is featured by her abstract work that is widely known. She was recently included in an exhibition, Women in Abstraction, at the Pompidou Museum in Paris. Her archive was placed with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.

 Fast forward to 1993, when Michael O’Brien had an assignment to photograph the ZZ Top band in Humble, Texas. Not only is the photographer from Texas, the band is too, from Houston. Recently Dusty Hill passed away, a big loss to ZZ Top fans all over.

Peter Brown’s stunning landscape taken in Limon, Colorado in 2006 was so dramatic that it became the cover image of his book, West of Last Chance, which included writing by notable author, Kent Haruf.

Also featured is a sneak preview of Don Netzer’s recent body of work, Killer Cartridges, a conceptual series regarding mass shootings in America.

New artists will be included in this exhibition: Dallas based Nitashia Johnson, Norm Diamond and Dan Sellers, and Beaumont based Cathy Spence.

Artists included:

Stuart Allen
Jeanine Michna-Bales
Carlotta Corpron
Ida Lansky
Barbara Maples
Keith Carter
Peter Brown
Michael O'Brien
Earlie Hudnall, Jr.
Don Netzer
Jack Ridley
Philip Lamb
Don Schol
Pam Burnley Schol
Paul Greenberg
Janis Hefley
Bank Langmore
Paul Sokal
George Krause
Chris Regas
Cathy Spence Nitashia Johnson Norm Diamond Dan Sellers Ron Evans David Donovan Julio Cedillo Stewart Cohen Meg Griffiths Frank Welch John Herrin Ferne Koch Geoff Winningham

Join the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD) for a Festive Celebration, Thursday, December 15th from 5:30 - 7 pm.

Kindly RSVP here.

Join us for a special conversation between artists, Keith Carter and Earlie Hudnall, Jr. , Saturday, November 19, 2022 at 4 pm.

This event is in conjunction with the opening exhibitions, Keith Carter: Ghostlight, and Earlie Hudnall, Jr, on view at PDNB Gallery from November 19, 2022 to February 11, 2023.

Limited space available.

Update: In gallery event has reached full capacity. We invite you to view this special event live on Youtube.

About Keith Carter:

Carter's haunting, enigmatic photographs have been shown in over one hundred solo exhibitions in thirteen countries. Thirteen books of his work have been published along with two documentary films: A Certain Alchemy, and Keith Carter: The Artist Series. Called a "Poet of the Ordinary" by the Los Angeles Times, he is the recipient of the Texas Medal of Arts.

Mr. Carter has been featured on the arts segment of nationally televised CBS Sunday Morning, and is the recipient of the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center For Documentary Studies at Duke University. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Portrait Gallery, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The George Eastman House, and The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

A gifted and insightful teacher, Keith Carter holds the Endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University in Texas where he was awarded the University's highest teaching honors; the Regents' Professor Award and Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Prize.

About Earlie Hudnall, Jr:

Earlie Hudnall was born and raised in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. His sense of community within his family and that of the African-American culture is what helped shape his work as an artist. Hudnall began photographing while serving as a Marine in the Vietnam War in the 1960’s. In 1968, he relocated to Houston to attend Texas Southern University and received his BA in Art Education. There he found the encouragement to continue photographing his subject matter of the everyday for African-Americans in the South. Hudnall made Houston his permanent home and has been working as the university photographer at Texas Southern University since 1990.

Hudnall is a board member for the Houston Center for Photography and an Executive Board member in the Texas Photographic Society. His work has been influential in the portrayl of the African-American community and culture. The cinematographer, James Laxton, of Academy Award winner for Best Picture in 2017, Moonlight, mentioned Hudnall as visual inspiration on how the film should depict African-Americans both aesthetically and symbolically.

His photographs are in many notable public and private collections across America, including the Smithsonian, Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

PDNB Gallery will be open late this Saturday, October 8th until 7 pm. Join us for an evening of art by viewing our current exhibition, In Memoriam: Jesse Alexander, Paul Greenberg & Jeffrey Silverthorne.

One of the great pleasures of running an art gallery is developing invaluable relationships with the artists. Through time, we learn so much about their lives, their families, politics, desires and philosophy.

This exhibition highlights the careers of three PDNB artists that passed away within the past nine months. We pay tribute to the art they created and their everlasting friendship.

