Back to The Future: The Avant-Garde is An Address. An Artist Talk by Ellen Carey (Online)

The Griffin Museum is pleased to host an online artist talk with Ellen Carey — an acclaimed lens-based artist, photographer, educator, independent scholar, and guest curator, as well as a participating artist in A Yellow Rose Project.

In this talk, Carey will explore photography as a visual art form at the forefront of the avant-garde, highlighting its capacity for disruption, experimentation, and transformation. With a career spanning over four decades, Carey is known for her pioneering work in abstract and experimental photography. 

Her innovative use of the Polaroid 20 X 24 camera, one of five in the world, sees her Neo-Geo “Self-Portrait” series (1983-1988) pointing the way towards abstraction to minimalism to her latest series in Polaroid as Crush & Pull (2018-2024) — dynamic large-scale Polaroids that emphasize color, process, materiality — with the “big” camera and its monumental negative that underscore her commitment to pushing the boundaries of what photography can be — “ light drawing” — anew.

Join us for an illuminating conversation that invites us to reconsider photography not just as a tool of representation, but as a medium of ongoing reinvention and radical visual exploration.

Event Details

Date: One session on October 26, 2025

Time: 1:00 – 2:30 pm EDT

Format: Live online via Zoom

Panel Fee: FREE for members (RSVP required) / $10 for non-members.
If you can, please consider donating — your support helps the Griffin Museum champion photography, uplift artists and educators, and inspire a vibrant creative community.

Level: Open to All!

About Ellen Carey

Ellen Carey (b. NYC, NY – USA), a Pictures Generation contemporary and member of Buffalo’s avant-garde with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, upends the medium’s collective histories in lens-based art, photography and technology with her abstract, minimal “picture” signs.

Ellen Carey is an university educator, independent scholar, guest curator, experimental photographer and lens-based artist. The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) named Carey one of the top 100 women photographers worldwide, one of 14 Americans. Her unique and experimental pictures have been seen in over 70 solo plus hundreds of group exhibits, reproduced in books, brochures and other printed matter.

She collaborated with dunhill of London (2021) with two solo exhibits – “Light Struck” – Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock (England) parallels “Struck by Light” – New Britain Museum of Art (www.nbmaa.org) (2023-24); lecture/workshop at foam museum (www.foam.org). In Paris, her Polaroid  and photograms in a group exhibition at Bibliotheque ne France plus a solo “Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey” at Galerie Miranda (2022), solo booth by Jayne H. Baum Gallery (NYC, NY) at Paris PHOTO (2018) follows a group one at Seterah Gallery (Berlin, GER) (2023).

Photography Degree Zero (1996-2024) in Polaroid 20 X 24 and Struck by Light (1988-2025) in Photogram name her dual practices while Pictus & Writ sees published essays: Man Ray, Sol LeWitt, Anna Atkins plus her own work. She is Associate Professor of Photography-Hartford Art School, University of Hartford-Connecticut.

She emphasizes photography’s indexical drawing with light and light with color. Her innovative, technical knowledge and burgeoning imagination dare viewers to engage with the arc of time beginning with the earliest memory of light and shadow up to the present of momentary rainbows.

Her performative record is a visual all or nothing, her ‘zero’. Her photographs no longer represent object-subject relations but rather the twin interplay of light and shadow, stark in black and white minimalism and freeing color itself into a kaleidoscope of abstraction that create new “picture signs”.

Ellen Carey
www.ellencareyphotography.com

Other Exhibition Highlights: 2017 – 2024

• 2017-2024 The Polaroid Project: At the Intersection of Art & Technology, Group exhibit/book, international/national tour (2017-2020) – FEP (www.fep-photo.org) and MIT; Carey Pulls CMY Thames & Hudson cover/essay: Photography Time Zero

• Shape of Light, Vassar College, 2019; group/book

• All the Marvelous Surfaces: Photography Since Karl Blossfeldt, deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum, 2019, group • 2018 Crush & Pull, JHB Gallery, Paris PHOTO, Solo Booth – Ranked in top five at Fair

• Dings, Shadows & Pulls, Amon Carter Museum of American Art (ACMAA); solo – 2018

• Mirrors of Chance, Galerie Miranda, Paris, FRANCE; solo – 2019

• Women in Colour: Anna Atkins, Color Photography and Those Struck by Light, Galerie Miranda, Paris, FRANCE – 2018

• Women in Colour: Anna Atkins, Color Photography and Those Struck by Light

Rubber Factory, NYC, NY, 2017; group

• All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, Los Angeles, CA; 2020; group

• A Yellow Rose Project, (www.ayellowroseproject.com), group/travel

• Lights, Camera, Ellen Carey!, NBMAA w/ The Delamar Hotel, 2020-2021, solo • Noir e Blanc, Bibliothèque Nationale France, Paris, FRANCE; 2023-2024, group/book

• Controlling the Chaos, Carnegie Mellon Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, 2020-21, group

• Lectures _ Multiple Venues