Artists & Works |
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| Leland Rice American (b. 1940) from the WALL SITES series (1973-5) 4 silver prints each 20” x 16” |
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Leland Rice studied at Arizona State University and California
State University, receiving an M.A. in 1969. He immediately began
his teaching career, founding the photography department at the
California College of Arts and Crafts at Oakland, where he was a
great influence for many young photographers. In the early seventies,
Rice began making portraits, intentionally stripping them of their
relationship to external events and attempting to realize them as
pure objects. He then started to focus on environments, including
many images of chairs; in these works, the artist attempted to allude
to the human presence without including it. Rice began the Wall Site series in 1973, first in black and white
and then in color. They are all set in his studio and feature simple
arrangements of objects against the studio wall. Light radiates
from the wall, giving the prosaic scenes almost a spiritual weight.
In 1983, Rice began to document the soon-to-be-demolished Berlin
Wall, and continued to do so until 1991; his photographs are a complete
record of paintings, graffiti, and other accretia on the Wall. A respected curator and collector, as well as artist and teacher, Rice curated Photographs of Moholy-Nagy, the first major American exhibition of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s photographs and photograms, which traveled to museums from 1975 through 1979 and was accompanied by his catalogue. Rice has also curated major museum exhibitions with publications of photography by Herbert Bayer, Frederick Sommer and Frances Benjamin Johnston. He taught photography at the College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland (where he founded the photography department); in Southern California at Pomona College, UCLA and USC; and Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
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Richard Wickerson, Leland Rice: The Wall Site Series,
New Mexico State University, 10/80 |