Candy/A Good and Spacious Land features work by Jim Goldberg and Donovan Wylie created beginning in 2013 while they were artists in residence at the Yale University Art Gallery. Both artists have taken New Haven as their subject, exploring the city through photography but from very different points of view. Goldberg, a New Haven native returning to a city he left four decades earlier, focuses on New Haven’s people and their stories, in his signature mode of intimate, informal portraits that he presents alongside the subjects’ own words. Irish-born Wylie examines the reconstruction of the dramatic highway merge between Interstates 95 and 91, approaching the massive structure as a compositional framework for viewing the cityscape and its inhabitants with an outsider’s eye. In the resulting bodies of work—which are also being published by the Gallery as a two-volume set—the artists consider New Haven’s quest to become a “model city,” contrasting its civic aspirations with its citizens’ lived realities.
Exhibition organized by Pamela Franks, Senior Deputy Director and the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Judy Ditner, the Richard Benson Assistant Curator of Photography and Digital Media. Made possible by the Happy and Bob Doran Artist-in-Residence Fund and the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund.