ROBIN RICE
IT’S ABOUT TIME

January 23 - March 29, 2019

After 30 years on West 11th Street, The Robin Rice Gallery celebrates its first ever exhibition for Robin Rice. For decades, Robin has exhibited a wide variety of photographers at the gallery but never her own work. As the show’s title denotes, “It’s About Time.” The opening reception will be held on Wednesday, January 23rd from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibit runs through March 17, 2019.

While her photography spans five decades and multiple continents, Rice maintains a cohesive, candid voice that carries throughout all of her work. Observing the world around her in a cinematic way, she possesses an uncanny ability to recognize and capture moments of beauty and the spontaneity of the human spirit. By evoking a wonderstruck sensibility, Rice expresses a deep-rooted love for both people and landscapes using her distinct bohemian style.

In this salon-style retrospective, Rice uses an “old school” approach and shoots with her Nikon on Tri-X film. When creating her art, she insists, “the camera has a mind of its own.” The scenes captured in her photography are unedited and thus born purely from the magic of the in-camera composition.

In the invitational image, “Tree Farm, Long Lane, East Hampton, NY”, 1999, a naked woman wearing nothing but a large straw hat is captured from behind, centered between a long line of trees on either side, as she bikes down the lane. In another image, “Bubbles, Piazza Rondanini, Roma”, 1995, friends linger before a vine-covered building, extending their arms up in joyful wonder, catching bubbles descending from above.

Receiving her first camera at the age of 11, she has since been an avid fine art photographer. After moving from Philadelphia to New York in 1976, Rice was immediately swept up in the electrifying, fast-paced art world of the city. In 1977, Discoworld Magazine hired her to photograph the opening night of Studio 54. After enjoying 23 years of success as a commercial photographer, she shifted her career to become a gallerist, opening The Robin Rice Gallery in 1990.

Curating 175 shows, Robin developed her own “school” of artists, cultivating a keen eye for curating and in doing so enriching the aesthetic of her own fine art photography. Despite devoting much of her energy to the gallery, Rice has never stopped creating her own art, and has exhibited in several galleries nationally and abroad. Influenced by photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who curated the art of others and exhibited his own work, Rice is ready to showcase her photography on her own turf. In her spare time, Robin has recently taken up DJing: you can often find DJ Redshoes spinning vinyl at her loft in Beacon.