Jesse Alexander, 1929 – 2021, b. Santa Barbara, California

Paul Greenberg, 1935 – 2022, b. Kansas City, Missouri

Jeffrey Silverthorne, 1946 – 2022, b. Honolulu, Hawaii

We remember Jesse Alexander’s motor sport photographs from the great races in Europe during the 1950's and 60's. He photographed the sexy, fast cars, the handsome drivers speeding dangerously along the winding roads in numerous races including Monte Carlo, Le Mans, and Nürburgring. This was an exceptional era that Jesse witnessed and captured on film. The resulting images are some of the most notable in the history of motorsport culture. Since 2001 we have represented Jesse's work. He was a kind man with a great smile that had many stories to tell of great photographers he met like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams, and the great drivers in the racing world including Phil Hill, Jim Clark, Juan Fangio, and Jackie Stewart. There are many sought after books of Jesse's work, and his remarkable photographs are collected world-wide.

Paul Greenberg was a medical internist and a photographer who lived in Dallas, Texas. Since Paul was allowed to convert a closet into a darkroom as a child, he has been actively involved in photography. His collection of photography books and photographs grew, as well as his career in photography. Paul was fortunate to travel to many countries: Russia, China, India, and more. But his favorite place to travel was New York City, a street photographer’s muse. There he captured his iconic image, Post No Dreams. Paul understood the history of photography from collecting photographs by the great masters like André Kertész, Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank. He attended multiple photography workshops, museum and gallery exhibitions and was a regular at FotoFest Biennials. Paul created many wonderful series: Street Corners, Museum Guards, Waitresses, and Immigrant business owners, to name a few. Paul was never idle, always thinking of his next photography series, printing in his darkroom, playing tennis, traveling, dining with family and friends, and celebrating life.

Jeffrey Silverthorne was the consummate artist. We were familiar with his significant 1973 Morgue series when we first met in 1998. His subjects were people mostly, the locations included carnivals, Boystown, the Texas border, and bullrings. Allegories and street photography were also his practice. What he saw was not easy to look at. Jeffrey’s investigation of various cultures, the seeking of joy...only disrupted, and even the final expression of death has resulted in some of the most powerful images in the history of photography.

We are thankful to have worked with these artists. Each of them have been important to the gallery’s history and to those that have been profoundly affected by their images.

In 2009, PDNB Gallery featured the very powerful suite of woodcut prints from Don Schol’s suite, Vietnam Remembrances. In 2014, Don Schol (b. 1941, Iowa) had another solo show at PDNB of his linoleum cuts, Arrangements. Although Schol is well-known for his sculpture, especially his honest but humorous self-portraits, his printmaking and drawing have been a focus in his late career.

Schol’s series of drawings, Jazz Mini, were created in his mom’s last years, between 2015-2017. During his visits with his mom, she would watch tv and he would draw while listening to jazz music with earbuds. These detailed drawings are small, 3.5 inch square compositions with intricate geometric forms dancing around, fitting together almost like gears in a machine. The energy created finds no end in sight except the end of the paper.

His woodcut prints are from a humorous graphic suite created in 2009, Moonstruck. This is a story of two pencils meeting each other and what happens to them after they fall in love. It is an homage to the pencil, his number 314, Eagle “Chemi*Sealed” Draughting pencil. One semester when teaching a drawing class, he made a beautiful wooden box for his pencil. This jewel in the box illustrated the importance of taking care of a fine instrument to make art, as a violin is cared for to make music. This illustration of the moonstruck pencils is based on the graphic novel.

Like the pencil falling in love with another pencil, Don and Pam found a life together in art. Pam Burnley-Schol’s (b. 1952, Washington DC) sublime gold leaf still-life paintings are considered by the artist to be “secular icons”. This relates to the preciousness of a family snapshot, something that is valued so much it is the first thing that one takes with them when escaping a fire or natural disaster. It can be an ordinary object that represents that connection with someone or some time in life that gives joy to the beholder.

The term, ‘secular’, is meant to be separated from the historic use of gold in icon painting. In art history, gold has represented light, as in the sun, which became linked to the gods. In Egypt, it was known as the ‘flesh of the gods’. The Incas believed gold to be the seeds of the gods.* Such assignments of gold transported to western art via paintings of Jesus and Mary and saints. Gold is still used in contemporary art, referencing its uses in early art history but creating new manifestations in the conceptual realm.

