BIO / Artist Statment

W   A   L   T   E    R    C   R   U   M   P

walter-crump-painting-sketch

Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, March 18, 1941
516 East Second Street, #27 South Boston MA 02127-1446

EDUCATION

Boston University School for the Arts, 1967-1970, BFA


TEACHING 

Commonwealth School, Boston, MA 1972 – 2019 (retired)
National College of Art, Lahore Pakistan 1991-1993 (Fulbright Scholar)


SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

  • “GOOD TROUBLE” (group exhibition, Columbia College, Charlestown MA, April 1 – April 30, 2022 
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  • ”ABOVE US ONLY SKY”, (six person exhibition), Curated by Erica H. Adams,
    April 1 -June 30, 2022, Moakley Atrium Gallery, Boston MA
  • “IN THE TIME OF COVID 19”, Witnessing Protests, Imagining The Pandemic & Some Poems (May 1 – 31 2021) https://violencetransformed.com/portfolio/witnessing-protests-imagining- the-pandemic-some-poems/
  • “LAYERED LIGHT EXHIBITION”, Light Art Space, Silver City, New Mexico, April 23, 2021 – June 26th, 2021 https://www.silvercityart.com/blog/layered-light-exhibition
  • “VISIONARIES” Four Person Exhibition, 555 Gallery, 555East Second Street, South
    Boston, MA 02127. September 8 – October 22 2016.
    http://www.555gallery.com/
  • “PAINTINGS” Rafius Fane Gallery, 460C Harrison Ave, Suite #C24, Boston MA,
    Winter 2016. http://www.rafiusfanegallery.com/
  •  “MIGRATIONS” Roxbury Community College Gallery, July 17th –August 31 2015
  • “FIRST LOOK” Panopticon Gallery 502c Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA
    02215, January 4 – February 27, 2018.
  • “VISIONARIES” Four Person Exhibition, 555 Gallery, 555East Second Street, South Boston, MA 02127, September 8 – October 22 2016.
  • “02127/0221” Spoke Gallery@Medicine Wheel Productions, South Boston, MA,
    June 21 to August 22 2014.
  • “SUMMERVILLE TOY CAMERA EXHIBITION, Brick Bottom Gallery, Somerville, MA, June 8 through 29 2014.
  • “OBJECTS, PORTFOLIO EXHIBITION, April 11 to May 12 Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson, New York, April 11 May 12 2014.
  • ”POETICS OF LIGHT” New Mexico History Museum, Pinhole Resource Collection, NM, April 27 – March 29, 2014.
  • “MATERIAL ILLUSIONS”, The New York Center for Photography & the Moving
    Image, New York City, May 16 – June 14 2011.
  • “PANDEMONIUM”, The Museum of Photography and the Moving Image, New York, March 4 – 14 2011.
  • GOING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK – Practicing Historic Photographic Processes In The 21st Century: University of New England Gallery, Portland, Maine (Nov. 17- Jan.31, 2010); Simmons College, Trustman Art Gallery, Boston, MA (April 20 – May 28, 2010); UMASS/Dartmouth, University Art Gallery, New Bedford, MA (June – Sept., 2010); Maine Media Workshop, Rockport, ME (Oct. – Nov. 2010); *Power Structures, Group Photography Exhibition, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA (March 24 –Sep. 7 2009)
  • ALTERED CITIES, Pinhole & Double Exposure Photographs, Iranian Artists Forum, Teheran, Iran (2009)
  • ACQUIRED TASTES: 200 Years Of Collecting For The Boston Athenaeum, Athenaeum, Boston, MA, February 13 – July 13, 2007
  • AN EXHIBITION of PIN HOLE PHOTOGRAPHY: Four Pinhole Photographers, Museum of the History of Photography, Krakow, Poland, January 14 – February 27, 2005.
  •  PHOTOPLAY: Three Alternative Photographers, Art Complex at Duxbury, Duxbury, MA, August 31 – November 2 2003.
  • MILLENIAL BOSTON: 15 Artists View The City, The Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA, September 9 – November 29, 2003.
  • BEYOND THE INSTANT IMAGE (pinhole and double exposed photographs), American Center, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1993.
  • MONOPRINTS, Rhotas Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1993.


