Iris’s curator William Messer gives a rare Artist’s Talk in conjunction with his exhibition Some Women, Some Stories. As a photographer Messer’s work has been presented in exhibitions at museums and galleries in the US and Europe, including the French Museum of Photography, Ohio Silver Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Fine Art, Oakland Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, M. H. deYoung Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), Salzburg College Gallery (Austria), Galeria Forum (Tarragona, Spain), the Galleries of the French Institute (NYC) and PAC Gallery, Cincinnati; in publications including Camera (Switzerland), Camerawork (UK), Creative Camera (UK), LFI (Germany), Mother Jones (US), Rolling Stone (US), and the TIme-Life Library of Photography (US); and collected by such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliothéque Nationale (Paris), Cincinnati Art Museum, Chatean d’Eau (Tououse, France) and the Museum of Fine Art Houston.
The work in Some Women, Some Stories at Iris dates back to his student years at the San Francisco Art institute in the late 1960s and continues through 2008. The pieces are photo-text combinations, with the writings intended as “illuminations” to the photographs, most written in the past dozen years. The talk begins at 2 PM this Sunday, February 16, at Iris BookCafe and Gallery located at 1331 Main Street, Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati.