Sonneman, Eve 1950-

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SONNEMAN, Eve 1950-

PERSONAL: Born January 14, 1950, in Chicago, IL; Education: University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, B.F.A., 1967; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, M.A., 1969.

ADDRESSES: Home—684 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010. Agent—Castelli Graphics, 4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10021; Rudiger Schottle, Martiusstrasse 7, 8 Munich 40, Germany; Texas Gallery, 2439 Bissonet, Houston, TX; Galerie Farideh Cadot, 11 rue du Jura, 75013 Paris, France.

CAREER: Freelance photographer, since 1969. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, lecturer, 1970-71, 1975-78, 1985; Rice University, Houston, visiting artist, 1971-72; City University of New York, lecturer, 1972-75; School of Visual Arts, New York, lecturer, 1975-89. Exhibitions: Works included in permanent collections at Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; de Menil Foundation, Houston, TX; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, Germany; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Le Nouveau Musée, Lyon, France; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France; and Toppan Museum, Tokyo, Japan. Solo exhibitions include A Survey, Cooper Union, New York, NY (traveled to the Media Center, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1971), 1970; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, 1972; Whitney Museum Art Resources Center, New York, NY, 1973; Coney Island Series, The Texas Gallery, Houston, 1974; Subway Series, The Texas Gallery, Houston, 1975; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY, 1976; Observations:—Mile in the Sky, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, 1976; New Work, Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1977; New Work, Galerie Farideh Cadot, Paris, France, 1977; New Work, The Texas Gallery, Houston, 1977; New Work, Diane Brown Gallery, Washington, DC, 1977; A Survey, College of Wooster, OH, 1977; New Work, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, 1978; Color Work, Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston, MA, 1979; Three Americans, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (with Lewis Baltz and Mark Cohen; traveled to the Aalborg Künstmuseum, Denmark, and Künstpavillionen, Esbjerg, Denmark, Tranegarden, Gentofte, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Henie-Onstad Museum, Oslo, Norway, 1980), 1979; Color Work, Rudiger Schottle Gallery, Munich, Germany, 1979; Color Work, Le Nouveau Musée, Lyon, France, 1980; Five-Year Color Show, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA (traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH), 1980: Work from 1968-78, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN, 1980; New Work and Polaroids, Galerie Farideh Cadot, Paris, France, 1980; The Texas Gallery, Houston, 1980; Polaroid Work, Young Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1980; New Work, Francoise Lambert Gallery, Milan, Italy, 1980; New Work: New York, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, 1980; Future Memories, Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 1981; Work from 1968-78, Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ, 1981; Galerie Peter Noser, Zurich, Switzerland, 1981; Burton Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1981; Locus Solus, Genoa, Italy, 1981; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, 1982; The Texas Gallery, Houston, 1982; Hudson River Museum, New York, NY, 1982; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 1982; Galerie Farideh Cadot, Paris, France, 1983; The Photographers' Gallery, London, England, 1983; Musée de Toulon, Toulon, France, 1983; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1984; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, 1984; Schloss Mickeln, Düsseldorf, Germany, 1984; Gloria Luria Gallery, Miami, FL, 1984; Mattingly Baker Gallery, Dallas, TX, 1984; Santa Barbara Art Museum, CA, 1984; The Texas Gallery, Houston, 1984; Museum of Modern Art, San José, Costa Rica, 1985; Galerie Peter Noser, Zurich, Switzerland, 1985; Gloria Luria Gallery, Miami, FL, 1985; Galleria Francoise Lambert, Milan, Italy 1985; Galerie Imago, Cologne, Germany 1985; Gallery for Fine Photography, New Orleans, LA, 1985; Castelli Graphics, New York, NY, 1986; Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA, 1986; Peter Noser Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland, 1988; Elizabeth Galasso Gallery, Ossining, NY, 1988; A Gallery for Fine Photography, New Orleans, LA, 1989; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 1989; Jones Troyer Fitzpatrick Gallery, Washington, DC, 1989; Lieberman & Saul Gallery, New York, 1989; Gloria Luria Gallery, Miami, FL, 1990; Zabriskie Gallery, New York, NY, 1990; Grand Central Terminal, New York, NY, 1991; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, 1992; Jones Troyer Fitzpatrick Gallery, Washington, DC, 1993; Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 1993, and The Art Museum of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1995. Group exhibitions include Recent Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1969, Bookworks, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1977, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (toured the United States, 1978-80), 1978, Attitudes: American Photography in the 1970s, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, 1979; One of a Kind, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980; Counterparts: Form and Emotion in Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA: Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC), 1982; Photography in America 1910-83, Tampa Museum, Tampa, FL, 1983; Exposed and Developed, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, 1984; Rare Books of the Twentieth Century, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France, 1985; Photography and Painting 1946-86, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, 1987; Saletta Conumale de Sposizone, Françoise Lambert Galleria, Milan, Italy, 1988; Le SAGA 88-FIAC Editions, Grand Palais, Paris, France, 1988; Artist Books, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, 1989; The Imaginary Library, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 1991; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 1991; Illuminations, Museum of Modern Art at Pfizer Inc., New York, NY, 1992; Contemporary Collection, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1992; A Private Collection, Galerie Cadot, Paris, France, 1993; and Flowers, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1994.

