Innovative photographer Duane Michals on campus Feb. 25

Duane Michals, one of the great photographic innovators of the last century—widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text—will present the Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture Thursday, Feb. 25, at Skidmore.

Free and open to the public, the illustrated talk is scheduled at 6 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.

Artist Susan Rabinowitz Malloy, a 1945 Skidmore graduate, endowed the College’s Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture series, which annually brings to campus distinguished contemporary artists of international stature.

Michals’s web site provides the following biographical information on the artist:

Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, he manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.

Over the past five decades his work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted Michals’s first solo exhibition in 1970; he also has had solo exhibitions at the Odakyu Museum, Tokyo (1999), and at the International Center of Photography, New York (2005). Michals celebrated his 50th anniversary as a photographer in 2008 with a retrospective exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece, and the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy.

His numerous recognitions include a CAPS Grant (1975), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art (1989), the Foto España International Award (2001), and an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass. (2005).

Michals’s work belongs to numerous permanent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michals’s archive is housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

He received a B.A. from the University of Denver in 1953 and worked as a graphic designer until his involvement with photography deepened in the late 1950s. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Several of Michals’s photographs are included ina major gift that photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear recently gave to Skidmore’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.

Shear’s donation of more than 500 photographs serves as a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day. An exhibition in celebration of the gift, titled Borrowed Light: Selections from the Jack Shear Collection, is currently on view at the Tang through Aug. 14.