The Tracey Baran Award was established to honor the memory and achievement of Tracey Baran, a young photographer who died after a short illness in 2008. This annual award, with a fellowship grant of $5000, will be given to one emerging female photographer who resides in the US. This is the grants first year, and was funded by the artists who donated to the Tracey Baran Memorial Auction last year.

Please visit the website for more details and to apply, www.traceybaranaward.org.

Genius at Play, 2007 Cecil McDonald

Here is Cecil McDonald, Jr.’s proposal:

“If it can be ventured that we are in a post racial society, then we must begin the process of revisiting and re-contextualizing history, if not only for reading, measuring and taking stock of just how far we have come. Artists are often cast in the role of interloper, interpreter and investigator of both the historical record and the contemporary condition.

James Baldwin’s A Stranger in a Village serves as my inspiration for the residency in Lucerne Switzerland. In this essay from Baldwin’s collected essays “Notes from a Native Son,” Baldwin uses his encounters with the villagers as an occasion to ponder the whole history of Western white supremacy, arguing that “the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.” He weaves the narrative of how the stigma of being a Negro in the Unites States has followed him to the remote Swiss village, Loèche-les- Bains. This essay continues to resonate within me from my first reading in 1984 as a teen on the south side of Chicago, struggling to find and establish my cultural and artistic identity. To the present a man, artist and matured, but yet still searching, questing and questioning. If Baldwin’s idea that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” then I must consider the notion that people and their histories can both inform and free each other, in order to move forward to form and construct meaningful narratives and nuanced histories.

The recent radical transformation of the American political landscape forces me to consider the notion of a post-racial society, a post-racial self.  And how might I use photography to see myself: a contemporized black man, in the role of a stranger in a distant land.  Can I still be “a stranger” in a world considerably smaller than the one Baldwin encounter in 1954? I plan to roam the countryside, beaches and streets, venturing into homes, shops and restaurants, photographing and notating my interactions with the people and places of Lucerne. Playing the role of a fictitious tourist and a colorized artist, collecting bits and pieces of a constructed reality, both real and imagined.”

-Cecil McDonald, Jr.

Flipside, 2004 Gregory Scott

Click here to read Reuel Golden’s review of Gregory Scott‘s work for the PDN Gear Guide. And, stop by the gallery to see Scott’s piece Escher-esque, which we currently have on display.

Home Funeral, 1990 Shelby Lee Adams

This afternoon we received a print of Home Funeral by Shelby Lee Adams, along with his contact print for our upcoming show Proof. Shelby was nice enough to include a copy of the March issue of the Smithsonian Magazine featuring a great article about Home Funeral written by Abigail Tucker. You can read the article here.

It’s been a busy day for Joel in Stockholm. He gave six interviews this afternoon for the opening of his show and he will be attending the Fotografiska VIP party this evening with Catherine. Hopefully she will send us some photos and write some tweets while they’re at the party. If you haven’t already watched CEG’s Artist Talk video with Joel-Peter Witkin (the very first video in the series), then we highly recommend giving it a view.

Lila and Goose, 2001 Shelby Lee Adams

The Home Funeral, 1990 Shelby Lee Adams

Follow Shelby on his blog or if you are in San Francisco today, don’t miss Shelby’s lecture at San Francisco Art Institute, 7:30 pm.

Time magazine cover by Julie Blackmon

Equestrienne (1997) Keith Carter

Click here to read Chicago Art Magazine’s review of Seen and Unseen.

Pram (2008) Keith Carter

Click here to read Newcity Art’s review: Keith Carter/Catherine Edelman Gallery.