About Episode 115
Artists Dru Donovan and Jon Rubin join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to share their memories of legendary photographer, artist, and teacher Larry Sultan and discuss the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (MACK), the first publication devoted to Sultan’s wide-ranging use of writing as a personal, artistic, and pedagogical tool, illustrated throughout with previously unseen materials from his archive. Former students, assistants, and friends of Sultan, Donovan and Rubin share personal stories about his approach to photography, teaching, and mentorship, while reflecting on his lasting influence and the privilege of collaborating with his family on this book.
About Larry Sultan
Larry Sultan (b. Brooklyn, NY, 1946; d. Greenbrae, CA, 2009) was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley. Sultan was a beloved and highly influential educator who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute between 1978 and 1988 and served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography and Chair of the Photography Department at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, from 1989 to 2009. His acclaimed books include Pictures from Home, The Valley, and Evidence, which he published with Mike Mandel.
About Dru Donovan
Dru Donovan works with both photography and video to examine the connection between physical and emotional occurrences by constructing or revisiting human experiences. Donovan’s work has shown nationally and internationally and was included in reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Fraenkel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Williamson Knight Gallery and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Donovan’s photographs were published in Aperture Magazine, Blind Spot, Picture Magazine and Matte Magazine. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. In 2011-2012 she participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace studio residency. Awards Donovan has received are the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2015 and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2016.
About Jon Rubin
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates collaborative interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His socially engaged projects include running a barter-based nomadic art school, founding a national museum, operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers, and co-directing another that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. In 2019, with the support from Creative Capital, Rubin built an exact replica of his friend Sohrab Kashani’s Tehran apartment so they both could live and work together in a parallel universe that bypassed the Trump travel ban.
Rubin has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennial; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Mercosul Biennial; the Carnegie International; The Lyon Biennale; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Rubin and collaborator Lenka Clayton, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. With the participation of six diverse venues around New York City, the artists arranged for an essential element from each site—referenced in the project’s title—to circulate from one place to the next, creating a six-month network of social and material exchange.
His work has been reported on internationally by outlets including The New York Times, The Associated Press, Art in America, Artforum, The Boston Globe, La Repubblica, Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and NPR’s All Things Considered. Conflict Kitchen, Rubin’s collaborative seven-year work with artist Dawn Weleski, was named as one of the 100 Artworks that “Defined the Decade” by Artnet News.
Rubin is a Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
Publications
When Over Thunder:
Selected Writings
Swimmers
Pictures from Home
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