About the artists
Considered a key member of the Pictures Generation, Sarah Charlesworth (b. 1947, East Orange, N.J.; d. 2013, Falls Village, Conn.) is known for her conceptually driven and visually alluring photo-based works. Through her exacting forms, assiduous process, and subjective interventions, Charlesworth aimed to subvert and deconstruct cultural imagery. Charlesworth’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the major survey Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld at the New Museum, New York (2015), which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Stills at the Art Institute of Chicago (2014); a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego (1998); the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (1998); and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1999). Her work is held in important public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Laurie Simmons (b. 1949, Long Island, N.Y.; lives and works in New York and Connecticut) is an internationally recognized artist. Since the mid-1970s, Simmons has staged scenes for her camera to create images with intensely psychological subtexts and nonlinear narratives. By the early 1980s Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of photography began a new dialogue in contemporary art. Her work is part of the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others. In 2018–19 Simmons’ retrospective Big Camera/Little Camera was presented at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2006 she produced and directed her first film, The Music of Regret, starring Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel, and the Alvin Ailey II dancers. The film premiered at The Museum of Modern Art. Her feature film MY ART premiered at the 73rd Venice Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival in 2017.
Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976, Baltimore; lives and works in New York) has presented recent institutional exhibitions including Veiled Presence: The Hidden Mothers and Sara VanDerBeek at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fla., and Women & Museums at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. VanDerBeek has had solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. VanDerBeek’s work was included in the inaugural New Visions Triennial for Photography and New Media at the Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden, Norway (2020). She has also participated in two-person and group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Calif.; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Kunsthalle Berlin; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, N.C., among others.
Lucy Charlesworth Freeman, MPH MS MA (b. 1988, New York; lives and works in New York), is an artist whose conceptually driven works combine diagrammatic systems, language, biological imagery, and spiritual inquiry. Drawing on studies in medicine, public health, psychiatry, and theology, Freeman develops visual models that attempt to map interior states of consciousness and the structure of the soul. Her works merge the aesthetics of scientific illustration and educational texts with deeply personal investigations of faith, grief, transformation, and transcendence. Freeman’s practice began in 2017 following a profound spiritual experience that prompted an ongoing body of research into the relationship between the material and immaterial dimensions of human life. Working digitally and producing unique canvas-based works, she constructs intricate visual vocabularies that combine text, symbolic forms, and appropriated scientific imagery into expansive conceptual systems. Her work has been the subject of the solo exhibition Pages from a Book at Will Shott Gallery, New York (2023). Selected group exhibitions include Tabula Rasa at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2024); New Art Dealers Alliance, Miami (2023); Artist Book Week at BravinLee Programs, New York (2023); No Fear in Trying at Unit London (2021); Dreamhouse at Procell, New York (2018); and Nice Days at Spencer Sweeney Studio, New York (2017). Freeman received an M.A. from The New School for Social Research, an M.S. from Drexel University College of Medicine, an M.P.H. from Hunter College and the CUNY School of Public Health, and a B.A. from New York University.
