Past Exhibition

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings

A tree trunk spanning the height of this horizontal photograph is scarred across its middle with a long, dark gash near its roots. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but the white has a warm, almost golden ivory glow. The details of the trunk are crisp, in focus, while the wire fence, field, and trees in the background are blurry. The tree’s branches dip into the scene from the top edge of the photograph, and they are also out of focus. The top corners of the view are rounded, and filled in with black.
Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree), 1998, gelatin silver print, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2016.112.1

Details

  • Dates

    -

  • Locations

    West Building, Ground Floor, Outer Tier Galleries
A tree trunk spanning the height of this horizontal photograph is scarred across its middle with a long, dark gash near its roots. The image is monochromatic like a black and white photograph but the white has a warm, almost golden ivory glow. The details of the trunk are crisp, in focus, while the wire fence, field, and trees in the background are blurry. The tree’s branches dip into the scene from the top edge of the photograph, and they are also out of focus. The top corners of the view are rounded, and filled in with black.
Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree), 1998, gelatin silver print, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2016.112.1

For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born 1951) has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work is that it is all bred of a place, the American South. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Mann has long written about what it means to live in the South and be identified as a southerner. Using her deep love of her native land and her knowledge of its fraught history, she asks provocative questions—about history, identity, race, and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings considers how Mann’s relationship with this land has shaped her work and how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—continues to permeate American identity.

Organized into five sections—Family, The Land, Last Measure, Abide with Me, and What Remains—and including many works not previously published or publicly shown, the exhibition is the first major survey of the artist’s work to travel internationally. Featuring some 110 photographs, the exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Sarah Kennel, the Byrne Family Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum.

Other Venues:

  • Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, 06/30/2018–09/23/2018
  • The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 11/16/2018–02/10/2019
  • The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 03/03/2019–05/27/2019
  • Jeu de Paume, Paris, 06/17/2019–09/22/2019
  • High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 10/19/2019–12/16/2019

Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.

Sponsors: The exhibition is supported by a generous grant from the Trellis Fund.

Additional support is provided by Sally Engelhard Pingree and The Charles Engelhard Foundation.

Attendance: 75,425

Catalog: Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings. By Sarah Greenough and Sarah Kennel. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2018.

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