Event Info

Curator Kevin Miller will moderate this panel discussion with Douglas McCulloh’s colleagues, collaborators, and friends who knew his work and chance operations well. Panelists include Jacques Garnier, Dawn Hassett, Sheila Pinkel, and Anne Bray.

Image: Douglas McCulloh, Untitled, from the series Chance Encounters, 1990–98. Courtesy of UCR ARTS and the Estate of Douglas McCulloh.

Speaker Bios:

Anne Bray works at the intersection of public space and media art as a hybrid artist and director of public arts organization, Freewaves.  Engagement with edgy art by a broad public is Bray’s mission. She makes multimedia works on 2 and 3d screens in venues such as gas stations, malls, billboards, etc. She taught graduate new genre seminars for 25 years at CGU and USC. Presenting more than 3000 artists with 230+ organizations including MOCA, Getty, Hammer, LACMA, were supported repeatedly by NEA, MacArthur and Warhol Foundations.

For the last decade, Jacques Garnier’s work has focused on using minimalism and negative space to operate at the core of abstraction. He has developed a practice both rigorously formal and profoundly contemplative, grounded in the belief that seeing itself can be a philosophical act.   Garnier’s images invite slowness – a kind of seeing that becomes meditation.  Freed from the constraints of context, he creates images of stillness. “I find fascinating the tension between the mind, which seeks to understand, and the body, which simply feels.” 

Dawn Hassett is a curator and exhibition designer at the Civil Rights Institute of Inland Southern California. She is author of The Great Picture: The Making of the World’s Largest Photograph (Hudson Hills Press, New York, 2012) and holds a master’s degree in writing from the University of Southern California. She was Douglas McCulloh’s partner for 42 years and served as his editor on the following books: Lost in the Wilderness: Ansel Adams in the 1960s, Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West (Inlandia Institute, 2020); In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to the Present (Inlandia Institute, 2018); Dream Street (Heyday Books, Berkeley, California, 2009); and Chance Encounters (University of California/California Museum of Photography, 1999). She worked with McCulloh on American Cross and served as his navigator for the map-driven project.

Sheila Pinkel was born in 1941 in Newport News, Virginia. She holds an MFA from UCLA and from 1986 to 2011 she was a professor of art at Pomona College. Pinkel’s forty-year career spans experimental light studies, socially-engaged documentary projects, and public art. Pinkel’s work has been exhibited extensively since the late 1970s and is held in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Denver Art Museum; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou, Paris. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kevin Miller is an independent curator and consultant and is currently the Director of FotoEkthesis, an exhibition, archive and project consultancy for institutions and artists. From 2001 to 2016 he served as director and senior curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography (SMP), a public museum located on the campus of Daytona State College in Florida. The SMP was one of the largest exclusively photographic institutions in the United States and is Florida’s most comprehensive museum of photography.

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