‘Art Takes You Places You Didn’t Mean to Go’
Untitled Jim Sleeping Spoleto by JoAnn Verburg, Ohio Wesleyan Class of 1972.
DELAWARE, OHIO – Ohio Wesleyan University alumna and internationally renowned photographer JoAnn Verburg is featured in a new segment of “Minnesota Original,” an award-winning public television series in which she discusses her take on the nature of art and photography.
“I’d like to find another way to work,” Verburg, OWU Class of 1972, said in the interview, “but I keep coming back to photography. On the one hand, there’s this object, this lens, that says, ‘This is the way it is right now,’ and yet the imagination makes it an infinite number of things. … It’s magical.”
Verburg has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad, including a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. Her photographs also can be found at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Among other honors, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center, Bellagio, Italy. She has taught at both Yale and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
“Her work has this living, breathing quality,” said Elizabeth Armstrong, curator of contemporary art at the Minnesota Institute of Arts.
Learn more about Verburg and her art at http://joannverburg.com. Watch her complete “Minnesota Original” interview at http://www.mnoriginal.org/episode/joann-verburg.
Founded in 1842, Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the nation’s premier small, private universities. Ohio Wesleyan offers more than 90 undergraduate majors, sequences, and courses of study, and 23 NCAA Division III varsity sports. OWU combines an internationally focused curriculum with off-campus learning and leadership opportunities that connect classroom theory with real-world practice. Located in Delaware, Ohio, OWU’s 1,850 students represent 41 states and 45 countries. The university is featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” listed on the 2012 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with distinction, and included on the “best colleges” lists of U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review. Learn more at www.owu.edu.