It would be convenient to say that Barbara Kasten works in photography or sculpture. The output of this Chicago-based artist certainly fits within these traditional categories. Over the course of her decades-long career—from her 1970s experiments in abstraction using cyanotype photograms to recent ballroom-scaled commissions—she’s skirted categorization, producing images and installations that capture, sometimes fleetingly, that which is ineffable. Which is to say, her true mediums are neither film nor stone, but rather light, space, and time.
Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten (born 1936) has developed her expansive photographic practice through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile and installation. Well known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, the Chicago-based artist has recently begun to be reconsidered within the broader context of architectural theory. This survey contextualizes Kasten’s investigations into how moving images and light play within and through architectural forms.
There is a letter in a drawer in Chicago’s Graham Foundation library; a sheet of Orange Coast College stationary dated 8 April 1980. The letter is from artist Barbara Kasten to Florence Henri, a photographer (then in her late 80s and living in Paris) who had been contemporary with many avants of early 20th-century Europe: Jean Arp, Man Ray, and László Moholy-Nagy, who she studied under at the Bauhaus. In it, Kasten asks to visit Henri and interview her as part of NEA-funded project to videotape six female photographers who had made “major contributions in the field” – figures whose work was troublingly dropping out of the historical narrative. Read More …