AIPAD Talks Presents ‘Abstract as a Verb’: Lynn Stern in Conversation with Phil Taylor

Monday, April 7, 2025
11am MST

REGISTER HERE FOR THE FREE ONLINE ZOOM EVENT

This conversation will range across the full-breadth of Lynn Stern’s work, tracing connections among recent abstractions as well as early work including landscapes and still lifes. Taylor and Stern will discuss the ways in which her early landscapes and interiors may be said to depict things, but the depictions are highly abstracted: pared down and devoid of details, they create a feeling of light, space, and movement. These qualities constitute the subject of Stern’s ongoing abstractions incorporating a transparent scrim. Consideration of a selection of important historical works from the collection of the George Eastman Museum will enrich and expand the conversation.

Phil Taylor is Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. He joined the museum in 2022 in a newly created New York City-based curatorial position. At the Eastman Museum he has organized Liz Deschenes: Frames per Second (Silent) (2025); Scene at Eastman: Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (2024); Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum (2024), with colleagues in the Department of Photography; New Directions: Recent Acquisitions (2024), with Louis Chavez; and Gregory Halpern: 19 winters / 7 springs (2023). Previously, Taylor was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, where he assisted Roxana Marcoci on the major survey Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear (2022), and co-edited Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader (2021). At MoMA, he organized or co-organized collection exhibitions including Machines, Mannequins, and Monsters (2019) and A Modern Media World (2020). With Antawan I. Byrd and Leslie M. Wilson, he co-organized panels devoted to photography and Africa at the 2024 conferences of the College Art Association and the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.

Lynn Stern is a New York-based photographer who works with black-and-white film and indirect, natural light. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and is in public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Art Museum (OR); the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

Six monographs of Stern’s work have been published: Skull (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017); Frozen Mystery: Lynn Stern Photographs 1978-2008 (Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón / Center for Creative Photography: 2009); Veiled Still Lifes (exhibition catalogue, 2006); Animus (Tucson: Nazraeli Press, 2000); Dispossession (New York: Aperture, 1995), “Highly Commended Book,” 1995 Ernst Haas Awards; and Unveilings (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988).

Stern was co-editor of Photographic INsight from 1990-1993. She was the organizer and moderator of a two-evening symposium held at New York University in 1991 titled “Examining Postmodernism: Images/Premises” and in 2016 moderated a discussion titled “Perceptual/Conceptual: How Does Art Nourish Us?” in New York.

The Lynn Stern Archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.

Register for the free online Zoom event here.

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