Nancy Newberry. Halfway to MidlandDescubrimientos PHotoEspaña 2013 Award
28 May 2014 19.30 h - 27 June 2014 20.00 h Centro de Arte Alcobendas
In her work, the American photographer Nancy Newberry examines the strange rituals of the everyday, and the interrelationship between the individual and society. In 2013, she won the Descubrimientos PHotoEspaña Award for her series Halfway to Midland, now on show at the Centro de Arte Alcobendas.
Nancy Newberry’s first and best-known project is Mum, the iconographic investigation of a custom virtually unknown outside her native Texas. The Homecoming Mum is a huge and elaborate floral corsage worn by high-school students for their Homecoming ceremony. Mums are exchanged between friends and lovers, worn for a night and subsequently kept for ever. At a time when many highschoolers seem disengaged from the world around them, the Mum constitutes both an act of cultural immersion and a specific kind of folk art. Halfway to Midland focuses on some of these issues, exploring both ceremony and the everyday. The series seeks to transcend the barrier of the purely documentary, to capture the complex relationship between self and culture.
Nancy Newberry’s photographs have received numerous prizes and awards. Her work was showcased at the FotoFest Discoveries exhibition in Houston and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Ms. Newberry's photographs can regularly be seen in the pages of magazines and are in the permanent collection of The Museum of Fine Art, Houston. Her work has been exhibited in the US, UK, Germany, Portugal and China.
