printable versionAmerican visual artists are focus of Leo Holub photo exhibition
Leo Holub, a former lecturer and founder of the photography program in the Department of Art and Art History, shot Ellsworth Kelly, NY 1986 at the Blum-Helman Warehouse.
Larry Poons, NY 1986 by Leo Holub
A selection of photographs of modern American visual artists taken by Leo Holub, a former lecturer and founder of the photography program in the Department of Art and Art History, will be on display through Oct. 29 at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery. The more than 70 formal portraits and candid photographs included in Studio Access: The Photographs of Leo Holub document such figures as Nathan Oliveira, Roy Lichtenstein and Edward Ruscha in their studios and living spaces.
Private art collectors Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, whose collection emphasizes modern and contemporary American artists, commissioned Holub to take more than 100 photographs of artists beginning in the 1980s. The project lasted more than a decade.
The exhibition was curated by students Vivian Crockett and Karla Mei Robertson, who were enrolled last spring in an Art Department seminar about exhibitions taught by Patience Young, curator for education at the Cantor Arts Center.
Although information and insights about artists typically are sought in their artworks, Holub's photographs offer rare glimpses of artists in their studios and living spaces and "inform us about artists through their interaction with their surroundings and artwork," the student curators wrote.
Holub, who is 89, began working at Stanford as a senior planner in 1960 and began teaching photography in the basement of the Art Department in 1969. Holub retired in 1979.
An exhibition reception with Holub will be held Oct. 12 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Art Gallery; the reception is open to the public. The Art Gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and weekends from 1 to 5 p.m.; admission is free.
A smaller version of this exhibition will be on view during the winter 2007 academic quarter in the new gallery at the Stanford in Washington, D.C., campus.