We have moved!

Our new address is:

330 South Convent Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85701

Join us for the The Grand Opening 2021

9 Small Exhibitions • September 18 - December 5, 2021

Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona LLC and Andrew Smith Gallery Photography Auctions LLC

are pleased to announce we are moving our private viewing rooms, gallery, registration, and cataloging office to 330 S. Convent Ave., Tucson, AZ 85701.

30x40” gelatin silver print mural printed 1962.

For close to 50 years the Andrew Smith Gallery has been one of the leading fine art photography galleries in the world. ASG’s interests are vast in the field and is known as the international source for historic and classic Western American Photography, including the works of Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, Laura Gilpin, and Ansel Adams, such as the incredibly rare and important mural of Moonrise, Hernandez, NM, 1941 offered during this exhibition.

6.25 x 10.25" gelatin silver print

Newly located in the downtown Tucson neighborhood of Barrio Viejo, our new space is a high ceilinged thick-walled eight room historic adobe building built in 1895. It is adjacent to the new gallery space of longtime friend and colleague Terry Etherton / Etherton Gallery (340 S. Convent).

5.3 x 11.4" vintage gelatin silver print.

15 x 14.7" gelatin silver print

The Grand Opening 2021: 9 Small Exhibitions (September 18 - December 5, 2021) will kick off on Saturday, September 18, 2021. A small selection of American masterpieces by 20th Century legends of photography that the gallery has presented for decades such as Annie Leibovitz, Paul Caponigro, Laura Gilpin, Flor Garduño, and Lee Friedlander will be featured alongside photographs by other 19th, 20th, and 21st century artists.

19 x 15" gelatin silver print, printed 1975

12 x 12" Cibachrome, printed 1989

Flor Garduño, Basket of Light, Sumpango, Guatemala, 1989

16 x 20" gelatin silver print

Paul Caponigro, Redding Woods, Connecticut, 1968

13.5 x 19" gelatin silver print

For the Grand Opening, Andrew Smith Gallery will feature small exhibitions of work by long time gallery artists Zig Jackson, Barbara Van Cleve and Jody Forster as well as Shelley Niro's "M: Stories of Women". Also featured will be Tucson photographers Nika Kaiser, Ernesto Esquer and contemporary landscape photographer Thomas Locke Hobbs. A group of photographs by classic 1960s street photographer George Gardner will be exhibited for the first time at Andrew Smith Gallery.

The Andrew Smith Gallery relocated to Tucson in 2018 after over 40 years in Santa Fe, NM; the gallery has long featured work by leading contemporary Native American photographers including Zig Jackson, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Shelly Niro, Victor Masayesva Jr., Larry McNeil and Will Wilson. Multiple small exhibitions by these acclaimed photographers will be shown over the next few years.

Zig Jackson - Survey

16 x 24" archival pigment print

The Grand Opening on September 18 will feature a selection of work by Zig Jackson, Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara Nations. Jackson is known for translating his experiences as an indigenous person through a lens of wit and keen observation. He was awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Works shown will be from various series including Entering Zig’s Indian Reservation, Indian Man in San Francisco, Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian, Native Veterans, and his Homeland Series of everyday views of reservation life.

from the Native Veterans series, 16 x 24" archival pigment print

Zig Jackson lives in Savannah, Georgia where he teaches photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. During the summer months he packs his car with camera equipment and heads for places throughout the United States that have significant meaning to Native Americans. When Jackson was young, he had an intense desire to meet as many Native People as he could. Over the years he has pursued that impulse traveling in New Mexico, Arizona, California, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arkansas, Utah, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and elsewhere. Engaged with so many different tribal groups, he gained considerable perspective on issues important to indigenous people. Thus, he tends to be warmly welcomed wherever he goes and invited into homes to rest and eat. 

18 x 18" archival pigment print

Indian tribal groups are as culturally diverse as the regions they inhabit, distinguished from each other by appearance, language, and social mannerisms. And yet all share the reality of being, at times, strangers in what was once their own land, living in the aftermath of a vanished frontier and government policies that forced them from their homelands and onto reservations. In the straightforward photographic style of Walker Evans and a nod to Cindy Sherman, Jackson captures the daily world of contemporary Indians, removed but intersecting with tourism, marketing, myth, traditions, and stereotyping. In Jackson's photographs eagle feathers collide with hot dog stands, road signs recall vanished animal herds, and ancient and modern traditions are celebrated.

Shelley Niro - M: Stories of Women

14 x 9.25" archival pigment print

Also featured in the Grand Opening exhibit will be the series: M Stories of Women (2011) by Shelley Niro, Haudenosaunee Mohawk Nation. Niro is known internationally for her feature length film Kissed by Lightening (2009), performance pieces, and particularly for her extensive photographic body of work. In Niro’s most notable photographic work, she deploys the photograph as a platform to represent herself and female family members cast in contemporary positions to challenge the stereotypes and clichés of Native American women. Born in New York and currently residing in Ontario, Niro is a member of the Haudenosaunee Mohawk Nation, Iroquois Confederacy, Turtle Clan, and Six Nations Reserve. For her MFA at the University of Western Ontario, Niro wrote a thesis about the rediscovery and readdressing of basic myths, legends and history of the Iroquois people, research that resulted in an intensive study of the diaspora of the Mohawk Nation.

