The Library at MAF and Corita Art Center presents Catching Sight with Paul Pfeiffer
Focusing on Corita Kent’s lesser known yet profoundly significant photographic practice, Catching Sight places her work in a broader historical and cultural context, emphasizing the critical role that photographic archives play in the continuous shaping of history, community, and artistic creation. Corita’s camera allowed her to “see for the sake of seeing.” As an artist and arts educator, the photographs she created and collected significantly shaped her artistic practice and teaching methods. For Corita, everything was a source, and photography was not only a creative tool but a way to view the world in new and meaningful ways.
Paul Pfeiffer brings together eighty of Corita Kent’s 35mm slides as part of his ongoing interest in how images shape our sense of presence and meaning. Known for reworking sports footage and pop culture icons into meditations on power and memory, Pfeiffer turns here to Corita’s photographs of the everyday. Street signs, passing figures, and simple objects become heightened moments of attention, a quiet homily to the beauty of what is usually overlooked. In conversation with his own practice, these slides offer a way of thinking about images as both record and altar, holding space for the ordinary to become extraordinary
THIS EVENT IS AT FULL CAPACITY.
Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer's objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness.
Pfeiffer has had many one-person exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017-18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others.
Pfeiffer’s first large-scale retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023-24) is traveling to the Guggenheim Bilbao (2024-2025) and MCA Chicago (2025).
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As part of Corita Art Center’s mission to initiate new forms and conversations inspired by our collections, Catching Sight explores photography’s role in Corita’s art and pedagogy through a series of lectures, programs, and exhibitions. Reflecting Corita’s collaborative spirit, we invite curators, writers, artists, and educators to creatively engage our extensive 35mm slide collection, offering fresh and diverse insights into her pioneering vision.
This presentation is organized by Corita Art Center’s senior curator, Olivian Cha, and made possible with special thanks to the Teiger Foundation.