Lightbox, 1995

Jeffry Mitchell
(American, born 1958)

Location: University of Washington, Seattle

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Lightbox by artist Jeffry Mitchell is a series of six portrait photographs of students and staff from the university community. He wanted to create "a feeling that hovers between an Edward Curtis ethnographic photograph and a [1990s] Calvin Klein ad's glamourized and eroticized subject." Sports teams, maintenance crew, office staff, professors, fraternities, and other students were featured in "highly directed, somewhat stilted poses and settings... that would place them within a fashion photo-advertisement-like sensibility." Mitchell created the images with Lyn McCracken, a photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area, using a large-format (8x10") camera. Mitchell’s images were temporarily installed in six lightboxes at the bus stop outside of the UW School of Art.

We do not currently have a digitized image of this artwork.

This artwork was part of a group of rotating installations on the University of Washington campus. The artists were selected in a competitive process to create images for existing lightboxes at bus stops outside of the UW's School of Art and Meany Hall. The images were reproduced as large-scale transparencies to fit the lightboxes. The bus stops featured the artworks for several months.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with University of Washington.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Northwest artist Jeffry Mitchell calls himself a gay folk artist. He creates playful and joyous ceramic artworks and installations, as well as prints and drawings. His art explores ideas of gender, spirituality, vulnerability, and self-discovery. The artworks are relatable to our shared human experience -- they often look handmade and use familiar imagery such as animals and flowers. Clay is also a material that most of us have used in grade school or at some other time.

Jeffry Mitchell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (1980) in painting from the University of Dallas. He moved to Japan to teach English and stayed for three years, apprenticing with a traditional production potter and studying calligraphy. In 1988, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In 2012, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle organized a retrospective exhibition "Like a Valentine: The Art of Jeffry Mitchell".