14 x 9.25" archival pigment print

Niro works in a photomontage process, combining historic and contemporary imagery to create seamless composite photographic prints. Her innovative, informative and at times, humorous works have a broad range of interests including the myths, legends, history and diaspora of the Mohawk Nation, feminism, politics, globalization, colonialism, satire, and the experience of the cultural "other." Ryan Rice in Shelley Niro 2017 ScotiaBank/Steidl

14 x 9.25" archival pigment print

Barbara Van Cleve

archival pigment print

“I want to capture the beauty of the landscape, the setting or rising of the sun, and the dust swirling as horses or cattle move across the terrain . . . I want people to see ranching as something different from the mythical image of the cowboy riding off into the sunset, brave, strong, and alone . . . There are also women doing half the work or even more.” Barbara Van Cleve – from "Pure Quill: Photographs by Barbara Van Cleve."

Long time Andrew Smith Gallery artist, Barbara Van Cleve, is the most notable photographer of western ranch life of the last 60 years. Montana born, she grew up on a ranch at the base of the Crazy Mountains near Big Timber, Montana.

archival pigment print

Barbara Van Cleve is the real deal. She has both the swagger and shyness of a true westerner. Her sense of the land and people combined with her sophisticated photographic techniques elevate her work into a special pantheon of legendary western landscape, ranch, and documentary photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably L. A. Huffman, Evelyn Cameron, and Erwin Smith. Not only is she a brilliant photographer of the American West; she herself grew up in the saddle so that the authenticity in her work shows clearly from her lifetime of genuine experiences and insights. Often photographing from horseback at full gallop, Van Cleve embraces the grit and substance of real western life. Her subjects are not sentimental objects, but rather friends and colleagues. Her black and white prints show more than any photographer of her generation the true grandness and enthralling isolation and toughness of the American West and the Western Ranch Woman.

archival pigment print

In 2018 the Montana Historical Society purchased her archive. A selection of Van Cleve photographs will be on view for the Grand Opening Exhibition.

archival pigment print

Jody Forster - The Sonoran Desert

gelatin silver print

Jody Forster (1948-2020) was the leading large format traditional landscape photographer of the Southwest and Sonora. Forster's spectacular large format silver print photographs of southwest deserts, northern Mexico mountains and coastlines, Nepal, Thailand, and Antarctica reveal him to be a master of vision and technique.

gelatin silver print

Forster was born in Chicago in 1948. Following a commission in the Armed Forces he began to devote himself to photography, attending Ansel Adams' Yosemite workshop. After 1976 he moved to Arizona to concentrate on photographing the Sonoran Desert, the Pinacate Mountains of Mexico and the Superstition Wilderness near Phoenix.

In 1984 Forster joined the American expedition to climb Mt. Himalchuli in the Himalayas. Although not a professional climber, he packed in 80 lbs. of large format camera equipment and worked at 16,000 to 18,000 feet covering three mountain ranges: the Annapurnas, the Gorkas, and the Khumbu.

In 1992 Forster was chosen by the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Program as Artist-in-Residence and spent three months photographing Antarctica's vast landscape and sailing more than one thousand miles along the Antarctic peninsula in NSF research vessels. The National Science Foundation invited him back to Antarctica in 1995 to make more photographs.

gelatin silver print

Jody Forster passed away on December 23, 2020, following a complicated heart surgery. For nearly thirty-five years Jody’s powerhouse energy, cheerfulness, and above all, his consummate artistry helped define the character of Andrew Smith Gallery. A small selection of his photographs will be on view at the Grand Opening for the first time since his passing. Jody has also been represented by our neighbor Etherton Gallery.

George Gardner

The Andrew Smith Gallery, Tucson, AZ., Deborah Bell Photographs, New York, and Paul M. Hertzmann Inc., San Francisco, are pleased to announce their exclusive representation of American documentary photographer George W. Gardner (b. 1940), a giant among late 20th Century documentary photographers. Gardner’s archive comprises thousands of photographs realized largely between 1960 and 1988, resulting in truly an “American document”. With empathy and insight Gardner captures the authentic and empathetic American experience, focusing on the most ordinary moments of daily life, even while chronicling events that shaped American history.

