Gregory Crewdson Biography and Artwork

born Brooklyn, NY 1962

Gregory Crewdson was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1962. His first experience of photography, at the age of ten, was a Diane Arbus retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At sixteen, he played in a band called the Speedies, whose first single was titled "Let Me Take Your Foto." In 1985, he received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase, where he studied photography with Jan Groover and Laurie Simmons. He graduated with an M.F.A. in photography from Yale University in 1988. For his thesis project, he took photographic portraits of residents of the area around Lee, Massachusetts, where his family had a cabin.

It was also in Lee that Crewdson conceived of his later Natural Wonder series (1992–97), in which birds, insects, and mutilated body parts are presented in surreal yet mundane domestic settings. Photographs from Natural Wonder were shown in the 1991 exhibition Pleasures and Terrors in Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In his next series, Hover (1992-97), Crewdson turned away from brightly colored close-ups to black-and-white bird's-eye views of strange situations (a man covering a street with sod, a bear gawked at by onlookers as it rummages through garbage) set in the streets and backyards of Lee. His Twilight series (1998-2001) introduced color and an enlarged scale"50 x 60 inches"to this surreal formula, resulting in decidedly cinematic images reminiscent of the films of Steven Spielberg. These recent photographs have become increasingly spectacular and complex to produce, requiring dozens of assistants, Hollywood-style lighting, and specially crafted stage sets.

Crewdson plans to direct a feature film in the future. Crewdson has had solo exhibitions at the Houston Center for Photography (1992), Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1997), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (1998), and SITE Santa Fe (2001). He has appeared in many group shows since 1991, including the Kwangju Biennale (1997), Where: Allegories of Site in Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1998), Open Ends: Minimalism [more] and After at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2000), Vision from America at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002), and Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003).

He received fellowships from the Aaron Siskind Foundation in 1991 and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. In 2004, he received the Skowhegan Medal for Photography from the Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Crewdson began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1990, and following brief stints at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Cooper Union, and Vassar College, he took a position in the photography department at Yale University in 1993. Crewdson currently lives and works in Lee, New Haven, and New York.

Select Timeline

• 1985 - B.A., SUNY Purchase, New York
• 1988 - M.F.A. Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven Connecticut
• 2001 - Crewdson married Ivy Shapiro, the director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery

Select Exhibitions

• 2005 - Gregory Crewdson : Beneath the Roses
• 2005 - Gagosian Gallery - CA, Beverly Hills, CA
• 2005 - The World is a Stage: Stories Behind Pictures Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
• 2005 - Beyond Big: Oversized Prints - Drawings and Photographs
• 2005 - The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
• 2004 - Picasso to Pop: A Growing Contemporary Collection
• 2004 - Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix
• 2003 - Dream House, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
• 2003 - UnNaturally, USC Fisher Gallery - University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
• 2003 - Disembodied Spirits, Bowdoin Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine
• 2003 - Passengens, Lisboa Photo, Lisbon, Portugal
• 2003 - Family Ties. A Contemporary Perspective, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
• 2003 - Twilight, London, UK
• 2003 - Yard, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, curated by Robyn Donohue and Alyson Baker
• 2003 - Ed Ruscha. Photographs: Recent Acquisitions Paintings and Sculptures, Fisher Landau Center for Art, Long Island City, New York
• 2003 - Imperfect Innocence, The Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, PBICA (Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL
• 2003 - UnNaturally, Independent Curators International (ICI), New Traveling Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, curated by Mary-Kay Lombino
• 2003 - Fantastic, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA
• 2003 - We Love Painting, The American Contemporary Art From Misumi Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
• 2002 - New Work 6: Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO
• 2002 - Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA
• 2002 - Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
• 2002 - Gregory Crewdson Twilight, White Cube, London
• 2002 - Thin Skin: The Fickle Nature of Bubbles, Spheres, and Inflatable Structures, Independent Curators International, New York
• 2002 - Contemporary American Photography 1970-2000, From the Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Samsung Museum of Modern Art
• 2002 - Fictions. New Narratives in Contemporary Photography and Video, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
• 2002 - Vision From America: Photographs From the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1940-2001, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• 2002 - Moving Pictures, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York
• 2002 - Staged! Contemporary Photography Gregory Crewdson, Rosemary Laing, Sharon Lockhart, Contemporary Art, Worcester Art Museum, MA
• 2001 - Gregory Crewdson: Photographs, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico
• 2000 - Twilight, Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
• 2000 - Early Work 1987-88, Partobject Gallery, Carrboro, North Carolina
• 2000 - Gregory Crewdson: Disturbed Nature, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art Design, Vancouver, Canada
• 1999 - Twilight, Emily Tsingou Gallery, London
• 1999 - Ginza Art Space, Shiseido Co., Tokyo
• 1999 - Surreal Suburbia, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI
• 1998 - Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University
• 1998 - Mise-en-Scene: A Selected Survey of Photographs, The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
• 1998 - H&R Projects, Brussels
• 1998 - Galleri Charlotte Lund, Stockholm, Sweden
• 1998 - Twilight, Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
• 1998 - Espacio Uno, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid Spain
• 1997 - Luhring Augustine Gallery
• 1997 - Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH
• 1996 - Ginza Artspace, Shiseido Co., Tokyo
• 1995 - Luhring Augustine, New York
• 1995 - Ruth Bloom Gallery, Los Angeles Jay Jopling / White Cube, London
• 1995 - Galerie Samia Saouma, Paris Gallerie Charlotte Lund, Stockholm
• 1995 - Les Images du Plastir, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Galerie des Carmes, La Fleche

Select Artwork

• Untitled (sod man) - 1999
• Untitled (pregnant woman/pool) - 1999
• Untitled (Ophelia) - 2001
• Untitled (family dinner) - 2001-2002
• Production Still a - 2003
• Production Still (Gas Station) - 2003

Quotes

• "I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me."

Publications

• Hover: Artspace Books, 1995, (first hardcover ed.)
• Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson, with essay by Rick Moody: Harry N. Abrams, 2003, (first hardcover ed.)
• Gregory Crewdson: 1985-2005: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005, (first hardcover ed.)

Quick Facts

• Gregory Crewdson works within a photographic tradition that combines the documentary style of William Eggleston and Walker Evans with the dream-like vision of filmmakers such as Stephen Spielberg and David Lynch.
• Gregory Crewdson is a leading practitioner in the use of constructed models and staged events in photographic art.
• Gregory Crewdson's photographs are produced on a feature-film scale, often requiring massive cranes, big lights, and a large crew.
• Crewdson explores stereotypes about art making through his images of obsessive-compulsive behavior driven by the sublime.

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