In Burnley-Schol’s still-life paintings, she gives thorough detail of the object, using the finest of brushes to show the intense beauty of design that is a bird, a nest, a flower, fruit, an insect. All these witnesses of life that are worthy of praise. And they are surrounded by the light of gold.

Gallery Night at River Bend, next Thursday, June 23 from 6 - 8 pm. 

Join us and our colleagues and neighbors, Erin Cluley Gallery, Keijsers Koning, 12.26 and the Green Family Art Foundation, for a special summer celebration. Refreshments provided by Pogo’s Wine and Spirits, and a cookout by Zeke Williams will be served. 

"Cheryl Medow: Envisioning Habitat: An Altered Reality" and "Robert Milnes: Sea What I think", will be on viewing at PDNB.

Come and enjoy an evening of art at River Bend.

PDNB Gallery will be one of the participating galleries for Design District Art Night, Wednesday, April 20th from 6 - 8 pm.

We invite you to enjoy our exhibitions, Cheryl Medow: Envisioning Habitat: A Altered Reality, and Robert Milnes: Sea What I Think.

BBQ and refreshments will be provided at 150 Manufacturing Street!

Participating Galleries:

PDNB Gallery

Pencil on Paper Gallery

Galleri Urbane

Peter Augustus Gallery

12.26

Erin Cluley Gallery

Keijsers Koning

Green Family Foundation at Dallas Art Fair Projects

Cris Worley Fine Arts

Holly Johnson Gallery

Dallas Contemporary

Site 131

Conduit Gallery

Karpidas Collection

April 9 - July 2, 2022

CHERYL MEDOW: Envisioning Habitat: An Altered Reality

ROBERT MILNES: Sea What I Think

Artist Reception

Saturday, April 9, 2022 from 5 - 8 pm

(both artists will be present)

PDNB Gallery is featuring two solo exhibitions in their Spring calendar. The exhibitions celebrate new work by photographer and birder, Cheryl Medow, and ceramic artist, Robert Milnes.

This is Cheryl Medow’s first solo exhibition in the gallery. In the summer of 2020, PDNB presented an online exhibition for Cheryl, and she has been featured in several PDNB group exhibitions.

Medow travels to locations local and international to photograph many species of birds. Her birds are placed in an imagined landscape. None of these feathered friends find themselves in their true environment in Cheryl’s final composition.

For example, a beautiful sleeping great egret is found with tropical trees in the background under a dramatic night sky with the starry Milky Way. In another photograph, a crowned crane is seen perched on a snarled tree stump, seemingly focused on calling to its mate. The misty background of grassy shores of what looks to be a river under a blue sky contrasts mightily with the crane's vivid black, white and red feathers.

Cheryl Medow’s photographs have been exhibited in the Ogden Museum, New Orleans, LA, The Wildling Museum, Solvang, CA, and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago, IL.

An exhibition catalog is available.

Robert Milnes Robert Milnes was also featured in an online exhibition with PDNB in 2020. His upcoming solo show will feature work he has created this past year. Robert’s inspiration for this body of work was kindled on his 2021 trip to the Yucatan peninsula. He found pieces of dead coral on the beach which had an organic, modular form that intrigued him.

With this, Robert engaged with the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, incorporating his seven propositions, sometimes using those propositions as titles to his ceramic sculptures. Wittgenstein discusses language as a picture. But, philosophy aside, these ceramic works are wondrous objects to behold.

Robert Milnes has exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions throughout his career, including Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, PA, the Northwest Craft Center, Seattle, WA and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA, His works are in included in the collections of the Arizona State University, Ceramics Research Center, Tempe, AZ, and the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA and other private, corporate, and public collections.

He is Dean Emeritus of the College of Visual Arts and Design at University of North Texas, in Denton, Texas. Robert Milnes currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, working in his Arbitrary Forms Studio.

Both Cheryl Medow and Robert Milnes will be present for the opening reception, Saturday, April 9, 2022, from 5 – 8 PM.

PDNB Gallery invites you to a special afternoon gallery talk about László Maholy-Nagy, György Kepes and Carlotta Corpron, Saturday, March 26th at 2 pm with University of Texas, Dallas Professor of Art and Architectural History, Charissa Terranova, and Artist and Texas Woman's University Professor of Art Emerita, Susan kae Grant.

This event is in conjunction with PDNB's current exhibition, The Bauhaus in Texas.

Event is free and open to the public.

RSVP'S are kindly appreciated, by clicking here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Charissa N. Terranova is is a writer and educator. Terranova researches complex biological systems from a cultural purview, focusing on the history of evolutionary theory, biology, and biocentrism in art, architecture, and design. Professor of Art and Architectural History, she lectures and teaches seminars at the University of Texas at Dallas on modern and contemporary art and architectural history and theory, the history of biology in art and architecture, and media and new media art and theory. She is coeditor with Meredith Tromble of Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science, and Design, a book series on Bloomsbury Press. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture: From Forces to Forms (Bloomsbury, 2021), an anthology Terranova coedited with Ellen K. Levy and her most recent book, explores how Scottish zoologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's magnum opus On Growth and Form (1917) transformed creative processes across fields. She is author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (Bloomsbury, 2022 /IB Tauris, 2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and coeditor withMeredith Tromble of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture(2016). She also edited a two-volume issue of the journal Technoetic Arts on “complexism” (2016).

Susan Kae Grant is an inventive and influential lens-based artist and educator. Her innovative studio practice and distinct personal vision represent one of the mediums more sustained and recognizable contributions to fabricated photography. With an interest in art and science, she uses the shadow as metaphor to create fabricated narratives that explore dreams, memory and the unconscious for her on-going series, “Night Journey”

Grant’s work is collected and exhibited in museums, galleries, and private collections. She has lectured and exhibited her work throughout the United States, Canada, China, Europe, Australia, British Columbia, Africa, Guatemala, and Japan. Her photographic and book-works are included in the public collections of Eastman Museum; J. Paul Getty Museum; Smithsonian Special Collections; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Victoria and Albert National Art Library.

From 1981-2017 Grant served as Head of Photography at Texas Woman's University and named Cornaro Professor of Art Emerita in 2018. She holds an MFA and BS in photography and book arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The Bauhaus in Texas

February 19 – April 2, 2022

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 19, 2022, 5:00 – 8:00 PM

PDNB Gallery will feature works by women artists from Texas that were included in the 2021-2022 international traveling exhibition, Women in Abstraction, at the Centre Pompidou.

Recently the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, have featured exhibitions featuring women artists that practiced abstraction in their art. The current Whitney show, Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, covers the period, 1930 – 1950, when abstraction thrust itself into the American art scene. The exhibition in Paris, Women in Abstraction, and now at the Guggenheim, Bilbao, covers abstraction in dance, film, textiles, painting, sculpture and photography. The three Texas women represented in the Pompidou exhibition: Carlotta Corpron, Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples.

The Bauhaus had its tentacles in both museum shows. The Bauhaus school taught all artistic disciplines from theater to decorative arts to photography. It was all about experimentation, which provided the wheelhouse for abstraction.

PDNB Gallery addresses this subject of women in abstraction in the upcoming exhibition, The Bauhaus in Texas. The theme of the show is the influence of the Bauhaus in Germany, and the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The Direct tutelage of three great artists, László Maholy-Nagy, György Kepes (featured in the PDNB show), and the Texas artist, Carlotta Corpron, influenced a whole generation of female students at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. TWU had the first studio art program in Texas.

Carlotta taught photography at Texas Woman’s University from the 1940's - 1980's. She and her students, Ida Lansky, Barbara Maples, Beverly Wilgus are included in PDNB’s show. Their approach is reflected in photographs by Bauhaus mentors Maholy-Nagy, Kepes who both taught briefly at the college, and Corpron.

Abstraction in these photographs is revealed through experiments with light, solarization, exposures, and photograms. This exhibition features examples of all of these. The works cover 1930 ‘s to the 1970’s.

The inclusion of these Texas artists in the expansive Pompidou exhibition states the importance of not only the threads of the Bauhaus and abstraction in our state in the 1940's and 1950's, but also the impressive, visionary art program of a Texas woman’s college.

Artists included in this exhibition:

Carlotta Corpron

Ida Lansky

Barbara Maples

Beverly Wilgus

including...

