BINH DANH: C.A.R.S Online

Aug 24, 2020 – Aug 25, 2021

The artist-curated C.A.R.S. Online series features past participants in the long running Critic & Artist Residency Series, which was founded in 1997 to bring prominent artists, critics, and curators to the Colorado State University campus for public lectures, classroom visits, and exhibitions. The virtual exhibition series brings together the artists’ own work and works from the museum’s collection, shedding new light on familiar objects. The first show of the series was curated by Binh Danh, who was a C.A.R.S. participant and the inaugural artist exhibited when the museum was founded in 2009. His chlorophyll print photograph Barracked (2005) was also the first (and until recently, only) museum purchase in CSU’s collection, a work acquired with the museum’s own funds rather than donations specifically supporting the purchase.

Binh Danh (MFA Stanford; BFA San Jose State University) emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on nineteenth-century photographic processes, applying them in an investigation of battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year.

His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum, and many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and in 2012 he was a featured artist at the 18^th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. He is represented by Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gallery in Phoenix, AZ. He lives and works in San Jose, CA and teaches photography at San Jose State University.