A New Reality, an exhibition of stirring photographic images, opens at the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery at Fairfield University September 19 | Press Releases

image: Photography exhibit Adventurous collectors of art are rare and those noted as prescient, even rarer. Fairfield University's Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery presents such a collection, "A New Reality: Black-and-White Photography in Contemporary Art," which opens on Friday, Sept. 19 with a public reception from 5:00-7:00 p.m. at the Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts. The exhibition of "Stirring Images" as noted by The New York Times, are from the collection of Anne and Arthur Goldstein of Upper Saddle River, N.J., and will be on exhibit at the Walsh Gallery until Sunday, Dec. 7. Admission to the Gallery is free.

Dr. Diana Mille, director of the Walsh Art Gallery, observed that the trend toward realism, pervasive in the current culture in the form of reality TV and internet-based documentary content, "has its roots in the work of artists like Richard Avedon, Kenneth Josephson, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and Vik Muniz, all of whom are on display in this exhibition. The Goldsteins discovered many of these artists early in their careers, while their styles were in development, and because of their vision, a window onto these artists' nascent work is open to us."

In The New York Times review of this exhibition when it first opened in Sept. 2007 at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Benjamin Genocchio noted, "...many images are more than just simple documentation. Some are mysterious, while others evoke a great deal of emotion or a sense of puzzlement... This is a wonderful collection of images."

In the course of the development of the exhibition, curator Jeffrey Wechsler became aware of, as he describes it, "...a collecting sensibility that showed considerable understanding of the history of the photographic medium, a sensibility that bespoke a cogent, individual and intriguing perception of a diverse field... Overall, the artworks presented here embody the modern view of photography as a medium that can equally maintain and transcend its original function..."

Admission to the Gallery is free. The hours are: Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday: Noon to 4 p.m. Closed Monday. The Gallery is always open when performances occur at the Quick Center.