Join us as we celebrate the opening of Baldwin Lee with a free Curated Conversation with photographer Baldwin Lee.

Taking place in the Museum’s historic Patrick F. Taylor Library, Prospect New Orleans’ Director of Curatorial Affairs, Andrew Rebatta, and photographer Baldwin Lee will engage in a lively conversation celebrating Baldwin Lee, a landmark solo exhibition at Ogden Museum of Southern Art highlighting Lee’s work.

Lee will share stories from his 5 decade career as a student, educator and practicing artist. Topics of discussion will include Lee’s formal education with Minor White and Walker Evans (two of the 20^th centuries’ most influential photographers) and his 1980s journey of self-discovery photographing the American South – which resulted in making nearly 10,000 photographs and producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century. 

Free and open to the public.

This Curated Conversation presented by The Shirley Rabé Masinter Fund.

Contemporary photo of Baldwin, Courtesy of Richard McCabe for Ogden Museum of Southern Art

About Baldwin Lee

Baldwin Lee is a photographer and educator known for his photographs of Black communities in the American South. Lee, a first-generation Chinese American, received a Bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) where he studied photography with Minor White. He went on to receive a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from Yale University (1975) where he studied with Walker Evans. After college, Lee began teaching photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Yale University while at the same time making photographs that explored the contemporary built environment.

In 1982, Lee became a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee where he founded the University’s Photography program. Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1984 and 1990).  He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, Virginia), Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (Atlanta, Georgia), Howard Greenberg Gallery (New York City), Joseph Bellows Gallery (La Jolla, California) and David Hill Gallery (London, England).

His work is held in many private and public collections including Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The Morgan Library and Museum of the City of New York (New York City), The Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City, Missouri), and The Do Good Fund Inc. (Columbus, Georgia), among many others. In 2022, Hunters Point Press published “Baldwin Lee,” a monograph of the photographer’s 1980s Southern photographs.

About Andrew Rebatta

Andrew Rebatta is the Director of Curatorial Affairs for Prospect New Orleans.  Andrew has organized exhibitions, performances, screenings and talks for museums and contemporary art spaces in the US, Canada, and Mexico.  Andrew spent his formative post-undergrad years throwing art shows and playing records in Chicago and DC before returning to his hometown of New York City, where he was most recently Associate Curator at the Museum of Chinese in America. Andrew’s recent research has been delving into the diasporic relations that have influenced his curatorial practice of interpreting the poetics of immigrant material culture, particularly through audio recordings.

About the Exhibition 

The exhibition Baldwin Lee features a selection of over 50 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s. Many of these photographs will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will include compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape, cityscape and still-life images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South.

/// Event image: Walker Evans, (Baldwin Lee) December 10, 1973 (Detail), Instant internal dye diffusion print (Polaroid SX-70), Collection of Baldwin Lee