NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT.- The New Britain Museum of American Art presents “150 Years of Photography: A Woman’s Choice,” on view through March 16, 2003. Some 40 years ago, Lillian Farber had literally never taken a picture. Today, she is a well-known photographer in her own right with an amazing collection of images produced by some of the most famous photographers in the world. 150 Years of Photography: One Woman’s Choices encompasses about 150 images from Lillian Farber’s comprehensive collection in the first photography survey ever presented by the Museum.
“Lillian Farber, whose genius as a collector we celebrate with this exhibition, was not content to patronize a few favored artists,” said Museum Director Douglas Hyland. “She studied and acquired examples by many of the most illustrious photographers from the last century and a half. Among her selections were the very founders of the movement to establish the legitimacy of photography.”
The exhibition consists of work by many of the finest photographers in the past 150 years. Included are major works by such illustrious artists as Paul Strand, Paul Caponigro, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams and many more who are “household names” to those at all interested in the classic art of black and white photography. An illustrated catalogue will be published to document the exhibition. Contributing to this project was Trinity College intern Cyma Shapiro-Roland who researched biographies of the photographers represented in the exhibition.
Farber’s first acquisition was a masterpiece by well-known photographer Paul Strand. Not realizing at that point in her collecting career that Strand was world renowned, Farber simply responded intuitively to his work. That same motivation has been the force behind her philosophy of collecting
from that day on.
“It hasn’t mattered who the photographer was, living or dead, acclaimed or unknown,” Farber says. “Neither has the pedigree of the print; vintage, self-produced, staff- produced or mass-produced. All I had to do was love it.”
Farber, now in her 80s, lives in Newfane, Vermont, and displays her photographs privately in a gallery in her barn. She received a master’s degree in political sociology from Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 and then stayed on at the college as dean of student services. She moved to Vermont in 1979 and formed a partnership with Bern Friedelson and photographer Fred Picker as owners of Zone VI, a mail-order photograph equipment business in Brattleboro.
Farber is also a former chairman of the Board of Trustees at Marlboro College in Newfane, where the Lillian Farber Chair in Liberal Arts and Technology was established in her honor. It was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Marlboro Trustee Jerome Aron and his wife Elizabeth McCormack.
The NBMAA is the first museum to show Farber’s collection publicly. The exhibition is made possible through the generosity of Lillian Farber and the support of the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, with additional support from the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City
and Clare Brett Smith.