WAM exhibit offers glimpse into Annie Leibovitz’s career
The Boss is coming to the Wichita Art Museum.
The iconic Vanity Fair cover photo of rock singer Bruce Springsteen — seated on a motorcycle with the U.S. flag behind him — is one of more than 130 photographs in the new summer exhibition “Annie Leibovitz/Work” at WAM. The exhibition, which spans 50 years of Leibovitz’s illustrious career, will be on display from May 19 through Sept. 1.
While Springsteen may be nicknamed the Boss, Leibovitz has a pretty high standing among photographers and others who’ve seen her artistic, sometimes provocative, photos on the magazine covers of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Vogue and elsewhere. In 1973, at age 23, Leibovitz became the chief photographer for Rolling Stone and her career skyrocketed.
Photographers and artists visiting the WAM exhibition will likely study her technique for lighting and being attuned
to creating memorable photographs of her subjects, while others will be trying to spot the celebrities.
Leibovitz has created portraits of many well-known actors, athletes, politicians and newsmakers, from Queen Elizabeth II to Demi Moore and Dolly Parton to LeBron James
to Bill Gates to Barack Obama’s family in the White House and Ukraine’s first couple, the Zelenskys. She’s also captured more casual, less-staged images.
Madeline McCullough, a former commercial photographer and instructor at Wichita State’s Elliott School of Communication,
is among the legions of Leibovitz fans.
Among her collection of Leibovitz’s books and other works, McCullough still has the Jan.
22, 1981, Rolling Stone magazine that featured Leibovitz’s photo of a naked John Lennon curled atop Yoko Ono on the floor. Leibovitz had taken the photo five hours before Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980.
“For the first 15 years of my professional life, I was a commercial photographer and Annie Leibovitz was my favorite photographer,” said McCullough, who traveled in November to Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, to see a much larger iteration of the exhibition coming to WAM.
“I subscribed to Rolling Stone when I was young because I was a lot more interested in her photographs than I was any of the articles about rock and roll and then when she switched over to Vanity Fair, I subscribed to Vanity Fair because of her photographs. I’ve just tried to follow her career … and at this
point, I’m pretty steeped in Annie’s history,” she said.
Crystal Bridges Museum, which organized the Leibovitz exhibition with the photographer’s involvement, displayed more than 300 of Leibovitz’s images from midSeptember to late January.
“There’s something very magical about standing in front of the photographs I’ve seen” in magazines and books, said McCullough, who is already planning repeat visits to see the exhibition at WAM.
While the exhibition at WAM will be about half the size of the exhibition at Crystal Bridges, it will have several of the same elements that provide an insight into the breadth of Leibovitz’s work and her creativity at capturing history-makers.
Some images will be framed, while in one area several will be pinned to the walls. The latter helps visitors “feel like they are in Annie’s studio,” said WAM curator Tera Hedrick.
“You can kind of feel like you are there with her, as she’s pinned things up to look at and contemplate them. There’s such a sense of creativity,” Hedrick said.
To help visitors gain more insight into Leibovitz’s creative inspiration, books from Leibovitz’s personal library that she referred to for inspiration during her career are displayed.
For those who want to know what it’s like to work with Leibovitz, mark your calendars for a 6:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 16, free exhibition talk by Tom Hossler, chair of the visual communication design department at The University of Kansas who worked as Leibovitz’s in-house art director from the late 1990s to early 2000s.
Hedrick said the WAM exhibition is loosely chronological as it spans the half-century of Leibovitz’s work, from the black and white photos from her 10 years as the head photographer at “Rolling Stone” to her more contemporary imagery.
The show includes five 11-by-12-foot digital screens that will continually rotate through dozens of photographs from Leibovitz’s recent works, Hedrick said.
Admission to see “Annie Leibovitz/Work” is $12, and free to WAM members, college students with ID and youth under 12. The exhibit will be free to everyone on Saturday, July 13, as part of WAM’s Family ArtVenture programming. For free or discounted admission, the museum participates in the Sunflower Summer program, which grants Kansas families free onetime access; the Blue Star program, which gives active-duty families free admission; and Museums for All, for families receiving food assistance.
WAM has several exhibition-related activities during the show’s run; some are ticketed and some are free.
Visitors with exhibition admission can take docent-led tours at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 1; noon Sunday, June 30; and 2 p.m. Saturday, July 20. As part of its themed, limited-ticket fundraising event series called pARTy, WAM will host a Vanity Affair, on June 29; tickets are $150 per person. Two pop-up bar and tour events happen Fridays, June 7, and Aug. 9, with a fashion and poetry event on July 19.
Free events include a film series showing “Hugo” (May 31), “Carol” (June 28) and “The Fifth Element” (July 26); a June 14 panel discussion on women photographers in Wichita, and Hossler’s Aug. 16 talk.
For a complete listing or to register for the ticketed special events, visit wam.org/events.
‘ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/WORK’ EXHIBITION
What: collection of more than 130 photographs by Annie Leibovitz, whose notable photos of celebrities have appeared on magazine covers for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Vogue, album covers, campaigns and elsewhere
Where: Wichita Art Museum, 1400 Museum Blvd.
When: Sunday, May 19, through Sunday, Sept. 1. WAM hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, with extended hours until 9 p.m. Fridays.
Admission: $12; free to WAM members, college students with an ID and youth under 18. The exhibit will be free for everyone Saturday, July 13.
More info: 316-2684921 or wam.org