György Kepes

PDNB Gallery is excited to participate in Gallery Late Night, Saturday, January 8, 2022 until 8 pm.

Patty Carroll: Anonymous Woman: Domestic Demise

Bill Owens: Suburbia

November 20, 2021 – February 12, 2022

Artist reception: Saturday, November 20, 2021

From 5 – 8 PM

PDNB Gallery features two solo exhibitions by gallery artists, Patty Carroll and Bill Owens. This will be the first solo show for Patty Carroll, who is based in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Owens has had a large presence in the gallery since the early 2000’s, when we first featured his groundbreaking series from the early 1970’s, Suburbia.

In recent years, Patty Carroll (b. 1946, Chicago, Illinois) has explored the traditional and contemporary “housewife” role, by creating scenes of exaggerated chaos that often consumes the subject, which is a woman. Pots and pans, shoes and flowers, excessively colorful drapery, cakes and pies, 1950’s furniture and decorative objects overwhelm the female subject in the scene. The series is appropriately titled, Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise. Patty states, “She is both a victim of her obsessions, activities and circumstances as well as the invisible creator of such; both satisfying and problematic, pathetic and humorous.”

The images are mostly humorous, but sometimes terrifying. Overall, we reflect on the past and current defined roles of the Suburban woman.

Speaking of suburban culture, Bill Owens (b. 1938, San Jose, California) was the early documentarian of suburbia! In the late 1960’s, this photographer had an epiphany to document America’s movement into the suburbs of northern California. He made a list of what he wanted to document, i.e. a Tupperware party, shag carpeting, a newly minted home with a few pieces of furniture, a family barbeque, a new lawn being rolled out, Christmas decorations, overview images of cul-de-sacs, New Development billboards, and July 4th block parties and parades. These photographs were included in the seminal 1971 publication, Suburbia, which became an important sociological study and photography series that launched Bill Owens’ art career. In 2001, Suburbia was included in the list of 101 most influential photography books published in the 20th Century.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of this publication, which is why PDNB Gallery is revisiting the photographs and the book in the gallery.

Both Patty Carroll and Bill Owens will be present for the opening reception, Saturday, November 20, 2021, from 5 – 8 PM.

PDNB Gallery is excited to participate in tomorrow's Gallery Late Night, Wednesday, November 10th until 8 pm.

This week is the last week to see our current exhibition, Jeanine Michna-Bales, Standing Together: Inez Milholland's Final Campaign for Women's Suffrage.

Our Viewing Room will have a very special showing of works by artists Ida Lansky and Earlie Hudnall, Jr, and a sneak preview of upcoming solo exhibitions by Patty Carroll and Bill Owens.

Join us and our colleagues 12.26, Cluley Projects, Conduit Gallery, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Erin Cluley Gallery, Galleri Urbane, Green Family Foundation, Liliana Bloch Gallery, and Site131 for a fun Gallery Night!

PDNB Gallery will be open late this Saturday, October 9th until 8 pm. We invite you to enjoy an evening of art by viewing our current solo exhibition, Jeanine Michna-Baes, Standing Together: Inez Milholland's Final Campaign for Women's Suffrage.

Director, Burt Finger, has also arranged a very special showing in our Viewing Room of works by Ida Lansky, John Albok, and Earlie Hudnall.

 Our colleagues and neighbors, Erin Cluley Gallery, Gallery 12.26, and Dallas Art Fair Projects will also be hosting their own late evening programming, including the Green Family Art Foundation's inaugural exhibition, Black Bodies, White Spaces: Invisibility & Hypervisibility, at the Dallas Art Fair Projects.

Stop by and enjoy an engaging evening of art at 150 Manufacturing St!

PDNB Gallery invites you to a special afternoon gallery talk and book signing with PDNB artist, Jeanine Michna-Bales, on Saturday, September 18th at 2 pm.

This event is in conjunction with her current solo exhibition, Standing Together: Inez Milholland's Final Campaign for Women's Suffrage.

Event is free and open to the public.

Masks are Required.

RSVP'S are kindly appreciated:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/artist-gallery-talk-jeanine-michna-bales-tickets-169342390649

PDNB Gallery artist, Jeanine Michna-Bales, has fortified her activist mission with yet another heavily researched project that plunges into the dark side of American history.

