Eyeballs Spinning, Abby Robinson’s Self-Portraits

Please join curator Antonella Pelizzari; Pratt Professor of Photography – Allen Frame; and writer, curator, and art historian Jackson Davidow for a discussion of the work of Abby Robinson at Pratt Manhattan Gallery on Thursday, May 1 at 6:30pm. This event is being presented in conjunction with Abby Robinson: AutoWorks & WaterWorks at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, on view now through June 7, 2025.

This event is free and open to the public.

Abby Robinson (1947–2024) developed her AutoWorks series for over 30 years, beginning in 1971. The images captured in the series communicate the art of women deploying the camera to debunk fixed gender roles through self-portrait photography and presentation. Composed of black and white prints approximately 2 x 3 inches in size, the works from the AutoWorks series are small and intimate photos.

Robinson’s WaterWorks series grew out of AutoWorks over the past decade, when she serendipitously took her camera into the shower. The use of color and significantly larger prints result in a different mood for the WaterWorks photos, lacking artifice by demanding presence in all senses of the word. The images are direct, showing merely a figure and a circumscribed space transformed by a combination of water and light. The exhibition will feature works from both series, which were selected by the photographer before her death in July 2024. In addition to the works, the artist’s notebooks and a shower curtain that Robinson used as a living canvas will be on display.

Antonella Pelizzari is a Professor of the History of Photography at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has published scholarly articles on the subject of illustrated periodicals in Modernism/Modernity, the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and two anthologies, Magazines and Modern Identities, and the forthcoming title, Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, which she co-edited with Andres Zervigon (Getty Publications, 2025). Pelizzari has mined other scholarly subjects that explore photography as a powerful vehicle of cultural transmission. She is a specialist of Italian photography and the author of Photography and Italy, coeditor of The Idea of Italy as well as numerous scholarly articles published on History of Photography, Visual Resources, Artforum, Afterimage, Millennium Film Journal. She has worked curatorially at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal and has served for the Curatorial Certificate at Hunter College, where she has organized three projects focusing on representation of the urban space and architecture (125th Street: Photography in Harlem, 2022; Peripheral Visions, 2012), and issues of documentary (Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 2017). Pelizzari’s work on photography lives at the intersections with other media. These intersections have informed her study of Paul Strand’s collaboration with the spoke-person of Italian Neorealism, Cesare Zavattini (etudes photographiques, 2012) and the in-depth research on Bruno Munari, graphic designer, photographer, and mass media wizard.

Allen Frame is a photographer and writer, represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where he has had solo exhibitions of photography in 2005, 2009, and 2013. He is a winner of the 2017/2018 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. His 2013 exhibition Dialogue with Bolaño was presented at the Museum of Art of the Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 2014. Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2001. He has been the recipient of grants from the Penny McCall Foundation, the Peter Reed Foundation, Creative Time, Art Matters, CECArtslink and others. He has been the curator of numerous exhibitions, including Darrel Ellis at Art in General; Bearings: the Female Figure at PS122 Gallery; Anatomy, Persona, and the Moment: Experimental 70’s Photographs of Luigi Di Sarro and Linda Salerno: A Selection of Experimental Photographs from the Black Mirror Series at the Camera Club of New York, and Illusione Persistente and Fuggenti Figure at ACTA International in Rome. He has been a contributing editor for Bomb and written feature articles for The New York Times and other publications. Frame is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts (BFA), and the International Center of Photography in New York. He has taught workshops in photography extensively in Mexico. He graduated from Harvard University and grew up in Mississippi.

Jackson Davidow is a writer, curator, and art historian in New Haven. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe Magazine, The Baffler, Boston Review, Poetry, Los Angeles Review of Books, and throughout the art press. He has published academic articles in American Art and ASAP/Journal, as well as in volumes such as Modernism, Art, Therapy and Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, and is working on a book about global AIDS cultural activism in the 1980s and 1990s. With Noam Parness, he is the co-curator of Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant, which originated at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and is now on view at Atlanta Contemporary.

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