From her hand-colored, machine-stitched photographic prints to her artist's books and well-known Mountain Dream Tarot card deck (the first-known photographic treatment of the tarot) Bea Nettles's work has always upended tradition. Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory presents the span of her art across half a century, in conjunction with an exhibition co-organized by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri.
Recognized for her innovations in mixed-media photography, Nettles used alternative photographic processes that produced textured works, with subjects including self-portraits; investigations of the body and its relationship to nature and landscape; and the experience of mothering, loss, and aging. A tremendously productive artist, Nettles has received critical acclaim, and her work has become part of museum permanent collections from coast to coast. Now, for the first time in her fifty-year career, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory offers a large-scale retrospective of an artist who profoundly illuminates our inner worlds.
About the Author: Bea Nettles began her international exhibition career in 1970 with Photography Into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. She received two National Endowment for the Arts Photography Fellowships, and taught for thirty years at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Jamie M. Allen is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum.
Olivia Lahs-Gonzales is the director of the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis, Missouri.
Amy L. Powell is the curator of modern and contemporary art at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Founded in 1947 and located in Rochester, New York, the George Eastman Museum is the world's oldest photography museum and one of the earliest film archives, with major collections in photography and cinema and related technologies as well as photography books.
