Susan Meiselas
Higher Pictures is pleased to present Revisiting Nicaragua 1978–1979, Susan Meiselas’ second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition presents Meiselas’ iconic photographs of the Nicaraguan popular insurrection in the context of current civil resistance in the country.
Meiselas was one of very few American photographers to bear witness to the revolution in Nicaragua, which culminated in 1979 with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrowing the forty-year dictatorship of the Somoza family. Meiselas photographed life under the Somoza regime during its decline, capturing the devastating personal and collective toll of the insurrection on Nicaraguans. Today, nearly forty years later, there is an ongoing, unarmed civilian resistance movement in Nicaragua against the government of President Daniel Ortega, a member of the FSLN. Two diptychs in the exhibition—in which Meiselas’ original images are paired with photographs she took of their reappearance in street murals in Nicaragua many years later—speak to the passage of time, the collision of past and present, and the lasting imprint of images on history and collective memory.
An AR (augmented reality) feature, which was developed for the 2016 Aperture reissue of the original Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979 monograph (1981), can be activated in the gallery. Using the Look & Listen app, visitors can use their mobile devices to hover over a selection of images and access clips from Meiselas’ films Pictures from a Revolution (1991), in which she returns to Nicaragua to speak with people she originally photographed in ’78 and ’79, and Reframing History (2004), which documents Meiselas’ collaboration with local communities to place mural-sized images of her original photographs back into the city and the landscape at the sites where they were originally made.
Susan Meiselas was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948. The author of eleven photobooks, she joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has served as President of the Magnum Foundation since its founding in 2007. Mediations, the most recent catalogue of her work, was published in 2018 in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition, Susan Meiselas: Mediations, which was on view at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mediations was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019). She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), Hasselblad Foundation Prize (1994), and Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Susan Meiselas lives in New York City.
Exhibition Event: Discussion and book signing for Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979 (Aperture, 2016) with artist Susan Meiselas.
Date: Saturday, March 21, 2020 from 3 – 6 pm
For more information, please contact Julia Curl at 212-249-6100.