Broodthaers Society of America
Lilli Ann, August 1952, 2018
Lilli Ann, August 1952, 2018
Potsdam ceiling wire, 2011
Potsdam ceiling wire, 2011
stump, 2009
stump, 2009
hat, 1992
hat, 1992
frozen piss, n.d.
frozen piss, n.d.
leg, 1990
leg, 1990
James Joyce on 23rd Street, early 1970s
James Joyce on 23rd Street, early 1970s
untitled, n.d.
untitled, n.d.
Judy Linn, Splay
31 March–12 May 2019

MBnb
520 West 143rd Street #2
New York NY 10031
mail@janiceguy.com
+1 917 293 3507
Thursday–Saturday, 1–6pm
and by appointment

MBnb can be reached via the A,B,C,D and 1 subway trains to 145th Street

Janice Guy is delighted to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Judy Linn, in collaboration with MBnb in Harlem.

Judy Linn began working as a photographer in the early 1970s when she covered local events for The Detroit Area Weekly News. However she soon became known for her starkly intimate images of her friends Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. In the 1980s she worked alongside Helen Levitt developing her skills as a street photographer.

But she is not a photojournalist. Linn's work is saturated with her particular unobtrusive, deceptively offhand style and a wry - at times wicked - humor, focusing on social marginalia, and on subjects both incidental and overlooked. The compositional clarity of her photographs as well as "the crazy stuff that jumps into the edges of the pictures", are evidence of a remarkable and deeply straightforward approach.

Linn has written: "As a child brought up on television, I believed the incongruous sequential image before I found words. There are a few moments of grace in editing photographs, but the ones I don't understand, where there is something in them that doesn't sit right, are the photographs that keep turning up. I am trying to shed the words in my head and openly respond to the visual".

Judy Linn was born in 1947, and received her BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1969. She has had solo exhibitions at the Cue Art Foundation, New York, 2018; Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, 2015; the Esther Massry Gallery at the College of Saint Rose, Albany NY, 2014; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2008; Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver, 2007; and White Columns, New York, 2005. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present at the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Strange Messenger at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2004 and the 1995 Whitney Biennial. For many years she was represented in New York by the legendary gallery Feature Inc.

The monograph Patti Smith 1969 - 1976 Photographs by Judy Linn was published in 2011 by Abrams Image.

Judy Linn lives and works in New York and the Hudson Valley.

MBnb is an ongoing artwork in honor of the great Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. It was conceived, in part, to explore what it might mean to "sell something and succeed in life” in what is euphemistically referred to as the sharing economy, fifty years after Broodthaers uttered those famously doomed, aspirational words.