Future Exhibition:
Kathya Maria Landeros and Mimi Plumb
Verdant Land
Exhibition on view: July 15 – September 3
Opening reception: July 15, 4:00 – 6:00pm
This exhibition is generously supported by Jim and Betty Kasson.

The Center for Photographic Art is proud to present Verdant Land, a two-person exhibition with award-winning photographers Kathya Maria Landeros and Mimi Plumb. Both artists have deep connections to California and the West and their work overlaps in many ways, visually and historically. Landeros is a visual artist interested in the photographic representation of Latinx and immigrant communities while Plumb traveled up and down the valleys of California photographing the young men living in farm labor camps, the children and adults working together in the fields, and the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) organizers, with Cesar Chavez, talking with farmworkers about how elections in the fields might change their lives. Don’t miss this landmark exhibition!

Bios
Kathya Maria Landeros is a Mexican-American photographer and educator. Influenced by her bi-cultural upbringing, her work of the past decade focuses on Latinx communities and the exploration of history, migration, representation and belonging.

Her research has been supported through the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship, an AIGA Worldstudio Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Rayko Photo Center and the Center for Photography at Woodstock where she created a self-published artist book titled Verdant Land. It is now part of a traveling group exhibition titled ‘Race, Love, and Labor,’ curated by art historian Sarah Lewis, and is in the permanent collection at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally at institutions such as the Diggs Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and through the San Francisco Arts Commission in California. In addition, her work is held in both private and public collections including the Figge Art Museum and Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History.

Prior to joining the faculty at Wellesley, she taught at institutions of higher education in California and Massachusetts. She also spent an extensive period of time living abroad, in both China and Mexico, where she worked on long-term projects with migrant and immigrant communities documenting the socio-economic effects of migration. She holds a graduate degree in photography from MassArt and a dual undergraduate degree in English literature and Hispanic studies from Vassar College.

When not thinking about photography, she can be found spending time with her daughter and partner and their two chihuahua-mix rescue dogs. To see more of Kathya’s work, please visit her website. >

Mimi Plumb
Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West.

In the 1970s, Plumb explored subjects ranging from her suburban roots to the United Farm Workers movement in the fields as they organized for union elections. Her first book, Landfall, published by TBW Books in 2018, is a collection of her images from the 1980s, a dreamlike vision of an American dystopia encapsulating the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance. Landfall was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2019, and the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2019. Her second book, The White Sky, a memoir of her childhood growing up in suburbia, was published by Stanley/Barker in September 2020. The Golden City, her third book, published by Stanley/Barker in March 2022, focuses on her many years living in San Francisco.

Plumb is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. She has received grants and fellowships from the California Humanities, the California Arts Council, the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography, and the Marin Arts Council. Her photographs are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse in Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Plumb received her MFA in Photography from SFAI in 1986, and her BFA in Photography from SFAI in 1976.

Born in Berkeley, and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, Mimi Plumb has served on the faculties of the San Francisco Art Institute, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Berkeley, California. To see more of Mimi’s work, please visit her website. >