This is the first in a series of small exhibitions the Gallery will host over the next 18 months that will focus on other areas of interest including: Protests, Parades and Politics; Private Moments; America - A Sense of Place; Private and Public Parties; Social Justice and Civil Rights, The Mixer, The Music Man of Harlem; among others. The most notable series from Gardner's work was the 1984 Gun People project with journalist Patrick Carr, published as visual ethno-history -- interviews and environmental portraits of (primarily white) people involved with guns. This prescient landmark snapshot into the most controversial area of modern political, personal and journalistic interest has gained in importance and relevance almost 40 years later.

George Gardner - Portraits

“America is my place.... I have no choice, and I have always felt that. Anyplace else, I’m just a tourist, I don’t connect. In America, I feel as if I have some deep notion of what’s going on. I am trying to get at what I think about America. I can feel this country.” - George Gardner

Whether practicing primarily as an independent photographer and choosing his own subjects or working on assignment, Gardner created a unified vision that defines and encompasses the American experience.

Nika Kaiser

30 x 30" chromogenic print

Andrew Smith Gallery will be presenting work by local contemporary artist Nika Kaiser for the first time at the Grand Opening. Nika Kaiser is a visual artist working with photography, video, and installation, her art practice intersects ideas of mysticism, interspecies connection, and future ecologies. 

20 x 20" chromogenic print

Kaiser received her MFA in Visual Art from University of Oregon in 2013. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including two Arts Foundation New Works Grants and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She teaches experimental practices in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Arizona.

Nika Kaiser's work touches on environmentalism and feminism, while often citing art history. Her photograph Sun Bones (after Lola Alvarez Bravo) 2019 references the famous Bravo self-portrait but transports the act into a mystical desert location awash with warm desert light. Much like most of her work, Dragoon Mountains, 2019 showcases a remote desert landscape glowing in golden hour light, but a mysterious masked and hatted figure emerges from the tall grasses. (Self-imagined) mythology and lore of the Sonoran Desert is central to Kaiser's work.

20 x 20" chromogenic print

Thomas Locke Hobbs

16 x 20" archival pigment print

Thomas Locke Hobbs is another contemporary photographer showing for the first time at the Grand Opening of Andrew Smith Gallery. Hobbs studied at the Talleres de Estética Fotográfica led by Eduardo Gil in Buenos Aires between 2009 and 2011. In 2015, he received an MFA from Arizona State University. He has exhibited work in Buenos Aires, Cuzco, Lima, London, and Phoenix. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Hobbs has been living in South America on and off for the last 12 years and is currently based in Peru. His work is informed by being an outsider both in the United States and in South America. Andrew Smith Gallery will be featuring works from his two series: Mountain fields like stairways of stone and Maravilla del Mundo.

16x20" archival pigment print

The photographs in Maravilla del Mundo depict young gay men in their environs; landscapes of the city; and details and interiors in Iquitos, Peru. The LGBT community in Iquitos is highly visible but also subject to homophobia, transphobia, and violence. Iquitos, Peru is a city of half a million people located on the Amazon River accessible only by boat or plane. There are no highways connecting it with the rest of Peru, making the city a kind of island. Surrounded on three sides by water, the city itself is dense, heavily urbanized, and lacking in parks and vegetation, in contrast to the jungle just beyond.

16x20" archival pigment print

The photographs from Mountain fields like stairways of stone are beautifully rendered black and white landscapes depicting centuries old hillside crop terraces in the mountains of Peru and the booming informal housing developments in proximity. The work explores both the continuities and disruptions in human alternations to the landscape as written on the land in South America.

Ernesto Esquer

3.5 x 3.5" hand-colored gelatin silver print

Also showing for the first time at the Grand Opening of Andrew Smith Gallery is Ernesto Esquer, a photographic artist and printer from Tucson, Arizona. Esquer actively works in all aspects of traditional darkroom photography and various alternative processes including cyanotype and lumen prints. He has extensive experience working with instant film and teaches instant film manipulations at Pima Community College. He often combines processes or materials in an attempt to transform a photograph into a precious object. 

Esquer received his BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona and is currently the Laboratory Specialist of Photography at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ. His first book In No Time, featuring a collection of hand colored or toned gelatin silver prints, was released by Dark Spring Press in 2017.

4x2.5" toned gelatin silver print

The subjects in Esquer's work are as varied as the photographic processes he uses. The common theme throughout his pictures is intense observation and the beauty of light on objects. The small gem-like photos highlight Esquer's skills as a photographic technician. The contemplative images evoke 19th century sensibilities while remaining wholly contemporary.

5.5 x 4" hand-colored gelatin silver print

For more information please contact us:

info@andrewsmithgallery.com

505-984-1234.

Hours: Monday – Saturday 10-4.
Masking is required while

in the gallery. Thank you.

Effective September 1, 2021:

Andrew Smith Gallery Arizona LLC

Private viewing rooms, print receiving and cataloguing office:

330 S. Convent Ave., Tucson, AZ 85701

Business office for invoice, billing, and payments:

10900 E. Roger Rd., Tucson, AZ 85749

info@andrewsmithgallery.com