Collecting Conversations: Joan Lyons

A virtual conversation with artist Joan Lyons in a Ransom Center series "Collecting Conversations: Five Women in American Photography."
Program description
Early in this in-depth conversation with Dr. Jessica S. McDonald, the Ransom Center’s curator of photography, artist Joan Lyons explains that “almost everything I've done in my life has been dictated by the process intersecting the idea that I want to convey.” In one illustration of this, Lyons describes innovative works she made in the early and mid 1970s in which fabric became both the essential technical element and the subject of the work, representing “personal power objects” and feminine rites of passage. Lyons also recalls the technical discoveries that were integral to her concurrent investigation of portraiture, in which she posed herself as female archetypes to explore what portraits of women, by women, might look like.
Artist bio
Joan Lyons is an artist and educator who has worked in a broad range of experimental media over more than six decades, and has produced over forty editioned artist’s books. For nearly thirty-five years she was on the faculty of the Visual Studies Workshop, an independent, artist-run organization with a graduate program in Rochester, New York, and was director of the Visual Studies Workshop Press, a leading publisher and printer of artist’s books. Her multimedia works on paper and fabric were featured in solo gallery exhibitions in Paris and New York in 2018. More information: www.joanlyons.com.
Series description
Collecting Conversations: Five Women in American Photography is a series of timely interviews with five artists whose work has recently entered the Ransom Center’s photography collection: Betty Hahn, Joanne Leonard, Joan Lyons, Bea Nettles, and Susan Ressler. Conducted by Dr. Jessica S. McDonald, the Ransom Center’s curator of photography, these expansive conversations introduce newly acquired works and situate them within each artist’s creative practice and personal life. The series culminates in a lively panel discussion aimed at exploring the cultural and institutional conditions that have affected these artists’ careers and have shaped our collections over the last half century. The group talks candidly about successes and failures, and about what it means for an artist, or her work, to be “rediscovered” now.
[Featured image: Joan Lyons (American, b. 1937), Drawing from the Hip #1, 1976, from the series Haloid Xerox Women’s Portraits. Electrophotographic print with oil stick and graphite, 19 x 25 7/8 in. Photography collection, purchased with funds provided by the Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Endowment in Photography, 2017:0009:0002. © Joan Lyons]
Artist Joan Lyons with Dr. Jessica S. McDonald, curator of photography
Recorded November 24, 2021
Released February 24, 2022
Part of the series Collecting Conversations: Five Women in American Photography
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