Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1376320
ENCOUNTERING AN-MY LÊ: THE AMON CARTER'S RETROSPECTIVE FOR A MACARTHUR GENIUS PHOTOGRAPHER " On Contested Terrain" is the first comprehensive museum survey for Vietnamese- American artist An-My Lê. Organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the exhibition travels to Texas, where it's overseen by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art's assistant curator of photographs, Kristen Gaylord. Born in Saigon in 1960, Lê lived h e r c h i l d h o o d during the Vietnam War, fleeing her homeland as a teen in 1975 and eventually settling in the U.S., where she received degrees at Stanford and Yale. Now a professor at Bard College, A n n a n d a l e - o n - Hudson, New York, she is also a 2012 MacArthur Genius Fellow. In an Art21 feature, she spoke about approaching the idea of war "in a more complicated and challenging way." At The Carter, all five of Lê's signature series are featured, inviting museum-goers to contemplate topics from Vietnam, decades after the war, to American naval vessels in far- flung ports of call, as well as the issues of Confederate monuments and America's immigration debates. The images in "On Contested Terrain" reverberate beyond the art world. They testify to the photographer's riveting and brave infiltrations into the U.S. military via photographing troops training in California before deployment for the Iraq War and crews aboard U.S. naval vessels around the globe. Lê also performed roles as a North Vietnamese soldier or Viet Cong rebel while documenting a group of Vietnam War re-enactors. Over Zoom, PaperCity queried Gaylord about the eerie timing of this show — planned 2 ½ years out, thanks to her friendship with exhibition curator Dan Leers of the Carnegie, a former colleague from MoMA days — and what she hopes viewers will take away. "When the opportunity first came up," she said, "I thought An-My Lê was a fit for us and our museum, our community, and our time, for reasons like her long engagement with American identity in history and the fact that she is a landscape photographer and sees herself that way and takes a lot of cues from 19th-century l a r g e f o r m a t p h o t o g r a p h e r s that we have as a strength in the collection. The changes over the last few years seemed to make her work even more urgent in many ways … I actually ended up rewriting a lot of the labels in the show. I wanted to be able to update and add information — with the protests around the murder of George Floyd last summer, again the section on Confederate war memorials. It really felt like our audience was primed to think about the issues that An-My was addressing by the time we got to open it this spring." Through August 8; cartermuseum.org. BY CATHERINE D. ANSPON © An-My Lê. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK, PARIS, AND LONDON. An-My Lê's Ship Divers, USS New Hampshire, Arctic Seas, 2011, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art 24