Exhibition

  • The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960-1980
    Alison Fisher, Katherine A. Bussard, and Greg Foster-Rice
    Curators
    Art Institute of Chicago
    Oct 26, 2014 to Jan 11, 2015
  • GRANTEE
    Art Institute of Chicago
    GRANT YEAR
    2014

Kenneth Josephson, Chicago, 1969. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The City Lost and Found is a groundbreaking exhibition focused on a pivotal shift in American cities during the 1960s and ’70s, explored through the intersection of photography, media, and urban planning. Breaking from traditional disciplinary boundaries structuring scholarship in this period, this project argues for the collective impact of practices from a wide range of makers and thinkers—documentary photographers, urban planners, architects, filmmakers, and performance artists—focused on the specific qualities and social potential of urban places. Not only did close examinations of streets, neighborhoods, public demonstrations, and the conditions of the urban fabric offer the American public a more complex image of life in the three largest cities in the United States, but also their images served as important new models for architects and planners in the study and transformation of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. A 256-page, illustrated publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring scholarly contributions from art history, urban studies, sociology, urban planning, and architecture.

Alison Fisher is the Harold and Margot Schiff Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BA in art history and history from the University of Rochester, and her MA and PhD in art history from Northwestern University. Since joining the Art Institute in 2009, Fisher has curated numerous exhibitions, including the major retrospective Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (2011–12) and its award-winning accompanying catalogue. Her lectures and publications address the expanded world of late modern architecture and urbanism in the United States and Europe, and her curatorial work and research has been recognized with grants and awards, including the Bourse Chateaubriand from the Embassy of France in 2007–08 and a 2013 Society of Architectural Historians Award for Excellence. She was selected as the local chairman for the 2015 SAH conference in Chicago.

Katherine A. Bussard is the Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. She received her BA in art history and women's studies from Smith College, her MA in art history from Williams College, and her PhD in art history from the City University of New York. Her dissertation is the first on the genre of street photography, published as Unfamiliar Streets by Yale University Press in 2014, with grants from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Bussard's other publications include the exhibition catalogues Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (2013) and So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan (2006). Prior to joining the Princeton University Art Museum in 2013, Bussard was associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she established a biennial series dedicated to emerging photographers.

Greg Foster-Rice is associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches the history, theory, and criticism of photography. He received his BA in art history and history from Rice University and his PhD in art history from Northwestern University. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including the Terra Foundation for American Art/Lloyd Lewis Fellowship in American Art History at the Newberry Library, Chicago. His most recent publication is the coedited anthology Reframing the New Topographics (2011), which critically examines the influential 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, in light of the social, economic, ecological, and aesthetic debates of the 1970s, and was the topic of a symposium of the same name. Foster-Rice also published the essay "Romare Bearden's Tactical Collage" in Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition (2010) and coorganized its related symposium (2007).

Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago collects, preserves, and interprets works of art of the highest quality, representing the world’s diverse artistic traditions, for the inspiration and education of the public and in accordance with our profession’s highest ethical standards and practices.