In Conversation: Rodrigo Valenzuela and James Swensen

Join us for an engaging conversation between one of our exhibiting artists, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and art historian James Swensen. Focusing on the work currently on view in Under Construction, including Lewis Baltz’s Park City series and Valenzuela’s own work, their discussion will explore both artists’ practices, as well as broader conversations and themes within contemporary photography.

James R. Swensen is professor of art history and the history of photography at Brigham Young University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 2009. His research interests include documentary photography, American photography in the 1930s and 1970s, and the art and photography of Utah and the American West. He is the author of several articles which have appeared in History of Photography, TransAtlantica: Revue d’Études Américaines, American Indian Quarterly, and The European Journal of American Culture, among others. He is also the author of two books: Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), and In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953-1954 (University of Utah Press, 2018). He also co-authored (with Farina King and Michael Taylor) Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2021.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. Santiago, Chile 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. He has received the Joan Mitchell Award, Art Matters Foundation Grant, and Artist Trust Innovators Award. Recent solo exhibitions include BRIC Arts Media, NY; Screen Series at the New Museum, NY; Lisa Kandlhofer Galerie, Vienna, AU; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Orange County Museum, Santa Ana, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. Recent residencies include the Dora Maar Fellowship, Ménerbes, France; Fountainhead Residency, Miami FL; Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Lightwork, Syracuse, NY, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.

Image credit: Rodrigo Valenzuela, Hedonic Reversal No. 16, 2014. Archival pigment print, artist frame, 54 x 44 inches. Courtesy of the artist