Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography

Current Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography

Letha Wilson (AY25)

Letha Wilson is known for combining photography with industrial materials like concrete and steel. Wilson cuts, tears and shapes her photographs, pushing and pulling the prints into place and then encases portions of the composition in cement. She explores the magnetic pull of the American West, alluding to landscape’s intrinsic role in our own myths of reinvention, endless possibility, and inevitable promise. Letha Wilson (born 1976 in Honolulu, HI) was raised in Greeley, Colorado and currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Taghkanic, New York. She earned her MFA from Hunter College, New York and her BFA from Syracuse University, NY. Wilson’s work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery at SUNY Purchase, NY (2023); GRIMM, London (2023); Higher Pictures, Brooklyn (2022); Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, FR (2021). Her work has been included in group shows at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Southern Utah Museum of Art, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, MA; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; MACRO Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2016); Essl Museum, Austria; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, among others. Residencies include Tusen Takk Foundation (Fall 2025); Windgate Artist in Residence, SUNY Purchase, NY; The MacDowell Colony; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Light Work, Syracuse, NY; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program; Headlands Center for the Arts; The Yaddo Foundation; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work is in collections including the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; New York Public Library; Smith College Museum of Art; Wellin Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery. In both 2019 and 2014 Letha was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Photography. Letha will have her first institutional solo exhibition at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine in September 2024.

lethaprojects.com

History of the Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography

Profiles of the past Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography.

Sara Cwynar (AY24)

Sara Cwynar (she/her) is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Cwynar was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, the 2020 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the 2021 Shpilman Photography Prize. She earned her Bachelor of Design from York University in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. In 2014, she was awarded the Printed Matter Emerging Artists Publication Series and published her first monograph, entitled Kitsch Encyclopedia, with Blonde Art Books. A monograph of Cwynar’s work, entitled Glass Life, was published in 2021 by Aperture with the Remai Modern. Cwynar has exhibited at international museums including the ICA Los Angeles, LACMA, Los Angeles; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; The Guggenheim Museum, MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Oakville Galleries, Oakville; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; the Fondazione Prada, Milano; and among others, and international galleries including The Approach, London; Foxy Production, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and Fluxia Gallery, Milan. Her work is in the permanent collections museums including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), SFMoMA (San Francisco), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas), Minneapolis Insitute of Art (Minneapolis), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).

saracwynar.com

Mahtab Hussain (AY23)

British artist, Mahtab Hussain (b. 1981), explores the important relationship between identity, heritage and displacement. His themes develop through long-term research articulating a visual language that challenges the prevailing concepts of multiculturalism. He received his BA in History of Art at Goldsmith College specialising in Fine Art Photography; his MA in Museum and Gallery Management, City University, London; awarded an Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC), he completed a MA in Photography at Nottingham Trent University. Hussain has been recipient of numerous awards and commissions including, Ikon Gallery, New Art Exchange, Arts Council England, Arts Humanities Research Council; he has also been winner of the Curators Choice Award, Culture Cloud at New Art Exchange and of Format 13 Portfolio Review Award for most significant review. Hussain was selected as the 2015 Light Work + Autograph ABP Artist-in-Residence, and chosen from 500 international artists to be ‘discovery artist’ under the prestigious Discoveries Award in 2016 at Houston FotoFest. Hussain has published four artist books. His You Get Me? series is published by MACK books with the support of Arts Council England winning the Light Work Photobook Award for 2017. Going Back to Where I Came From is being published by Ikon Gallery, supported by Arts Council England and The British Council. The Quiet Town of Tipton was published by Dewi Lewis and commissioned by Multistory and The Commonality of Stranger published by New Art Exchange supported by Arts Council England. Hussain’s You Get Me? series debut in the UK at Autograph ABP, London in 2017, curated by Mark Sealy, it reached an audience in excess of 2m through print, online coverage, TV, and radio with prominent featured articles The Guardian, The Economist, The Independent, Vanity Fair, New York Time, Metro, Buzzfeed, Dazed and Confused to name a few.

mahtabhussain.com

Stephen Marc (AY22)

Stephen Marc is a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist, who was raised on the South Side of Chicago, and claims Champaign-Urbana, IL as his home away from home while growing up. Marc lives in Tempe, AZ and is Professor of Art at Arizona State University, where he began teaching in 1998, after twenty years on the faculty of the Department of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. He received his BA from Pomona College and his MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Marc has published four photography books: American/True Colors (Co-published with George F. Thompson Publishing and Stephen Marc in association with the Center for the Study of Place, 2020), Passage on the Underground Railroad (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience: Street Life and Culture in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States (Columbia College Chicago, 1992), and Urban Notions (Ataraxia Press, 1983). Since 2008, Passage on the Underground Railroad has been listed as an Interpretative Program of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a division of the National Park Service.

Stephen Marc

Magnum Photos (AY21)

Magnum Photos is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices in Paris, New York City, London and Tokyo. It was founded in 1947 in Paris. During the pandemic, members of the cooperative visited virtually with our #MICAphoto students linked to the Photojournalism course. Visitors during the semester included Susan Meiselas, Beike Depoorter, Eli Reed, Peter van Agtmael, Nanna Heitmann, Cristina de Middel, Carolyn Drake, Sim Chi Yin, and Mikhael Subotzky. We are grateful to Amber Terranova for collaboration and coordination at Magnum.

magnumphotos.com

Dr. Deborah Willis (AY20)

Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social & Cultural and the Institute of Fine Arts where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is also the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute for African American Affairs. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and an Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. Fellow. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received awards from the College Art Association for Writing Art History (2021) and the Outstanding Service Award from the Royal Photographic Society in the UK. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African diasporic cultures. Willis is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty; Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present; Let Your Motto be Resistance – African American Portraits; Family History Memory: Photographs by Deborah Willis; VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee; and co-author of The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams; Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery with Barbara Krauthamer; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (both titles a NAACP Image Award Winner). She lectures widely and has co-edited books Women and Migration(s); authored many papers and articles on a range of subjects including The Image of the Black in Western Art, Gordon Parks Life Works, Steidl, Volume II; America’s Lens in Double Exposure: Through the African American Lens; “Photographing Between the Lines: Beauty, Politics and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography & Video, and “Malick Sidibé: The Front of the Back View” in Self: Portraiture and Social Identity. Professor Willis is editor of Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography; and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot", which received the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Edited Volume in Women's Studies by the Popular Culture/American Culture Association in 2011. Exhibitions of her artwork include: Monument Lab Staying Power, Philadelphia; 100Years/100Women, Park Avenue Armory, In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinity, African American Museum Philadelphia; MFON: Black Women Photographers, African American Museum Philadelphia; In Pursuit of Beauty, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, “Mirror Mirror” Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ; A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, Interventions in Printmaking: Three Generations of African-American Women, Allentown Museum of Art; A Family Affair, University of South Florida; I am Going to Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston Museum; Afrique: See you, see me; Progeny: Deborah Willis +Hank Willis Thomas. Gantt Center.

debwillisphoto.com