Museum Publications

Teenie Harris grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a neighborhood once called “the crossroads of the world.” A serious photographer from the age of 18, he started his professional photographic career in 1937 when he opened a studio and began to take on freelance assignments. In 1941, Harris was appointed staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s preeminent black newsweekly. His images were disseminated nationally through the Courier, and played a key role in how African Americans visualized themselves. His career with the Courier lasted until the mid-1970s, and his photos of the public personalities, events, and the daily lives of people in his neighborhood offer a historic outlook on this crucial period for black Americans.

Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History explores Harris’s artistry along with the social and historical context of his photographs, and provides a detailed biography of the photographer whose archive of over 70,000 images is considered one of the most important documentations of 20th-century African American life. Harris’s work is explored through nearly 200 reproductions, including 100 plates of his signature images.

Preface by Deborah Willis and texts by Cheryl Finley, Laurence Glasco, and Joe Trotter. Accompanied exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art, October 29 to April 7, 2012.

Winner of the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

2012; softcover and hardcover; 208 pages with 198 duotone illustrations; available from the CMOA Store and University of Pittsburgh Press; ISBN: 978-0-8229-6174-1 (softcover)

From the Russian court to the mountains of Tibet, and from the laboratories of Pittsburgh to the salons of Park Avenue, the extraordinary career of the artist and entomologist Andrey Avinoff (1884–1949) has never been surveyed in its entirety. Avinoff created a rich body of effusive, fantastical, Symbolist watercolor paintings that express yearnings both mystical and homoerotic, exploding beyond the strictures of his equally esteemed entomological research (“I bow to scientific fact until five o’clock,” he once declared. “After that I may have other ideas”). Andrey Avinoff: In Pursuit of Beauty accompanies the first exhibition devoted to this visionary in more than 50 years. Incorporating botanical illustrations, Symbolist watercolors, apocalyptic scenes, dance subjects, and homoerotic drawings (many of which the artist made for his friend Alfred Kinsey), author and curator Louise Lippincott elaborates the work through Avinoff’s identity as a gay man and situates him firmly within the culture of Russia’s bountiful Silver Age.

Accompanied exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art, February 26 to August 28, 2011.

2011; 104 pages with 80 color illustrations; available from the CMOA Store and D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers; ISBN 978-0-88039-053-8