Debbie Grossman Explained

Debbie Grossman (born 1977) is an American photographer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.[1] [2]

Early life and education

Debbie Grossman was born in 1977. She was originally from Rochester, New York.Grossman holds a BA in Women's Studies and Art History from Barnard College.[3] She received an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, where she won the Paula Rhodes Memorial Prize.[3]

Career

Grossman's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[4] the Museum of Fine Arts Houston,[5] and the Jewish Museum.

In her 2011 show, My Pie Town, Grossman created her best known body of work by manipulating photographs first created by Russell Lee of a small community of homesteaders in Pie Town, New Mexico.[6]

My Pie Town first showed at Julie Saul Gallery from April 14 – May 21, 2011.[7] In these images, Grossman reworks and re-imagines a body of images originally photographed by Russell Lee for the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940.[8] Using Photoshop to modify Lee's pictures, Grossman created an imaginary, parallel world – a "Pie Town" populated and governed exclusively by women.[6] [9]

Grossman first saw the Lee's Pie Town pictures in the book Bound For Glory and obtained high resolution public domain versions of them on the Library of Congress website.[10] Using sixteen of Lee's unpublished series on Pietown, a homesteaded community in New Mexico, Grossman took male bodies and rendered them to look like masculine women; in others, she shifted the body language of pairs of women, bringing them closer to create a sense of intimacy.[3] Grossman says of the project "I’ve begun to think of Photoshop as my medium – I’m fascinated by the fact this it shares qualities with both photography and drawing…..I enjoy imagining My Pie Town working as its own kind of (lighthearted) propaganda".[11] ..."[Lee's] pictures of the town are tinged with his mythologizing of a difficult way of life and the land-conquering kind of patriotism that’s a foundation of the American story. I share Lee’s nostalgia. Seventy years later, I am drawn to a similar utopian ideal. ... I’ve had a lifelong obsession with frontier life. I fantasize about locating myself within those pictures and that time. So in an attempt to make the history I wish was real, I have made over Pie Town to mirror my fantasy."[12]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Notes and References

  1. Web site: For Women Only: Re-imagining Russell Lee's Pie Town. Goto. Yumi. Time. en-us. 2020-03-08.
  2. Web site: Examining Identity, Gender Image by Gender Image. MacDonald. Kerri. 2013-06-13. Lens Blog. en-US. 2020-03-08.
  3. Web site: Brooklyn Museum: Debbie Grossman. www.brooklynmuseum.org. 2020-03-08.
  4. Web site: Debbie Grossman . Metropolitan Museum of Art . 22 June 2021.
  5. Web site: Debbie Grossman: Couple at community meeting . mfah.org.
  6. Web site: Debbie Grossman- My Pie Town. 2013-03-02. In the In-Between. en-US. 2020-03-08.
  7. Web site: Julie Saul Projects – My Pie Town – Images. juliesaulprojects.com. 2020-03-08.
  8. Web site: History and Herstory: Pie Town Pics Revisited. 2011-05-26. Reading The Pictures. en. 2020-04-20.
  9. Web site: My Pie Town. x-publishers. www.gupmagazine.com. 2020-03-08.
  10. Web site: My Pie Town. www.themorningnews.org. The Morning News LLC. The Morning News. 2020-03-08.
  11. Web site: Julie Saul Projects – 2011 – My Pie Town. juliesaulprojects.com. 2020-03-08.
  12. Web site: Debbie Grossman Archives. The Center for Fine Art Photography. en-US. 2020-03-08.
  13. Web site: The Jewish Museum. thejewishmuseum.org. 2020-03-08.
  14. Web site: My Pie Town . George Eastman Museum. www.eastman.org. 2020-03-08.
  15. Web site: After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age . Metropolitan Museum of Art . 22 June 2021.
  16. Web site: FRAMING DESIRE: Photography and Video . Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. www.themodern.org. 2020-03-08.