The Spartan Art Project at TwispWorks will host Notes from Suburbia, an exhibition by two photographers, Chris Heard and Michael J Hoffman. Their bodies of work present two variant approaches to the subject, offering viewers insight into the discordant realities of life in suburbia.

The photographs were created in response to research by Dr. Ellen Avitts, CWU Assistant Professor of Art History, who also curated the exhibition. Dr. Avitts’ scholarship focuses on suburban housing as a contested and mediated space, one that reveals the disparity between dominant cultural ideas of home and the ways that people really live.

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“In the suburbs, a manageable life depends on a compact among neighbors.  The unspoken agreement is an honest hypocrisy.”

~ d. j. waldie, Holy Land 2005

“The stereotype [of suburbia] is real . . . For those on the right, it affirms that there is an “American way of life” to which all citizens can aspire.  To the left, the myth of suburbia has been a convenient way of attacking a wide variety of national problems, from excessive conformity to ecological destruction.”

~ Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 1985

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Chris Heard has been an active photographer for over forty years, having worked as a staff photographer for a daily newspaper, a freelance commercial photographer and as a fine artist. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993. In 2014 he retired from his position as Professor of Photography at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland and moved to Washington State to continue his art-making practice.

Michael J Hoffman worked for many years as a self-taught photographer until 2000 when he studied under Jack Radcliffe at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. In 2005, he began to work on a body of street photography that would last for nearly a decade: urban imagery produced primarily in his native Baltimore, but also in numerous other cities including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Hoffman currently lives and works in Delta, Pennsylvania.

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DATE: Sat Sep 22, 2018, 6:30-8:30PM  LOCATION: Spartan Art Project, TwispWorks, Twisp WA  CONTACT: marmbrust@methow.org