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Hollins To Host “Robert Sulkin: Photographs 1973-2019”

Robert Sulkin, Exhibit A, 2013.

The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University will present the exhibition “Robert Sulkin: Photographs 1973-2019.” A member of the Hollins faculty since 1980, Robert Sulkin is an award-winning photographer whose work has been featured in regional and national exhibitions.

Like many photographers working at the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Sulkin witnessed and experienced changes in technology that had profound effects on his work. Collectively his studio and/or photoshop-based fabrications comment on aspects of culture and track a progression of style and experimentation, some playful, some farcical, and some serious.

Robert Sulkin, Vanitas, 2000.

This retrospective exhibition presents 120 photographs thoughtfully selected from 40 plus years of making photographs, ranging from his early social landscape works from the mid-1970s to what the artist refers to as his landscape intervention work from 2019. Throughout his career Sulkin has worked in series, and these will be displayed together somewhat chronologically.

Robert Sulkin was a history graduate at UNC, Chapel Hill, and largely self-taught in photography before pursuing his M.A. and M.F.A. in art at the University of Iowa. In 2009, he was the recipient of a Professional Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. In 2014, a portfolio and interview appeared in the national journal Local: A Quarterly of People and Places.

Robert Sulkin, Homage to Holst 13, 2012-2019.

Sulkin has participated in over 200 solo, group, and juried exhibitions. In recent years, he has had exhibitions at Virginia Tech, the Arts Club of Washington, the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, and the William King Museum. His work has also been exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; the Light Factory; the Chrysler Museum; college galleries throughout Virginia; the New Orleans Museum of Art; and 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM, among others.

Of his work, Sulkin states, “Broadly, my photography deals with the futility of the individual attempting to cope in a technology driven world spinning out of control.”

Robert Sulkin: Photographs 1973-2019 is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by art historian Genevieve Hendricks, a poem by R. H. W. Dillard written in homage to Sulkin, and a fully illustrated exhibition checklist.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by the City of Roanoke through the Roanoke Arts Commission.

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