Keliy Anderson-Staley: One wild and precious life
March 20 - April 27, 2025
March 20 - April 27, 2025
Basket Books & Art is pleased to present One wild and precious life, a selection of tintype portraits by Keliy Anderson-Staley. The exhibition is on view through April 20, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 22 from 4-6pm.
Drawing from Anderson-Staley’s archive of hundreds of tintype portraits taken over the course of a decade, One wild and precious life highlights the relationship between photographer and subject, and the intimate nature of portrait photography. Tintype photography requires stillness of the sitter and a deft alchemical hand of the photographer, who mixes the emulsion for each plate on site. Referencing Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” this exhibition presents enigmatic groups of individuals whose gaze prompts the viewer to ask: what defines each of us? what do we share as members of the human family? How do we find common ground?
A selection of Anderson-Staley’s tintype portraits are collected in the monograph On a Wet Bough (Waltz Books, 2014), which is also available for purchase at Basket Books & Art.
Keliy Anderson-Staley was raised off-the-grid in Maine and currently lives and works in Houston, Texas. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. She has received additional project support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Houston Arts Alliance. She was a recipient of the Houston Center for Photography Carol Crowe Memorial Fellowship and the Clarence John Laughlin Award from New Orleans Photo Alliance, and she was a finalist for both the Aperture Portfolio Prize and the Honickman/Duke Center for Documentary Studies first book prize. She has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work in Syracuse, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester and Aurora Photo Center in Indianapolis.
Collections holding her work include the Library of Congress, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Houston Airport System, Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Portland Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Akron Art Museum; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; The Printing Museum, Houston TX; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona, Florida; Shelburne Museum, Burlington, Vermont; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; and Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, Maine. In 2016, she completed a major public commission, producing fifty portraits installed in the Rapid Train tunnel at the Cleveland Airport. In 2019, a large-scale work, incorporating nineteen portraits was commissioned for Terminal 3 of Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Documents & Dwellings.
She holds a BA from Hampshire College, Massachusetts and an MFA from Hunter College, NYC. She is Professor of Photography | Video at the School of Art, University of Houston.
For inquiries contact info@basket-books.com
Images: Alex Barber