Fall 2020 Photo Lecture Series: Lois Connor

Lois Conner is known for her large-scale panoramic photographs relating to a global landscape. Her pictures are characterized by their narrative sweep, a sense of place, and their implicit attention to history and culture. Many of her projects have an arc of decades, including her work in China, on the Navajo Reservation, and in the American West.

Conner has been awarded numerous grants, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Rosenkranz/NYU Grant (2020); the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship (2007), as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1984), the National Endowment for the Arts (1979), and New York State Council on the Arts (1983). In 2019, she had solo exhibitions at Fordham University Art Gallery, Lincoln Center: From the Landscape; in Hangzhou at the Twin Osmanthus Studio: Lotus, Trees and the Jiangnan Landscape; at Mon the Bund: Andromeda; and at the Shanghai HanFeng Art Space: Lotus. Other recent exhibitions include the Shanghai Center of Photography: A Long View, and the M97 Gallery in Shanghai: Early Portraits in the Landscape (2018); Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial: Cleveland Art Museum in Ohio (2014); The Long View: Gitterman Gallery, New York (2014); Unfurling the Landscape: Australian National University, Canberra; Reading Landscapes, M97 Gallery, Shanghai; Beijing, Zetterquist Gallery, New York; Searching for Van Gogh, Dali, China (2013); Drawing the Land, JNBY Gallery in Hangzhou, China (2012); and Beijing Building, Rossi and Rossi in London (2011). In the fall of 2012, her work was featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Chinese Gardens: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats exhibition. She was included in Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC, presented a retrospective of her work, Landscape as Culture, in 1993. Her work is in the permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum (one of her large scale photographs is permanently installed at the entryway to the Asian Wing) and the British Library in London.

Her books include: Lotus, Trees and the Jiangnan Landscape, Hangzhou (2019); A Long View, Shanghai Center of Photography (2018); Lotus Leaves, Wairarapa Academy, New Zealand (2018); Lost: Beijing, Kris Graves Projects, New York (2018); Beijing: Contemporary and Imperial, Princeton Architectural Press (2014); Beijing Building, Rossi and Rossi, London (2012); Life in a Box, Hanart, Hong Kong (2010); Twirling the Lotus, Rossi and Rossi, London (2007); and China: The Photographs of Lois Conner, Callaway, NY (2000).

Conner has been teaching photography for over thirty years, including a decade at the Yale University School of Art. Other venues include Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, Cooper Union, Bard College,, Stanford University, the New School and the School of Visual Arts. She taught at The China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China in the fall of 2019, and is currently teaching at Fordham University.

*All Photography lectures are free and open to the public. Please note that all lectures will be held virtually on Zoom for the Fall 2020 semester.