Pieces of a Life traces Bruce Katsiff’s sixty-year career through the artist’s mastery of the evolving medium of photography from the 1970s to the present day. Katsiff served as chair of the Art and Music Department at Bucks County Community College for over a decade and he was the founding director of the Michener Art Museum from 1989 to 2012. His work demonstrates his deep connections to the artistic communities of Bucks County and beyond. Pieces of a Life features sixty photographs from five distinct bodies of work, including large format portraits of the artist’s Lumberville, Pennsylvania, friends and neighbors, selections from his famed Nature Morte series, collaborative platinum prints, and composite digital portraits. Katsiff considers his work a “private tool to help [him] understand and interact with the world.” His photographs also reflect his position at the center of the Bucks County artistic community during a transitional historical moment.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays by the artist, guest curator Dorothy Fisher, and Jennifer-Navva Milliken, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia.
About the artist:
Photographer and educator Bruce Katsiff has experimented with a variety of styles, subjects, and media across his six-decade career. He mastered the art of platinum and silver gelatin prints using large format cameras and he also embraces digital photography in his more recent series. Katsiff earned his BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and his MFA from Pratt Institute. He attended postgraduate studies at Oxford University. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Michener Art Museum. Bruce divides his time between Bucks County and Philadelphia with his wife Jo.
Major support for ”Bruce Katsiff: Pieces of a Life” is provided by Julie Jensen Bryan, with additional support from The Bullough Family Legacy Trust, David and Gwen Campbell, Kathy and Ted Fernberger, and many friends of the artist.