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Health & Fitness

Photographs of Jan Groover on View at Purchase College

See the work of legendary photographer in "Jan Groover: Formalism is Everything," on view in the Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery, Purchase College, February 25–March 29, 2013


Jan Groover: Formalism is Everything
Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery, Visual Arts Building
February 25–March 29, 2013

Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 10am–5pm or by appointment
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 28, 6–8 pm (open to the public)


The Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery, Purchase College, SUNY, is pleased to present an exhibition of Jan Groover’s photographs.

The renowned photographer taught in the college’s School of Art+Design from 1979-1991. Hired to teach the program’s first color photography class, the artist ushered in a new era of photography to the Purchase community.

Professor Emeritus of Art+Design Jed Devine, a colleague and dear friend, remembers her, “…attitude, conviction and desire to inquire and engage. She came to play and if you were in her class, you had better be all-in, because she was. Jan could be friendly, funny, and fierce at almost the same time. She could be tough, hot, but it was the fire of the forge steeling students to be stronger, sharper, better. And they loved her.”
         
Formerly trained as a painter, Groover studied at Pratt Institute and Ohio State University, buying her first camera (a 35mm Pentax) in 1967. Her early photographs, featuring triptychs and diptychs, captured street scenes of passing trucks and cars, and later included carefully composed fragments of suburban homes and storefronts. 
 
Prominent in the exhibition are a series of kitchen still-life photographs from 1978—meticulously crafted compositions of everyday kitchen utensils such as forks, knives, cake pans, and plants. 

Susan Kismaric, former curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, writes in an essay accompanying Groover’s 1987 mid-career retrospective, “Groover’s photographs revealed, above all, a bracing commitment to form, a commitment so intense that the 'subject' of her pictures was elusive, if not seemingly non-existent. 'Formalism is everything,' she declared.”
 
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1943, Groover lived and worked in New York City until 1991, when she and her husband, painter and critic Bruce Boice, moved to Montpon-Ménestérol France. She lived and worked there until her death in 2012. 


Jan Groover: Formalism is Everything is on view in the Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery in the Visual Arts building, Purchase College, SUNY.

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Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 10am–5pm or by appointment
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 28, 6–8 pm (open to the public)

(914) 251-6750 or Click here for more information.

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SAVE THE DATE: Tuesday, April 9
School of Art+Design Silent Auction
1–4 pm preview and 4–7 pm bidding

Acquire work by the superbly talented students, renowned faculty, and alumni of the School of Art+Design during this student-run event.

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