Robert Frank: a celebration on his 100th birthday

We are celebrating Robert Frank’s 100th birthday this year on November 9th. To help commemorate, this panel will welcome Lucy Gallun, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Sarah Greenhough, Senior Curator and Head, Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Lucy will share her experience discovering unknown work in Robert’s archive and how this experience  became the major new exhibition currently at MoMA,  Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue

Sarah has curated two of the most significant exhibitions of Frank’s work, Looking In: Robert Frank’s "The Americans” in 2009 and Looking In: Robert Frank’s "The Americans" in 1994. She will share with us her new work studying  Frank’s  letters and correspondence with others throughout his life. This work will share some intimate and intuitive aspects of Frank’s life and art. 

Robert Frank, Trolley. New Orleans, 1955 - Courtesy Photo Discovery / Bruno Tartarin

Lucy Gallun is Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, where her latest exhibition is Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, on view at the Museum until January 11, 2025. Since joining MoMA in 2010, Gallun has curated numerous exhibitions and collection presentations, and she was co-editor and contributing author of the three-volume history, Photography at MoMA. 

Sarah Greenough is senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. In 1978, she was awarded a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the National Gallery, where she has worked ever since. In 1990, she became the founding curator of the department of photographs and has been responsible for establishing and growing the National Gallery's collection of photographs. She also established the program for photography at the National Gallery, which now presents two to three photography exhibitions per year in the museum's dedicated photography galleries, as well as many smaller installations.

Greenough is the author of many publications, including Walker Evans: Subways and Streets (1991), Robert Frank: Moving Out (1994), Harry Callahan (1996), Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (2002), All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton, 1852–1860 (2004), with Malcolm Daniel and Gordon Baldwin, The Altering Eye: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art (2015), with Sarah Kennel, Andrea Nelson, Diane Waggoner, and Philip Brookman, and author and editor of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915-1933, Yale University Press (2011).

Her exhibitions and publications have won many awards, including the International Center of Photography Publications Award for On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography and the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set for outstanding art publication of the year. In 2007, Greenough and co-author Diane Waggoner won the College Art Association's Alfred H. Barr, Jr. award for outstanding museum scholarship for their exhibition catalog, The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888–1978. In 2009, Greenough won the Outstanding Museum Catalogue of the Year from the Association of Art Museum Curators' award for Looking In: Robert Frank's "The Americans," and in 2010 she won the International Center for Photography's Infinity Award for Publications for the same publication.

Greenough received her PhD and MA from University of New Mexico where she studied with the noted photographic historian Beaumont Newhall. She also holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Clark Winter is a Trustee of the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation and has been a friend of theirs for more than 40 years. He is the moderator of this panel and  will speak briefly about Robert and the goals and mission of the Foundation. He is also a global investment strategist, artist, Director and board member of various other boards, both corporate and philanthropic. 

Credits : © Robert Frank