
Cascade, 2019. Inkjet print, mounted on Dibond, 61.75 x 50 inches, print.
Communion, 2017. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 43 x 54 inches, print.
Dance Hall Concert, 2019. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 43 x 54 inches, print.
Shadonna, 2018. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 43 x 54 inches, print,
The Beginning, 2008. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 30 x 42.25 inches, print.
Joanette, Canarsie, Brooklyn, 2013. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 42.5 x 34.875 inches, print, 44 x 35 inches, framed.
Trap Car, 2016. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 35 x 45 inches, print, 36 x 46 inches, framed.
Walking Home on Some Road, Gemena, DR Congo, 2015. Inkjet print, mounted on sintra, 35 x 44 inches, print, 36 x 45 inches.
Congregation, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2012. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 35 x 44 inches, print, 36.25 x 45 inches, framed.
Binky & Tony Forever, 2009. Pigmented inkjet print, 37 x 43.25 inches, print, 38 x 44.25 inches, framed.
Wanda and Daughters, 2009. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 35 x 44.25 inches, print, 36 x 45.25 inches.
Jouvert, Flatbush, Brooklyn, 2013. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 40 x 50 inches, print, 41 x 51 inches, framed.
Kings, 2016. Pigment print, 50 x 78 inches.
Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2010. Inkjet print, mounted on Sintra, 35 x 43 inches, print, 36 x 44 inches, framed.
Deana Lawson (b. 1979 Rochester, NY) is a photo-based artist whose work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and spiritual aesthetics. Her practice borrows from simultaneous visual traditions, ranging from photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the materiality of black culture and its expression as seen through the body and in domestic environments. Careful attention is given to lighting and pose, both formal constructs used to transform and intensify representations of power and liberation through the personal and intimate space.
Lawson received her MFA in Photography from RISD in 2004. Her work will be the subject of a major retrospective jointly organized by MoMA PS1 and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 2020-21, and has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Art Institute of Chicago, Kunsthalle Basel, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Underground Museum in Los Angeles, Studio Museum in Harlem, KIT Museum in Dusseldorf Germany, Light Work Gallery in Syracuse, Cohan & Leslie Gallery in New York, Artists Space in New York, Print Center in Philadelphia, and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta. Lawson is the recipient of the Art Matters Grant, John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a NYFA Grant. In 2013, Lawson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; she is a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize.
Centropy, an exhibition of new and recent works by Deana Lawson, is now on view at Kunsthalle Basel through October. Centropy is Deana's first presentation of works in Switzerland, and the largest institutional exhibition of her work to date.
"There is a conspiratorial intimacy that enables her to capture the subjects of her photographs as regal, commanding, supremely sensual, and very much of the here and now, while also seeming to channel past lives of stately sovreignty. Even if these often are, in fact, highly staged compositions, Lawson's gripping portraits of contemporary Balck life are no less candid, intimate, or real because of it...in so much of Lawson's portraiture, Blackness is an identity that is neither monolithic nor can it be understood apart from the passage, flight, and migration forced by a dominant white system that has dispersed people of color across the globe."
Megan N. Liberty reviews Deana Lawson's monograph recently published by Aperture.
Review of Deana Lawson at Sikkema Jenkins.
Arthur Lubow profiles Deana Lawson in The New York Times.
Profile of Deana Lawson by Zadie Smith.