| Schoolhouse Press |
| Ernie |
| The Schoolhouse Galleries PRESENT TONY MENDOZA / CATS and DOGS Friday, June 25 - Wednesday, July 14 RECEPTION: Friday, June 25 7-10 The Schoolhouse Galleries are pleased to present photographs from Tony Mendoza from June 25 through July 14. There will be a reception on Friday, June 25 from 7-10 PM. TONY MENDOZA was born in Havana, Cuba in 1941. He left for Miami with his family in 1960. He bought his first camera at age eleven and continued photographing through grammar school, high school, Yale University (Bachelor of Engineering), and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Master of Architecture). In 1973 to the dismay of his creditors and relatives, he turned full time to the pursuit of photography as art. Since then his work has been exhibited and published widely. He is the author of five books, including Cuba: Going Back (1999), Stories (1987), and Ernie (1985). He has received three National Endowment For The Arts Fellowships. A Guggenheim Photography Fellowship, as well as two Creative Writing Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council (He is the only artist in Ohio to receive Ohio Arts Council Fellowships in three separate mediums: photography, video and creative writing.). His photographs are in the collections of major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA., Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA., and the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He teaches photography at Ohio State University. For this exhibition he will present works from his acclaimed book, Ernie , A Photographer's Memoir and from a body of work called, Dog Postcards.
Eric Levin, People Magazine, June 29, 1987. "There are word books and there are photo books, but rarely do the twain combine in anything but a mismatch. A notable exception is Mendoza's mating of paragraphs and photographs to form a series of 45 humorous and surprisingly poignant stepping-stones through his life story...Mendoza's modesty shows in his self-deflating humor, as well as his book's (Stories) friendly size and price. Don't be deceived. This funny little book is as sophisticated and original as anything you'll find in the bookstore." The New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1987. "Like all good autobiographers, Mr. Mendoza, a photographer of some renown, has constructed a persona. He's the outsider, a guy who uses his "aw shucks" naiveté and alienation to con people into laughing. He does it by writing short, self-deprecating, seductive sentences, the verbal equivalent of his photographs." (Stories) Vogue, May, 1987. "The photographs in the book, (Stories) which were shown at MOMA (and some of which are on permanent exhibit there) range from casual snapshots of family, pals, and girlfriends, to artier compositions of the everyday objects-like an alarm clock-that speak volumes about daily life. Each photograph is accompanied by an anecdotal caption, written in Mendoza's ingenuous style-a cross between scrapbook notations and Spalding Gray." Harvard Magazine, November 1987. "A different kind of book is Stories, by Tony Mendoza, an autobiography of captioned snapshots by a Cuban-American engineer-turned-architect-turned-photographer who has apparently never heard of angst, the tragic dilemma, the primal scream, existential loneliness, or resigned sadness. It is a serene book about a wonderful individual man set firmly within a sense of family and community...We've had Stories on our coffee table for a month. People come in, sit down, idly pick it up--and promptly drop out of the conversation." People Magazine, January 25, 1993. "One cat picture is worth a thousand meows--at least, if the photographer is Tony Mendoza. Mendoza practically invented a genre in 1985 with his enduring Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir. Crawling around a New York City loft for two years in pursuit of a rambunctious black and white cat, Mendoza produced a remarkable study of catness... With a clever narrative written from Ernie's viewpoint, the book never got cloying, or is that clawing? Ernie proved so popular that Mendoza followed up in 1989 with Ernie's Postcard Book. But the greatest tribute to the Ernie books is paid by their imitators." Harvard Magazine, July-August, 2001. (Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir.) How many cat books out of print for a decade get a second life in a better-printed edition with 14 added images of the hero and some of his hitherto unpublished thoughts? This cat book deserves immortality. BookPage, June, 2001. "Mendoza's black and white pictures prove the perfect medium for Ernie's many moods. Cat to the core and more, he appears, at times, downright demonic. Beneath the smoothly groomed, two-tone coat lurks a beast with a taste for birds, bugs, and cardboard boxes, a creature whose face displays, by turns, otherworldly wrath, steely placidity and a distinctly human indignation." Los Angeles Times, Sunday March 12, 2000. (Cuba: Going Back) "In his brilliant photographs, Mendoza doesn't betray any interest in the exile fantasies of return. He teases us, plays with our love of nostalgia, by bathing his black and white prints in sepia, making them look older, …but, through his lens, Mendoza shows us the present disintegrating: An elderly man earns a few pesos filling cigarette lighters; the police checks a taxi driver's papers; a small boy plays baseball in the rubble; a sickly dog searches for scraps of food. What the gifted Mendoza delivers is the topography of a wasteland."
This is the first of two exhibitions in the galleries this season. Mr. Mendoza will also show images from his Stories from August 20 through September 1.
The Schoolhouse Galleries are located at 494 Commercial Street in the heart of Provincetown’s East End Gallery District. For information and press contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105 or email mcarroll@schoolhousecenter.com .
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