AWARDS, HONORS: Boskop Foundation grant, New York, 1969; National Endowment for the Arts awards, 1972, 1978; Institute for Art and Urban Resources grant, New York, 1977; Polaraid Corporation grant for work in Polavision, 1978; Polaroid Corporation grants, 1988, 1989; Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, France, 1989.

WRITINGS:

Real Time, 1968-1974, Printed Matter (New York, NY), 1976.

Roses Are Read, text by Klaus Kertess, Editions Génération (Colombes, France), 1982.

America's Cottage Gardens, text by Patricia Thorpe, Random House (New York, NY), 1990.

Where Birds Live, Random House (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Lawrence Weiner) How to Touch What, Power-House (New York, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: New York photographer and painter Eva Sonneman is best known for her photographic pairs, or diptychs, which she began creating while a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. More than thirty museum collections worldwide house her creations.

Poet David Shapiro wrote, "She is a painterly photographer [who] reminds us that photography, as with Man Ray and Rodchenko, must never be denigrated as mere materiality."

Sonneman, in an interview with Rick Cunniff in artcritical.com, explained that her photography and paining approaches differ. "In photography I'm very interested in a tiny moment of gesture or innuendo and of change," said Sonneman, who began taking photographs in her late teens. "In painting I'm trying to grasp a larger universal feeling about nature, atmosphere, color, which is a much broader issue."

Her early black-and-white diptychs depicted sequential events or items juxtaposed. A writer noted in Contemporary Photographers, "Her work characteristically contains pairs or quartets of images having some formal or thematic relationship to one another."

Sonneman's professional breakthrough came in 1971 at the Young Photographers exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Sonneman, during that time, experimented further with shifting perspective, chronology, and the juxtaposition of color and black-and-white images. Her "Coney Island" series exemplifies this process, presenting beach and street scenes, positioned within a quadruple image; Observations:—Mile in the Sky, a one-woman show of diptychs taken at the World Trade Center during the bicentennial festivities, followed in 1976.

In 1980 she presented paired works shot in Europe and the United States over two years. The Contemporary Photographers writer commented, "They demonstrate that photography need not be either a cold document of reality or a poetic evocation of the world processed through the photographer's manipulative intelligence."

Sonneman has written four books of photographic work: Real Time, Roses Are Read, America's Cottage Gardens, Where Birds Live, and, with Lawrence Wiener, How to Touch What: An Artists Book.

Where Birds Live studies birds in flight and related aviary matters. Ben Lifson wrote in Artforum, "As a photographer Sonneman is an able and often an affecting maker of lyrical sketches.... Indeed, in her earliest street work the figures often have the look of rapid, deft brushwork. In Where Birds Live, the strongest pictures in this style are of birds themselves." In How to Touch What: An Artists Book, Sonneman collaborates with Weiner, known for his conceptualism and trademark lettering on walls.