“Camera Obscura: View of Florence from the Hotel Excelsior, Italy” by Abelardo Morell
MONTCLAIR, NJ — The Montclair Art Museum will present “Abelardo Morell: Projecting Italy”, from October 15 to February 12. The Montclair Art Museum is located at 3 S. Mountain Ave. in Montclair.
World-renowned Boston-based photographer Abelardo Morell has used the camera obscura since the early 1990s, creating a body of work defined by the contemporary use of pre-camera technology. By creating a dark room into which no light enters except through a small pinhole, Morell brings the outside world into the room, projected upside down and upside down onto the opposite wall. The result is a complex layering of interior and exterior views. This exhibit highlights 12 tent and camera-dark photographs of sites in Italy in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Center for Italian Culture at Fitchburg State University, located in Fitchburg, Mass.
Morell’s exhibition inaugurates a series of shows at MAM that will focus on the creative contributions of contemporary American and Native American photographers. “Abelardo Morell: Projecting Italy” was originally curated by the Fitchburg Art Museum, where it premiered last year. The FAM exhibit was supported in part by a grant from the Amelia V. Gallucci-Cirio Endowment of FSU’s Center for Italian Culture.
Exhibition and MAM curator Lauren Szumita said, “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to showcase Abelardo Morell’s stunning photographs at FAM and in the upcoming MAM exhibition. His work with the camera obscura is surprisingly revolutionary for all its simplicity, and his engagement with the photographic past modernizes the history of the camera obscura. Morell’s work reminds us to grasp the magnificence of the mundane and notice the often overlooked details of our world.
Morell was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1948, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell earned his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from Yale University School of Art. . He was a professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston from 1983 to 2010. He has received several awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, an Infinity Award in Art from the International Center for Photography in 2011, and a Lucie Prize for Achievement in Fine Arts in November 2017.
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