Keliy Anderson-Staley

Over the past twelve years Keliy Anderson-Staley (Hunter MFA 2006) has made more than 2,000 tintype portraits—of friends, family, and complete strangers. She will discuss her ongoing portrait project and the complications of involving her subjects in their own representation. All of the individuals in the project are presented only with a first name and no other defining context. The viewer is left only with a face to grapple with, a stranger brought intimately close for examination. The portraits are revealing, but the faces are also defiantly assertive, underscoring the exchange and silent dialogue central to the creation of any portrait. In recent years she has also completed a number of public portrait projects, in which collaboration with institutions and individuals is essential, and the problems of representation are magnified when the project is made and exhibited as public art.

Since completing her MFA in photography at Hunter College in 2006, Keliy Anderson-Staley has become well-known nationally for her photographic work in wet-plate collodion. Her work has been exhibited at the Akron Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, Morris Museum of Art, National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and Ogden Museum, and her work is in the collections of Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, and the Portland Museum of Art (Maine). Anderson-Staley’s projects have been funded by grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Houston Arts Alliance, Sustainable Arts Foundation, the George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Her book of tintype portraits, On a Wet Bough, was published in 2014 by Waltz Books. She lives in Houston, TX, where she is an assistant professor of photography and digital media at the University of Houston and where she is developing a major public art portrait project called Shelter in Place. She is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Sponsored by the Crossways Foundation