Natalie White: The Last Shot: Beacon, NY

Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is excited to present The Last Shot, a solo exhibition of large-format Polaroids by Natalie White, opening during Upstate Art Weekend.

Natalie White: The Last Shot features more than eighty 24x20-inch Polaroid photographs capturing the spirit, heart and personalities of the art scene in the Hudson Valley and New York City. These instant portraits of Beaconites as well as members of the Greater New York arts community are at once visceral and soulful, and literally among “the last shots” that will ever be produced, employing a photographic technology that will soon no longer exist, due to the rapidly depleting film stock. Only a few of the gigantic 20x24 cameras–a favored tool in decades past of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Chuck Close, to name a few–are currently in use anywhere in the world. The once-iconic company stopped making film altogether in 2008, a year before it declared bankruptcy–a victim of the digital age. At a moment when digital manipulation and replication are ubiquitous in modern photography, White sees the large-format Polaroid as a unique medium that documents its subjects with unsparing detail and shocking immediacy. “This camera,” White says, “has the magical ability to capture a distilled essence of both a subject’s likeness and personality.”

Natalie White is a provocative artist and feminist activist whose work–featured in more than 20 solo exhibitions and collected by several museums–spans such varied modes of expression as self-portraiture, sculpture, embroidery, abstract paintings, works on paper and performance. A native of West Virginia, she arrived in New York as a wide-eyed 17-year-old and, almost by accident, became a muse for such prominent visual artists as Peter Beard, Spencer Tunick, George Condo and even Sean Lennon before harnessing her fierce drive and unapologetic spirit to her own creations. She has performed at the Art Basel Miami Women in Art in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Center. As Vice President of Equal Means Equal, an organization that lobbies for the enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment, she presented the “Natalie White for Equal Rights” show at the Hole in 2015 and the following year led a 16-day, 250-mile march from NYC to Washington, D.C., to promote the fight for the ERA to be included in the Constitution. White’s works have been acquired by the Sackler Center and the Carnegie Museum of Art and are in the private collections of William T. Hillman, Lawrence Benenson, Maurice Marciano, The Mugrabi Collection and Eric Schmidt.

Natalie White: The Last Shot will be presented in the KuBe Art Center’s main gallery, the Joan Lebold Cohen and Jerome A. Cohen Center for Visual Arts, located on the second floor. The opening reception will take place Saturday, July 22^nd, 4 – 6 pm.