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A Sneak Peek at Annie Leibovitz’s Traveling Exhibit, “Women: New Portraits”

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Photo: Courtesy of Annie Leibovitz
Patti Smith, musician, writer, artist, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, 2016 She has been making music and art since the early 1970s, when she stood in front of her band in skinny jeans and a ripped T-shirt, giving ecstatic, charismatic, profane performances that merged poetry and rock ’n’ roll. Downtown New York clubs were her natural milieu, but in 1975 she made an album for a major record label. This was Horses, which is now pretty unanimously considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time. In the cover photograph, taken by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, she gazes out insolently, her black jacket tossed over the shoulder of a white man’s shirt. She has had only one Top 40 hit—“Because the Night”—in a long career, but her influence has been significant, on fashion as well as music. She has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and won the 2010 National Book Award for Just Kids, a memoir of her relationship with Mapplethorpe. For the fortieth anniversary of Horses, she and the band performed live versions around the world.

Over four and a half decades, Annie Leibovitz has refined the art of portraiture in images that are profound, provocative, and revelatory of the times we live in. Her photographs for American Vogue and Vanity Fair, and for books and exhibitions, have brought us an extraordinary range of subjects from the most celebrated to the most humble. In “Women,” an exhibition that opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., sixteen years ago, Leibovitz’s lens captured female Supreme Court justices, senators, artists, athletes, maids, mothers, businesswomen, comedians, actors, architects, and soldiers.

Amplifying that phenomenal body of work, Leibovitz, with exclusive commissioning partner and leading global wealth manager UBS, is presenting the traveling exhibition “Women: New Portraits.” Ten cities—London, Tokyo, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Milan, Frankfurt, New York, and Zurich—are hosts to the photographer’s response to changes in the roles of women. Images from the original project are presented alongside recent subjects, all of whom touch our lives today.

“Women: New Portraits”
The former Bayview Correctional Facility, the future home of the Women’s Building
550 West 20th Street, New York, New York 10011
November 18–December 11, 2016

Watch Leibovitz discuss her exhibit, “Women: New Portraits”: