Connecticut HQ Art

Jeff Brouws explores the American cultural landscape through his photographs. A self-described “visual anthropologist,” he utilizes a constructed narrative and typological approach through the various subjects he employs. Here, he directs his lens toward deserted barns as a manifestation of the abandoned sites of American consciousness and expressive experience of the American landscape. The accumulated group shows a variety and diversity of forms but also acts as abstract imagery in their repetition.

Brouws’ work is held in major museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Nelson-Atkins Museum (Kansas City), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Brouws has had more than 25 one-person exhibitions since 1980; and has been included in numerous exhibitions including at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Princeton University Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Williams College Museum of Art, Norsk Museum of Photography (Norway), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2000). Published monographs include Approaching Nowhere (W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts (Chronicle Books, 2003), Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of the Carnival Midway (Chronicle Books, 2001), Highway: America’s Endless Dream (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1997), and Twenty-six Abandoned Gasoline Stations (Gas-N-Go Publications, 1992).