Opening this November, ‘Annie Leibovitz: Stream of Consciousness’ presents a group of works by the distinguished American artist. Foregoing a linear timeline or conventional thematic constraints, the exhibition is conceived to reveal glimpses into Leibovitz’s highly associative thought processes, creating a fluid visual dialogue among photographs that aren’t anchored in the moment they were made. ‘Stream of Consciousness’ will include landscapes, still lifes and portraits.
‘Exhibitions of my work are usually arranged chronologically. The images tell a story shaped by time. But there are some photographs—Georgia O’Keeffe’s red hill, the portrait of Joan Didion in Central Park—that rhyme with photographs from other places, other times. They aren’t moored to the moment they were made. I keep returning to these images’ — Annie Leibovitz
The four images that visitors will see first upon entering the exhibition are the Selldorf suite of photographs, which was created at the historic Frick Collection on East 70th Street in New York City just days after Leibovitz returned from a visit with Annabelle Selldorf at the architect’s home in Maine. Selldorf had been charged with the sensitive task of the revered museum’s renovation and she had spoken to Leibovitz about the design challenges she was addressing. It was at their meeting at the construction site in Manhattan that Leibovitz composed these images.
‘Stream of Consciousness’ features both familiar images of iconic writers, performers and visual artists—Amy Sherald, Billie Eilish and Salman Rushdie are among them—and images that have never been exhibited publicly before.
‘Stream of Consciousness’ includes portraits of contemporary cultural figures such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Stephen Hawking alongside images of landscapes, interiors and historical ephemera—Abraham Lincoln’s top hat and Elvis Presley’s bullet-riddled television. The associative juxtapositions show Leibovitz’s diverse range of subjects and ability to balance intimacy and theatricality, the exquisitely personal and the grandly universal. Her eye is guided by intuition and a preternatural sense of narrative.
About the Artist
Annie Leibovitz
Annie Leibovitz was born in 1949 in Connecticut. She bought her first camera in the summer of 1968, when she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, and her early works are punctuated by images of the Bay Area landscape and photographs shot during drives the artist often...
Current Exhibitions
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