On Saturday, March 22, UCR ARTS held a reception heralding the California Museum of Photography's three exhibitions for spring. They include:

•    “Shadow Archive” by Meggan Gould, which opened in February and will be on exhibition until July 27. 

•    “Gail Rebhan, About Time,” a retrospective of Rebhan’s work, which opened the morning of the reception and will run until Aug. 17.

•    “Lost in the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in the 1960s” was the final curated exhibition by the late Douglas McCulloh, senior curator and interim Executive Director of the California Museum of Photography (CMP). This exhibition will be up through the summer, until Sept. 28.

In remarks, Daryle Williams, UCR’s Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences called for all people who love the humanities to take whatever stand they can in the face of the presidential administration’s assault on education, the arts, literature, and sciences. He ended with talking about McCulloh’s passing and said the curators at the California Museum of Photography, or CMP, are working on a retrospective of his extensive body of work. They plan to have it ready in 2026.

Kathryn Poindexter-Akers, UCR ARTS’ head of exhibitions, spoke about the work that went into mounting the exhibitions by McCulloh and Gould, both of which she curated or helped curate.

“Ansel Adams: Lost in the Wilderness” focuses on the photographs from Adams’ “Fiat Lux” project in the 1960s. During the six-year commission from the University of California, we see the landscape photographer, famous for his perfectly framed and exposed images of the American West, notably Yosemite, immersed in the built environment of universities. The companion book with essays by McCulloh is available at the CMP.

Gould’s work emerged from the archives of the CMP. At first, she was interested in a different project, involving cameras. As she photographed the cameras, she became captivated by the film counters, and how many of the cameras had film left in them. After photographing the counters, with permission from the CMP, she took the film from the cameras and developed it, producing a “shadow archive” of forgotten images now brought to light.

The exhibition displays lumen prints of the film counters and a selection of photographs ranging from pets and family to homes and vacations. Gould’s book, “7 Pictures Remaining” for this exhibition is available on her website.

Joanna Szupinska, senior curator at CMP, introduced Gail Rebhan and guest curator Sally Stein, professor emerita, Department of Art History, UC Irvine. After the introductions, Rebhan and Stein led a tour of the exhibition.

From her first self-portrait as a student in the early ’70s to close-up images of her aging body during the pandemic, from infants to the domestic spaces around her, from the displacement of a historic Black cemetery to her dying immigrant father, we witness changes in her life and in societal issues that affect us all. We see continuity and change as she incorporates text and multiple images overlayed to create a sense of structure, such as calendars with appointments over her father or historic buildings superimposed over the newer buildings that have replaced them. A publication of the same title is available.

For more information about the three exhibitions, visit https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/current-exhibitions.