Sharon Lockhart is both a filmmaker and a photographer, and she moves seamlessly between the two. All of her work, regardless of medium, offers a prolonged investigation of the subject at hand. The artist’s almost anthropological sensibility leads her to spend months, even years, working with the same community, whether in Bath, Maine, or Lodz, Poland, resulting in provocative and thorough studies of people and places. For More American Photographs, for example, Lockhart went to California’s Central Valley to the town of Visalia, a large agricultural center in the San Joaquin Valley. Lockhart spent time with cattle ranchers on their properties and attended livestock auctions with them, getting a sense of the rhythm of their lives.

Lockhart’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at international institutions including Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Wiener Secession in Austria, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zürich, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Wolfsburg Museum in Germany, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her films have been included in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival. She has been a Radcliffe Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Rockefeller Fellow.

Courtesy of CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts