Artist News
The latest in new work, publications, exhibition and artist talks.
Artist Talks + Events
Holly Lynton: Bare Handed Author Talk
Thursday, August 31, 2023, 6 PM
MASS MoCA
The Research & Development Store
1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247
Join MASS MoCA Senior Curator, Susan Cross for a conversation with American photographer Holly Lynton.
ICP PHOTOBOOK FEST 2023 Book Signing
Saturday, May 13, 4 PM
AIPAD Photography Show 2023 Book Signing
Friday, March 31 – Sunday, April 2, 2023
Book signing Saturday April 1, 2023, 1 PM
Momentum Gallery
Heidelberg University Baden-Württemberg Seminar Artist Lecture
Nov 17, 2022
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
Workshop Nov 18, 2022
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Hauptstraße 120. D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Paris Photo 2022 Book Signing
November 10 – 13, 2022
L’ARTIERE booth SE2
Grand Palais Ephemere 2 Pl. Joffre, 7 5007 Paris, France
J. Sybylla Smith In Conversation with Holly Lynton
October 2022
Episode #49
Bare Handed utilizes traditional craftsmanship as a portal into the rich complexities of culture, history, and art in rural America and the deep South.
Holly Lynton melds form, content, and meaning in her strikingly beautiful images, capturing the lives of those providing our sustenance, while protecting our land. Lynton’s compositional framing, lush palette, textural tones, and transformative gestures craft a meditative beauty. Accompanying essays provide context for cultural contradictions, associations, and representations — speaking to the role art has played to perpetuate or reveal them.
ICP PHOTOBOOK FEST 2022
Thursday Night Photo Talk with Holly Lynton
December 3, 2020
1400 N. American Street Suite #103 Philadelphia, PA 19122
Holly Lynton talks about her upcoming monograph, Bare Handed, and discusses current work.
Acquisitions
Cassilhaus Acquisition
March 2023
Sienna, Turkey Madonna, Shutesbury, Massachusetts has been acquired by Cassilhaus collection, Chapel Hill, NC.
Holly signing a copy of Bare Handed at the Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.
Bare Handed acquired by Library Collections:
Thank you to the following institutions for their recent library acquisitions of Bare Handed:
MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Yale University, Columbia University, VMFA, the Cleveland Museum of Art, LACMA, Amon Carter Center of American Art, Casalinilibri, Amherst College, Mass Art, Sächsische Landesbibliothek
Ruth, St Paul Camp Meeting, Harleyville, South Carolina
Tall Pines, St Paul Camp Meeting, Harleyville, South Carolina
Ja’Laysia, St Paul Camp Meeting, Harleyville, South Carolina.
Zimmerli Art Museum Acquisition
The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University has acquired three images from Meeting Tonight for their permanent collection
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University Acquisition
September 2022
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall St, New Haven, CT 06511, United States
The Bare Handed book and print of Haystack Wall, Graveley Ranch, Avon, Montana, 2018 have been acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Awards + Fellowships
Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 2022
June 21, 2022
Holly Lynton was included in Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50 artists for the 2022 season.
GLC Fellowship 2019
2018 - 2019
Yale University
Holly was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition for her series on Methodist Camp Meetings in South Carolina.
Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship 2022
2016
Holly Lynton was a recipient of the prestigious Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship Grant for her series Bare Handed.
Stephen, Mayflies, Oklahoma has been acquired by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in conjunction with the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship 2016.
Press & Publication
Bare Handed Press and Reviews
Collector Daily: Holly Lynton, Bare Handed
Fisheye Magazine: Edition 57 Frisson
What Will You Remember?: Our Favorite Photo Books of 2022
The LUUPE: Fifty-Seven Photography Books That Made Us See Differently In 2022
Fisheye Magazine: Edition 57 Frisson
Strangefire Collective: Book Review: Bare Handed by Holly Lynton
BOOOOOOOM – Bare Handed by Holly Lynton, February 2023.
Filter Photo – Bare Handed selected for "Back on the Shelf," a photo book exhibition juried by artist and co-founder of SKYLARK Editions, Paul D’Amato. On view February 3 - March 31, 2023, Filter Space, 1821 W. Hubbard St, Suite 207, Chicago.
“Lost in a Meditation”: Rural American Life - In Pictures, Edited by Mee-Lai Stone
August 23, 2022
Strange Fire Q&A with Holly Lynton + Jess Dugan
May 5, 2022
Holly Lynton speaks with photographer Jess T. Dugan in a Q&A that explores Holly’s relationship to the medium of photography, her inspirations, curiosities, and her decade-long project, Bare Handed, as well to her book by the same name prior to its publication.
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women At Yale
Designed by Miko McGinty with an introduction by Elisabeth Hodermarsky and essays by Helen A. Cooper, Linda Konheim Kramer, and Marta Kuzma, 2021, Yale University Press.
Marking the 50th anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Yale and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University, who came to study at the Yale School of the Fine Arts (now Yale School of Art) when it opened in 1869, this volume honors the accomplishments of women artist-graduates of Yale.
Triggered: Holly Lynton
MUSÉE Magazine
June 8, 2021
Holly Lynton discusses the inspiration behind her photograph Les, Honeybees with MUSÉE Magazine.
Leaves of Grass
Harvard Design Magazine Issue # 48: America Spring / Summer 2021
April 2021
The exhibition Leaves of Grass, curated by Adam Monohon is turned into a photo essay for this issue of Harvard Design Magazine. Stephen, Mayflies, Temple, Oklahoma, 2009 is featured.
The America Issue of Harvard Design Magazine, featuring a new design and art direction by Alexis Mark, invites historians, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, theorists, curators, artists, and planners to reflect on the country’s past and present and to imagine sustainable futures. Projects, taxonomies, dialogues, essays, and spatial interpretations explore possible Americas. They allow us to delve into issues relevant to small cities, towns, and rural areas—as well as major urban centers—and to study barriers and opportunities facing communities across the country.
Bare Handed
Documentary Moment, Vol 26, No. 1, Spring 2020, the University of North Carolina Press for the Center for the Study of the American South
April 2020
A photo essay featuring photos from Bare Handed, and an accompanying written essay by Holly Lynton on “the moment” and how it functions in her practice.
The Spirit and the Food Feeds Them
Gravy No.74, Winter 2019, Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi
January 2019
Following a commission from Gravy magazine to photograph the labor and food traditions at the South Carolina camp meetings, a written essay, incorporating the research conducted during her fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, appeared alongside her photos in this issue of their quarterly journal.
Agrarian Labors with Biblical Passion at Miller Yezerski
Agrarian labors with biblical passion at Miller Yezerski, Cate McQuaid, June 17, 2014
Workshops
Los Angeles Center of Photography
September 12 — October 3 2022
Over the course of six sessions, this workshop provides participants with innovative strategies to produce images that are provocative, enigmatic, and lyrical. Students learn to depict people, places, and histories in unprecedented ways. Reconsidering their roles as storytellers, students developed new methods that transform viewers into active participants in the narrative and will learn how to tell complex stories. Holly Lynton will describe how research and archival exploration play an important role in effectively describing the places and communities that become the subject of her projects. In addition, Holly will provide tips on how to gain permission for making photographs in new and exciting territories.
Selected Exhibitions
Altered Images
February 21 - June 30, 2023
Center for Fine Art Photography
Lisa Volpe, Associate Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, selected two silver gelatin collages from my series The Birds for the Center for Fine Art Photography's exhibition, Altered Images. For this series, annual photographs are taken of falcons that hunt at a farm in decline to show the changes in the landscape over time.
FIlter Photo Context 2023
March 10 - April 22, 2023
Filter Space, 1821 W. Hubbard St, Suite 207, Chicago
Karen Haas, the Lane Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, selected “Les, Honeybees, the Bosque, New Mexico” to receive the 2023 Juror's Choice Award in the Filter Photo exhibition Context 2023.
Meeting Tonight: Two South Carolina African American Camp Meetings
April 06 - September 25, 2022
Zimmerli Art Museum
71 Hamilton Street New Brunswick, NJ, 08901
Meeting Tonight: Two South Carolina African American Camp Meetings
This exhibition is a collaboration between Holly Lynton, Maurice Wallace, and the Gospel Materialities Working Group in the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers.
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women At Yale
September 10, 2021–January 9, 2022
Yale University Art Gallery 1111 Chapel St, New Haven, CT 06510, United States
This exhibition showcases and celebrates the remarkable achievements of an impressive roster of women artists who have graduated from Yale University. Presented on the occasion of two major milestones – the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University, who came to study at the Yale School of the Fine Arts when it opened in 1869 – the exhibition features works drawn entirely from the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery that spans a variety of media, such as paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography, and video.
The title of the exhibition references the phrase used in the landmark 1972 U.S. federal law Title IX – which declared that no one could be discriminated against “on the basis of sex” in any education program receiving federal financial assistance – which forced the School of Art to hire full-time female faculty beginning that year. Amid the rise of feminist movements – from women’s suffrage at the turn of the 20th century to the ERA movement of the mid-20th century, to the #MeToo movement of today – this exhibition asserts the crucial role that women have played in pushing creative boundaries at Yale, and in the art world at large.
Leaves of Grass
May 10 – November 29, 2019
Center For Creative Photography, the University Of Arizona
1030 North Olive Road Tucson Arizona AZ 85721
"In organizing the exhibition Edward Weston’s Leaves of Grass Holly Lynton’s image, Stephen, Mayflies, Oklahoma, 2009, leaped out at me for its many resonances with work made by Weston in the American South. Constructed around pairings of work by Edward Weston and recent acquisitions from the Center’s collection (Lynton’s work came into the collection in 2018) the show intended to create dialogues between images from Weston’s Leaves of Grass project and the work of contemporary photographers.
Set in the rural American South, Lynton’s image lent itself naturally to dialogue with two images of Weston’s made during his time in Texas in the company of famed folklorist J. Frank Dobie. Without relying on common tropes of rurality or the American South, as Weston did, Lynton’s image transports the viewer to that context as effectively as Weston’s own. The harsh light, swarming mayflies, and glistening back of the image’s central figure evokes a visceral sensation of being in the scene, conjuring a uniquely tangible experience of the American South.”
– Adam Monohon, curator
Solid Ground
September - October, 2006
Jen Bekman Gallery, 6 Spring St New York, NY 10012
October 23, 2006
Exploring the possibilities for fantasy in her own back yard, Lynton turns it into a wild kingdom for a series of color photographs that assume the point of view of a playful and inquisitive child. Lynton’s nearly naked little girl and a bare-chested friend take on a fairy-tale presence in a landscape rendered mysterious by women’s-eye-view closeups. He’s a giant seen through a scrim of leaves; she’s a sprite, crouching to catch a sprinkler’s spray in her mouth. But some of the most intriguing images are unpopulated” a tunnel in the snow: a bird caught behind the netting on a raspberry bush; leaves, petals, dead bees, and dry ice floating in a plastic pool. Through Oct. 28. (Beckman, 6 Spring St. 212-219-0166.)
Mean Ceiling
April 22 – May 22, 2004
Mixed Greens, 531 West 26 Street, New York, NY.
In Between
April 2000
Curated by Stephanie Theodore, Kathryn Markel Fine Art, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, New York, NY.
April 25, 2000
It’s a familiar story: the young (in this case, 27) female Yale grad (’94) whose stage color photographs flirt provocatively with issues of sex, desire, identity, and self determination. But Holly Lynton Isn’t likely to get lost in the crowd; the 22 images in her first New York solo show are so subtle, accomplished, and ambiguous they’re hard to forget. The artist herself, deceptively girlish, appears in the pictures, most often along with a stocky older man who lets her ride piggy-back and dance with her mare feet on his shoes but whose sexual aura is hardly fatherly. Full of tentative gestures and thwarted heat, Lento’s work knows more than it tell. - Through April 29 Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, 226-3608. (Aletti)
April 21, 2000
“HOLLY LYNTON, Kathryn Markel, 560 Broadway, at Prince Street, (212) 226-3608 (through April 29). Though not much to look at one at a time, Ms. Lynton's glossy color photographs together create an obliquely diverting narrative about two men and a young woman (the artist herself). Always shown in fragmentary views, the threesome appears to be enjoying a romantic, triangulated interlude in the country (Johnson).”