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About the Project:
In the Mountains of Peru
In the summer of 2003, my husband, Douglas, and my younger daughter, Katherine, and I trekked around the mountains of Peru. I was on a Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship, and my principal intention was to see weavings and consider how they are made within the context of the culture and environment. For the past 13 years, the products and processes associated with domestic labor had been recurring themes in my still life construction photographs. The carefully crafted, anonymously made rug, quilt or sampler, created without pretense, for function and/or adornment seemed especially heroic to me. This got me looking at textiles from other cultures, the rugs made by nomadic women from the Caucasus Mountains, for example, and the weavings made by Andean women.
The images in these digital photographs are my response to what I saw of the weaving tradition in the mountains. Five Andeans, three who spoke only Quechuan, the language of the indigenous people, led us to a few remote villages high in the Urubamba range of the Andes. We witnessed the difficult life of these isolating altitudes. Potatoes are the main staple; children bring a stick of firewood to school as tuition; and llamas, alpacas and sheep are raised for their meat and wool. While manufactured clothes are evident, so are those that are handcrafted; many women and girls still spin wool and weave on back strap looms, as people have been doing for centuries. The intricacies of the patterns, the beauty of the weavings, the concern for fine craftsmanship as seen against the backdrop of a grand landscape was truly awe-inspiring. To me, the desire and ability to create art in such harsh living conditions are courageous and life affirming, virtues born of necessity.
About the Artist:
Ann Hunt Currier was born in Bay Shore, New York, in 1956, one of seven children, and has been a fine art color photographer since she received her BFA from Purchase College in 1980. She earned an MFA in Creative Art from Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1989. She has exhibited her work at a number of venues, most notably at the Neuberger Museum in a show titled Working/Still, in a three-person show at Kendall Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In 2002, a solo exhibit at Gallery West of Suffolk County Community College featured her Still Life Constructions and her April-Isolated series.
In 1995, she had a one-person exhibit of 14 photographs from her Twenty-Two Views from my Window One Winter at Windows Above the Circle Gallery of New York Institute of Technology. The series and its title inspired composer Vito Ricci to write a piano work comprising 14 pieces, one for each photograph in the installation. In 1996, the images were displayed at a performance of his work given at the Knitting Factory in New York City.
A teacher of fine art and photography at LaGuardia High School in New York City since 1984, Currier established the photography program there and continues to develop and expand it, most recently with the inclusion of digital image making. In addition to teaching at the Fame school, she is an adjunct lecturer in photography at Brooklyn College and has taught and lectured about her work at the Maine Photographic Workshops.
A recipient of many awards and grants, Currier is a 1995 Fellow in Photography of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2002, she was awarded a commission for a public art project for Kings County Hospital Center, in Brooklyn. for which she created photographic assemblages. combining her own images with historic photographs of the hospital. These were displayed and illuminated in an installation of light boxes.
Her photographic work has undergone a shift in content away from an internal landscape to a more documentary perspective and a shift in media to experiments with digital image making. Her first extensive project involved her work with photographs taken in Oaxaca, Mexico. That trip sparked an interest in Latin American culture, primarily religious and craft-making practices. She is a 2003 recipient of a Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to Peru. A solo exhibition in 2004 at the LaGuardia Gallery of LaGuardia High School featured the photographs taken on that trip: a digital project showing weaving traditions from the highlands of Peru. In this work, she continued to focus on the artifacts and products of domestic labor-and the people who perform it.
She lives with her husband, Douglas, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and on Hooper Island in Maryland; they have two daughters, Joanna, born in 1981, and Katherine, born in 1993.
Welcome to my site.
The website contains images of photographs I have made; the earliest are from 1979. It is arranged chronologically by project starting with my current work.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at ann@annhuntcurrier.com.
Thank you for looking; it is a pleasure to share with you my online portfolio.
- Ann