As in her previous project, following the undocumented Underground Railroad, Jeanine has recently followed the journey of one American Suffragist, Inez Milholland, on her October 1916 campaign across America to promote Women’s right to vote.

With the artist’s new series, Standing Together, we find the subject very relevant to this era of controversy about validating the 2020 Presidential election and the passing of restrictive voting laws.

“It is impossible for any problem that confronts the nation today to be decided adequately or justly while half the people are excluded from its consideration. If democracy means anything, it means a right to a voice in government.” -Inez Milholland, quoted in the Casper Daily Tribune, Wyoming, October 18, 1916

The struggle for the woman’s vote was an arduous and sometimes violent journey. Jeanine illustrates, with her camera, Milholland’s 1916 mission, traveling across the country via train and automobile, stopping in cities and towns speaking to crowds of passionate, politically active citizens. Each segment of her October journey becomes more and more difficult, since she tires easily from her illness, pernicious anemia, thought to be a fatal disease at the time. Her doctors prescribed arsenic and strychnine to medicate her, which inevitably killed her when she reached California.

The solo exhibition features Jeanine Michna-Bales’s photo essay of Inez Milholland’s cross-country campaign on behalf of women’s suffrage in 1916. The story is told through contemporary images of majestic landscapes encountered along her route, combined with recreated scenes via historic reenactments and still life images. Michna-Bales portrays narrative elements and key locations from Inez's journey – Inez giving a whistlestop speech from the back of a train, a lectern on the stage of an historic auditorium, a hotel’s grand staircase, or an interior view of a passenger train car from the period. She also creates symbolic statements with the theme, Standing Together, in mind. The reenacted, still life and symbolic images – separate from the landscapes – are presented in small period reproduction light box frames, created by the artist, that recall the earliest color photographs called "autochromes".

The overall impact is similar to Michna-Bales's earlier documentation of the Underground Railroad in Through Darkness to Light…she takes your hand and gives witness to one woman’s journey to fight for women’s suffrage.

All these images can be found in the companion book to this exhibition, Standing Together: Inez Milholland’s Final Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, published by MW Editions. Jeanine will be signing copies of the book at the opening reception of this show, Saturday, August 28, 2021.

Jeanine’s project was planned to be released last year, which marked the Centennial celebration of the passing of the 19th Amendment. Because of COVID-19, the book release and exhibition were delayed.

Jeanine Michna-Bales’s (born 1971, Midland, Michigan) photographs are in major museum collections, including the Phillips Collection, Washington DC, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, the Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.

Stories on Jeanine's project were featured in the Smithsonian Magazine and the New York Times in 2020.

Jeanine Michna-Bales will present a gallery talk on Saturday, September 18, 2021 at 2pm.

In conjunction with the current exhibition, Ruth Orkin: A Centennial Celebration, PDNB Gallery will present a special screening of two films, Frames of Life and Little Fugitive.

Space for this event is limited and reservations are required. Kindly RSVP here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/161131307077

ABOUT THE FILMS:

FRAMES OF LIFE (1995, 18 minutes)

A short film documentary about Ruth Orkin by her daughter, Mary Engel

Narrated by actress, Julie Harris

Interviews with Mary Ellen Mark, Cornell Capa, Evelyn Daitz and Morris Engel

Selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as Outstanding Documentary of 1996.

LITTLE FUGITIVE (1953, 80 minutes)

Written and Directed by Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley

Starring Richie Andrusco and Rickie Brewster

A charming story about a boy named Joey, who runs away to Coney Island. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best motion picture story and winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

RUTH ORKIN: A Centennial Celebration

NEW WORK by Gallery Artists

Opening Reception:

Saturday, June 5, 2021

From 5 - 8 pm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, DALLAS, TX – Two exhibitions will make their debut in the new PDNB Gallery location on Manufacturing Street in Dallas, on Saturday, June 5, 2021.

But first, a personal note, from a pre-post Covid diary.

PDNB Gallery started as Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery in 1995 in a little house on Routh Street in Dallas. Last year, PDNB celebrated its 25th anniversary, in quiet locations, in staff home offices. No clinking of champagne glasses, but some retro images to enjoy, posted on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, from our first years on Routh Street.

