Alumni Exhibit Marks 60 Years of UT’s Photography Program

“Experimental Seeing: Russell Lee’s Pedagogical Legacy”
Up by Dec. 19 on the Visual Arts Center

In 1965, photographer Russell Lee held a retrospective exhibition at The University of Texas’ three-year-old Art Museum on the nook of twenty third Street and San Jacinto Boulevard. This gallery within the Art Building is now the Visual Arts Center, so the truth that “Experimental Seeing: Russell Lee’s Pedagogical Legacy” has simply gone up in that very same house is a full-circle second. 

Just after Lee’s present, he was recruited to construct the primary images program within the College of Fine Arts. “Eschewing technical language, Lee described his innovative curriculum not as a series of photography classes, but as ‘experimental courses in seeing,’” clarify curators Teresa Hubbard, a UT studio artwork professor, and Jana La Brasca, artwork historical past alumna and critic-in-residence on the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. 

Lee started photographing objects to make use of as references for his portray, however finally, the medium turned his main focus. He labored extensively to doc American life as a part of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration and later the Coal Mines Administration. He was additionally one of many main photographers to doc Japanese internment camps of World War II. Much of Lee’s work is now housed simply up the hill at UT’s Briscoe Center for American History. In 2016, Austin’s Robert E. Lee Elementary School was renamed for Russell Lee.

The exhibit marks the sixtieth anniversary of the College of Fine Arts’ images program with images not by Lee, who died in 1986, or by college students of Lee, however by 25 comparatively younger MFA graduates who however have benefited from Lee’s pedagogical legacy. The earliest graduates are Adam P. Schreiber and Dave Woody, each MFA 2007; the most recent, Nolan Zunk, MFA 2026.

The present doesn’t embrace each single methodology for displaying a picture, nevertheless it comes fairly shut. There are, after all, many wonderful images within the exhibit, resembling a set Woody made in California in the course of the previous seven years displayed in a case within the gallery’s heart. (Pictured at high of article.)

And one other set, Schreiber’s “Selections” from Mess Ledger (2008-2019), consists of archival prints on aged ledger paper and runs vertically all the best way to the ceiling. 

Rosie Clements’ “Dogleg” (2025) is folded at a proper angle in order that it hangs flush to a nook (in a body she made too). And Zunk’s “Mo, 2025” is an 8-by-10-inch constructive movie slide mounted by itself custom-built mild field.

But past prints and transparencies, there are additionally movies and different installations which have rippled out from this system Lee started. In one video projected simply inches large on a wall, (“Appa In Between, Sleeping” (2020-2022) Aishwarya Arumbakkam’s father sleeps sitting up for 11 minutes, and one should watch for a breath or different delicate motion to appreciate it’s a video and never a slide.

Want extra sleeping fathers? Jennifer Teresa Villanueva’s “Papá en casa después del trabajo tomando una siesta mientras ve el partido de fútbol / Dad home after work napping while watching the football match” (2021) — nicely, the title just about says all of it. 

Yet one other paternally impressed print reveals dozens of crimson objects — a pickup, fuel cans, a wagon, umbrella, duct tape — that artist Phoebe Shuman-Goodier discovered at her father’s woody property and staged collectively for “Red” (2023). While in this system Shuman-Goodier obtained the Russell Lee Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Photography.

In one other set up, which takes over a complete nook of the gallery, massive closeups of a cat’s face are affixed to items of four-legged furnishings, suggesting overgrown pets. 

Laura B. Turner’s “Birdwatching” (2011) is just a portrait of a birding area information in all of its wonderful age and put on. 

Have a seat in entrance of a giant TV display screen and order up a brief movie by images program alumni, resembling Santiago Forero Ramírez’s “Eclipses” (2024), a suspenseful, atmospheric 17-minute movie that follows 4 speechless characters by a mysterious visible nocturne. 

Or take pleasure in Tova Katzman’s entertaining guerrilla-cinema documentary “Searching for the Source” (2024), which captures her quest to seek out the supply of Texas’ Colorado River in West Texas. 

According to the curators, the artists, who reside in 9 states and 4 international locations, “respond to Lee’s proposition by treating photography not as a destination, but a starting point through which to see the world.”

“Experimental Seeing: Russell Lee’s Pedagogical Legacy” is up by Dec. 19. The Visual Arts Center, 2301 San Jacinto Blvd., is free and open to the general public Tuesday-Saturday (besides throughout residence soccer video games) noon-5 p.m..