Eskenazi Museum of Art Hires Lauren Richman as Assistant Curator of Photography
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University has hired Lauren Richman as its Assistant Curator of Photography thanks to a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Richman’s three-year term position will focus on researching the archive of Henry Holmes Smith.
Lauren Richman is an art historian and curator specializing in the history of photography and twentieth-century art. She received her PhD and MA in art history from Southern Methodist University and holds a BA in the same subject from Vanderbilt University. Her research centers on the relations between art and politics, images of conflict and documentary practice, and the intersections between art and visual mass culture. Richman’s dissertation analyzes how lens-based media—through U.S. government-sponsored photography exhibitions, film initiatives, and mass-media image circulation—became entangled with and impacted divided Germany’s redeveloping visual arts communities during the early Cold War period.
Richman has previously held curatorial and research positions at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art. She has held academic residencies at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and Berlin’s Freie and Humboldt Universities. Most recently, Richman was awarded a Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has contributed to Art Journal, as well as publications produced by the Dallas Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum, and Centre Georges Pompidou.
As Assistant Curator of Photography at the Eskenazi Museum, Richman will focus on the archive of Henry Holmes Smith, an American photographer and leader in photographic theory and education. Smith was one of the first professors in the United States to conceptualize a History of Photography course and MFA program in photography. Long recognized for his influence on photo education and the achievements of his students (Jerry Uelsmann, Betty Hahn, and Robert Fichter, among others), Smith’s personal practice has largely been overlooked. He began his teaching career at the invitation of László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, after which he began to experiment with camera-less photography and alternative processes. As early as 1948, Smith produced color dye transfer prints, achieving multi-sensory images that straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. A multi-venue retrospective exhibition and accompanying catalogue based on Richman’s research are planned.