GRANTS

  • HUGHES GRANTS 2005,2007, 2009
  • FULBRIGHT FELLOWSHIP 1991-1993
  • INGRAM MERRILL FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP, 1975-1976


COLLECTIONS

  • NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM, Pinhole Resource Collection, NM
  • DECORDOVA MUSEUM, Lincoln, MA
  • MUSEUM of the HISTORY of PHOTOGRAPHY, Krakow, POLAND,
  • THE UNIVERSITY of MAINE MUSEUM of ART in BANGOR. Bangor, ME,
  • THE ART COMPLEX  Duxbury, MA.
  • BOSTON ANTHENAEUM, Boston, MA
  • PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM of ART, Philadelphia, PANATIONAL MUSEUM of ART, SMITHSONIAN, Washington, DC
  • FOGG ART MUSEUM, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
  • NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM of ART, Raleigh, NC
  • DANFORTH MUSEUM, Fitchburg, MA
  • CORNING MUSEUM, Corning, NY
  • NATIONAL MUSEUM of ART, Hanoi, Socialist Republic of VIETNAM
  • BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, Print, Drawing & Photography Collection, Boston, MA
  • HARVARD UNIVERSITY Photographic Collection, Cambridge, MA
  • SOUTHEASTERN CENTER for THE ARTS, Winston-Salem, NC
  • FIDELITY INVESTMENT, Boston, MA
  • CITY CORP WORLD HEADQUARTERS, NY


SELECTED BOOKS, LECTURES, WORKSHOPS, CURATORIAL

  • VIRTUAL PINHOLE WORKSHOP, September 11 + 18, 2021,
    Photographic Resource Center, Leslie University, Cambridge MA
  • “STANDING UP” Invitational Virtual Exhibition, Co-Curated with Hakim Raquib, 4/1–4/30 2012 https://violencetransformed.com/portfolio/standing-up/
  • CO-CURATOR: “SEVEN PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHERS FROM POLAND”
    Gallery at Art Institute of Boston, Boston, Ma, January 2007; University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MA. Summer, 2007, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA. October 2007.
  • “IN THE TIME OF COVID 19” A Series of virtual exhibitions of multimedia art,
    initiated in Fall 2020, co-curated by artists:
    Hakim Raquib and Walter Crump, who will also be presenting their own bodies of work. https://violencetransformed.com/in-the-time-of-covid-19-2020-2021-
  • ARTISTS VIRTUAL TALKS:
    Karachi School of the Arts, “The Masters Series” (8/22/2020);
  • Art Institute of Boston, Sarah Slavick painting class (1/15/2021);
  • Woven Tale Press Salon (2/24/2021).

Walter-crump-cover

PHOTOGRAPHY STATEMENT

I explore alternative ways in which cameras see the world. Trained as a painter and printmaker, I gradually mastered the art of photography when in 1986 I was asked to teach photography at my school. Previously, I had never worked in a darkroom. Over time, I as I became proficient, I grew  fascinated with the possibilities of extending my vision through photography and began to concentrate on alternative ways to photograph, using both traditional cameras & handmade pinhole cameras. I soon gravitated from printmaking to photography first working in my darkroom and later digitally.

I photograph cityscapes, landscapes, people, details and found objects – anything that catches my eye. I merge most of my photographs, melding or welding multiple images, producing photographs that hover between photography and painting, leaving time, and words behind.

I have been especially attracted to still lifes – why, I don’t know. But from the first time I saw, in art school, Chardin’s still life paintings of domestic objects, I was mesmerized. Later, discovering the still life painters of the 16th & 17th century Northern Europe, Morandi’s sparse but luminous paintings of jars and bottles, William Bailey’s elegant ceramic “cities”, and most of all, my teacher Walter Murch’s object paintings, I began to explore, photographically, my own particular brand of still life. Instead of daily objects such as shinny apples, dead fish, polished copper vessels or battered crockery found in those painters’ paintings, I began to photograph the mechanical and electronic detritus of our culture. Over the years, I have collected and photographed objects discarded from the fading industrial world, fragments of defunct mechanisms, mangled circuit boards, worn gears and tangled rusting whackmadoos. Like Morandi who arraigned and rearranged his dull crockery, to create his luscious nuanced paintings, my constructed still lifes are not permanent; once photographed, they are dismantled and reassembled in different configurations. I think of these impermanent structures as machines without a purpose or machines that have lost their purpose invoking rusting metropolises or ambiguous edifices, elusive images appearing as cloudy wrecks of a dubious age, blending fiction and reality, shivery things surviving on the edge of memory.

Walter Crump