Connecticut HQ Art

JoAnn Verburg is a renowned American photographer whose multidisciplinary practice exists at the intersection of a range of art-historical traditions between still-life and landscapes. As in Under the Rocca, she repeatedly returns to certain images, including olive trees, addressing the same subject matter—arranging and rearranging her images in three-dimensional space through use of vantage point, framing, and light, while employing techniques of classical craftsmanship, including the production of each singular print herself. Treating the olive grove as both landscape and still life, her focus on a limited range of subject matter suggests a connection between her work and the minimalist and serial practices of the 1970s, but also painters such as Giorgio Morandi. Yet Verburg’s practice is also aligned with old master paintings: Her works resist the acceleration and velocity of contemporary culture.

Having studied sociology as an undergraduate, her artwork reflects a deep philosophical engagement with the social and formal histories of photography as well as the work of key practitioners who blended formalist concerns with sociological awareness. These experiential artworks offer a contemplative respite from a cacophonous urban environment. In response to a period of social and political unrest and a global health crisis, generating what the artist has called an “imagined reality,” her images become vehicles for orchestrating a performative and existential encounter between the viewer and the world.

Verburg has exhibited her work extensively in the United States and around the world, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her work has also been featured in a number of group exhibitions at the International Center for Photography, New York, the Katonah Museum of Art, La Triennale di Milano, the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Verburg is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Bush Foundation and the McKnight Foundation. She was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center, Bellagio, Italy.

Verburg’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Verburg lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy.