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Frances F. Denny | “Let Virtue Be Your Guide,” Baxter Street Camera Club

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From Liz Saleson’s interview with Frances F. Denny for the Baxter Street Camera Club:

LS: Your title comes from a piece of embroidery?

FFD: “Let Virtue Be a Guide to Thee” was the title of a 1982 Rhode Island Historical Society exhibition of colonial girls’ embroidery samplers. I discovered the catalog in a library and I began thinking about this word “virtue.” I feel like is not a commonly used word so much anymore.

LS: I hear it used ironically.

FFD: Right, exactly, because, historically it’s about chasteness, the preservation of virginity. But I wonder, what does it mean to live a moral life as a woman today?

View the original interview

Browse the series “Let Virtue Be Your Guide” at ClampArt
Browse all of Frances F. Denny’s work at ClampArt

Work by Rachel Papo included in a show at HERE Arts Center

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Work by Rachel Papo included in a show at HERE Arts Center
Image: Rachel Papo, “Backstage at the Marinsky Theater,” 2007, Digital C-print.

Work by Rachel Papo is included in “FiveSixSevenEight” at HERE Arts Center in New York City, which closes on October 10, 2015. Curated by Dan Halm, other artists include Nir Arieli, Glenys Barton, Tad Beck, and Dana Bell.

The rhythm, the synchronicity of motion, music pulsating, undulating, bodies contorting. Dance continues to inspire and motivate artists and vice versa; this relationship between the two art forms has a rich historical significance, most notably Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. This perfect marriage between the two art forms allows viewers to experience the power of dance, the vehicles for expression, the motivation of collaboration, and the grace and beauty of it all.

HERE Arts Center
145 6th Avenue
New York, NY 10013
Click here for more information

View Rachel Papo’s series “Desperately Perfect”
Browse all of Rachel Papo’s work at ClampArt

Blog post by:
Andrew Kurczak, Gallery Assistant

Let Virtue Be Your Guide

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“Let Virtue Be Your Guide” examines the artist’s family and their deeply rooted history as early settlers of New England. One ancestor, John Howland, was a deckhand aboard The Mayflower. Unearthing the idea of feminine “virtue” from the confines of its historical meaning, the photographs of the women in the artist’s family have a watchful quality, as if the artist is defining for herself what it means to be a woman. Her sitters, and the domestic spaces they inhabit, together evoke a distinct and well-worn privilege. In the photographs seams pull apart exposing the shifts occurring across generations of women. The resulting collection of images becomes a search for meaning in heritage, a challenge to the notion of legacy, and the artist’s reckoning with a traditional version of American femininity.

Photographs included in “Let Virtue Be Your Guide” were taken between 2011-2014. They were made in nine private residences located in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island.