JOE DEAL

risd connection: Professor of Photography

medium: photography

about his work: Deal’s photographs have appeared in numerous exhibitions throughout the US and in Europe. In 1992 a major one-person exhibition of his work at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery was accompanied by a book, Joe Deal: Southern California Photographs, 1976-86. In 1984 Deal was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Trust to photograph the site and construction of the new J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles. Photographs from this project were included in the Getty Museum’s 1998 exhibition, Making Architecture, and are the subject of the book, Between Nature and Culture (1999).

the road to risd: From 1976-89, Deal taught photography at the University of California/Riverside, where he was also an associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. For the next decade he served as a professor and dean of the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis. A national search brought him to RISD in the summer of 1999 and he held the position of Provost from then until 2005.

discoveries: (1) “The more you know, the greater your access to knowledge, but the more you learn, the narrower your field of inquiry inevitably becomes.” (2) “Talent is really a way of saying that a person has a certain facility for picking up a skill that others find more challenging; talent alone rarely leads to mastery.”

one-person exhibitions
Joe Deal, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, 1997
Joe Deal: Southern California Photographs, 1976-86, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1992
Joe Deal: Men and Women, Currents 48, St. Louis Art Museum, 1991
Nagase Photo Gallery, Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, 1986

group exhibitions
The American Lawn: The Surface of Everyday Life, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 1998
Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West from 1840 to the Present, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996, and traveled to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1998
Making Architecture, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1997-98
Elusive Paradise, The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1997
Backyards, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, 1997
Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1996

awards/fellowships
Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 1983
Artist’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1980
Artist’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1977

public collections
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ
International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
MoMA, New York, NY
National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
The Oakland [CA] Museum, Oakland, CA

education
MFA, Photography, University of New Mexico/Albuquerque, 1978
MA, Photography, University of New Mexico/Albuquerque, 1974
BFA, Design, Kansas City Art Institute, 1970