That anniversary month, April 2020, was frantic, not just for us, but the world. But, holding on to the memories of those early years of our gallery reminded us of where we started and how far we have traveled. It has been a great adventure that we only dreamed of back then. Helping to place powerful photographs in private and public collections near and far was the goal. Along the path, we met remarkable people…artists, collectors, gallerists, writers, curators, architects, construction workers, framers, publishers, shippers, etc.

As members of AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers), we exhibited among our colleagues in the New York Photography Shows, for 25 years. Art fairs and Photo Festivals like the FotoFest Biennial, have benefitted PDNB in many ways, meeting collectors, curators, and artists from all over the world enabled us to become a more international player, early on.

The knowledge we have gained was vast. Each day a gem, a challenge, and a new beginning.

So here we are, 26 years later, in our new gallery. A fresh start in a beautiful space, designed once again by the very talented architect, Thomas Krähenbühl. The location is great, next door to other art galleries. PDNB is still located in the Dallas Design District, which is growing by the minute, with the noise of construction on every block.

This location brings us to a philosophical new beginning. A time to restart with optimism and big ideas. We are smiling about the possibilities of this brave new world.

On June 5th, we celebrate this momentous occasion with an exhibition reviewing Ruth Orkin’s career. Ruth would have been 100 this year. She created indelible work that has contributed to the history of photography and photojournalism. Her New York images, along with her iconic work from Italy, captured street life with a sensitive, candid vision of a true artist.

Ruth’s centennial year will be marked with the release of a monograph published by Hatje Cantz. Her photographs will be widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the US, Canada and Europe. Earlier this year, many of Orkin’s most memorable images were published in The Guardian. And, PDNB will screen the film, Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life, during the span of the exhibition on a date to be announced.

Many will remember Ruth Orkin’s classic, American Girl in Italy. This image became an icon, reproduced all over the world. It was shot in Florence, Italy, when Ruth had just been to Israel for a press junket to photograph newly settled Jewish immigrants in 1951. Afterwards, she decided to take a trip to Italy to do a travel story about a young woman, like herself, traveling in Italy alone. She met an American art student in her Florence hotel that became her ‘model’ for this photo series. This street scene she encountered, taken in two shots, became part of the successful series that Cosmopolitan Magazine picked up, the rest is history. In 2019, with the Me Too movement taking hold, this image gained criticism for its display of male ogling. Certainly, times have changed, but the image is an indelible part of Western culture.

Orkin's exhibition will include vintage, modern and posthumous prints.

PDNB will also feature a show of new work by gallery artists that has mostly been created this past year of COVID. The images are diverse interpretations of how the pandemic motivated their work, including color work by Keith Carter, from his pandemic walks, and an image by Delilah Montoya that deals with separation, created for the New Monuments for New Cities project, exhibited on the High Line at 14th Street, in Manhattan. Also featured are some new/ older images by a few gallery artists that have not been exhibited before. These images are timely, including a portrait of the now, late novelist, Larry McMurtry, by Michael O’Brien.

We are looking forward to seeing you in our new space! On Saturday, June 5, 2021, we will have much to celebrate with you, but if you are unable to attend the opening reception, please know that we are now open with regular hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 am - 5 pm. We have missed you dearly.

Opening reception: Saturday, June 5, 2021 5pm – 8pm

A select group of Dallas art galleries and the Dallas Art Fair are partnering together to present “Dallas Gallery Day" on Saturday, April 17th from 12 - 8 pm, in celebration of the spring exhibition season. Dallas Gallery Day is an opportunity for the community to come together and support Dallas galleries and their respective artists and programming. After nearly a year without formal programming or events, galleries are eager to welcome people back into their spaces. Select galleries will activate their space by hosting artist/curator talks, live music and performances. A full list of events and times can be found below. Refreshments will be served, masks will be mandated, and the capacity of people in the galleries will be monitored by gallery staff. We can’t wait to welcome you in-person!

PDNB Gallery is excited to be one of the participating galleries for this Gallery Day. Because we will be just beginning our move to Manufacturing St, we will welcome all visitors into our new space by giving a special sneak preview tour. Our gallery will have its first exhibition debut in May. Refreshments will be served as well.

ENJOY A SPECIAL PREVIEW OF THE NEW PDNB Gallery:

PDNB GALLERY

150 Manufacturing Street

Suite 203

Dallas, TX 75207