By Jenny Zeller
Nature and photography are completely intertwined. It’s because of the natural world that the photographic medium was finally recognized as a valid art form. And it’s because of photography that large blocks of the natural world have been protected. After 1980-82 AIR Paul Fields, the program hosted nearly a decade of fine art landscape photographers. At a time long before digital technology consumed the photography market, these works harken back to days of film with prints developed in the darkroom that also documents areas of Bernheim that no longer exist in the same fashion. This is the second in a series of three that highlights the early artistic contributions of Bernheim’s Artist in Residence program through the lens of photography. (click here to see part one)
1986 Artist in Residence Barbara Bosworth
Barbara Bosworth is a photographer whose images explore both overt and subtle relationships between humans and the rest of the natural world. Bosworth’s caring attention to the world around her results in images that similarly inspire viewers to look closely.
Bosworth lives in Massachusetts, where she is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Bosworth’s work has been widely exhibited, notably in recent retrospectives at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Her publications include, The Heavens (Radius Books, 2018), The Meadow (Radius Books, 2015), Natural Histories (Radius Books, 2013), Trees: National Champions (MIT Press; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 2005) and Chasing the Light (Nightwood Press, 2002).
1987 Artist in Residence Nancy Lloyd
Nancy Lloyd, landscape photographer from Easton Pennsylvania was Bernheim’s 1987 Artist in Residence.
Focusing largely on peaceful moments in nature, captured during the golden light hours at the beginning and end of each sun cycle, Lloyds photographs encompass all that is romantic in landscape photography, illuminating the sensual, quiet and beautiful qualities of the Bernheim landscape.
At the time of her residency, Lloyd was a featured artist in Sally Eauclaire’s book American Independents: Eighteen Color Photographers published by Abbeville Press in New York and had images published in Zoom magazine in Paris, France. Her work has been exhibited at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY and at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. Unfortunately, little is known about Lloyd or her work beyond the residency at Bernheim, adding mystery and furthering the romanticism in the work that remains.
1988 Artist in Residence Dick Arentz
Dick Arentz is a professional photographer and retired University professor who specializes in the platinum and palladium printing process. After a sabbatical in Europe in 1973, Dick Arentz relocated in Flagstaff, Arizona where he taught studio and photographic history at Northern Arizona University. At this time he also embarked on a six-year project documenting Four Corners region of the United States consisting of the southwestern corner of Colorado, southeastern corner of Utah, northeastern corner of Arizona, and northwestern corner of New Mexico.
In 1988, desirous of a change in subject matter, Arentz accepted the opportunity to live and work in Kentucky with the awarding of a Bernheim Artist in Residence. He began a three-year project photographing the Midsouthern states and Appalachia, concentrating on the human effect of the landscape. In 1990, under the sponsorship of The Huntington Museum of Art, an exhibition and catalogue of that work, Outside The Mainstream, with an introduction by Merry Foresta, was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
In a fifty-year career, Dick Arentz has had over seventy-five one-man exhibits in museums and private galleries. Since 1984 has conducted over forty platinum printing workshops, included those at The Center for Creative Photography, The Museum of Photographic Arts and The Friends of Photography. In 2013 Dick received the Phoenix Art Museum Infocus Founders Award for contributions to photography. His work is represented in public and private collections, including the New York and San Francisco Museums of Modern Art.
Over ninety works of fine art nature photographs produced by Bernheim Artists in Residence are on permanent loan and available for viewing in the Photographic Archives at the University of Louisville’s Special Collections.
2020 marks the 40th anniversary of Bernheim’s Artist in Residence program. Established in 1980, this internationally renowned program annually awards artists the opportunity to live and create site-specific work inspired by their total immersion experience at Bernheim. Throughout 2020, we are celebrating the contributions of the program’s past that has allowed our visitors to experience nature in a new way while enhancing awareness of Bernheim’s mission of connecting people to nature.
