Ellen Carey

Artist Info

Ellen Careyb. 1952

Ellen Carey (1952-

“A Hartford Biography”

Carey, “is an educator, independent scholar, guest curator, photographer and lens-based artist, whose work uses the large-format Polaroid 20 X 24 camera (one of five) to create her well-known Pulls and site-specific installations with a parallel practice in the camera-less photogram”. She has written countless articles and books on the history of photography and photographic practices and is considered a pioneer in the development and use of new photographic practices.

She was born in New York City in 1952. She was the oldest of five children, raised Catholic and had a happy child hood. She says the love and memory of her parents gives her strength. Her young years were spent in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and New Jersey. She has travelled throughout the U.S., the Middle East, and Europe.

Carey studied at the Art Students League in 1970, received a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in 1975, and an MFA from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1978

She returned to her native New York City in 1979 and lived there until 1994.

Since 1983 Carey has taught at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford where she is Associate Professor of Photography. She now lives and works in Hartford and New York City.

Her studio is in the historic Underwood Typewriter Factory in the Parkville section of Hartford. With its high ceilings and tall windows, this early 20th century industrial space provides an appropriate environment to showcase Carey’s imposing “Pulls.

Her essay, “Color Me Real”, was written for fellow Hartford artist Sol LeWitt, entitled “Sol LeWitt: 100 Views” for the MASS MoCA retrospective in 2009. One her notable accomplishments came in 2008 when she discovered a hidden “signature” in Man Ray’s 1935 photograph, “Space Writing (Self Portrait)”. Man Ray also has a strong Hartford connection since Hartford’s James Soby was a major supporter of Ray and Ray’s first one-person exhibition in the United States occurred at the Wadsworth Atheneum under the legendary A. Everett (Chick) Austin.

She has had 50 one-person exhibitions in museums, alternative spaces, and galleries throughout the world, including shows in the Hartford area at Eastern Connecticut State University, “Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey” (2014); Celeste LeWitt Gallery, UCONN Health Center, Farmington, “In Hamlet’s Shadow: Self Portraits as Photo-Lithographs from 1987” (2012); West Hartford Art League, “The Black Swans of Ellen Carey: Of Necessary Poetic Realities” (2010); Saint Joseph University, “Struck By Light: Ellen Carey” (2009); Lyman Allyn Art Museum, “Moires, Blinks, Monchromes, Start & Stop, Mixes” (2006); The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, “Photography Degree Zero/Matrix #153” (2004); Mercy Gallery, Loomis Chaffee School, Windsor, CT, “Mourning Wall for 9/11” (2003); Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Hartford, “Self Portrait at 48” (2002); New Britain Museum of American Art, “Photography Degree Zero” (2002); Paesaggio Gallery, West Hartford, “Prima Facia” (2002); and Real Art Ways, Hartford, “No Voice is Wholly Lost: Mourning Wall/Family Portraits/Birthday Portrait” (2000) and “Self-Portraits in Polaroid 20 x 24”(1986). She has also participated in hundreds of group shows throughout the Hartford area and the world.

The Real Art Ways show, “No Voice is Lost”, was a tribute to her family Quoting Rosoff:

“These works are the artist’s response not only to the dying of the millennium but also the deaths of three immediate family members. In what she calls ‘grief work’, Carey transmutes the pain of loss into a conceptual dialogue with light, manipulating the process of Polaroid photography into and elegiac form.

Carey’s father and mother and her brother John each died within days of their birthdays, lending a double edge to the remembrance.”

Her works are included in the collections of over 20 major museums including the local museums New Britain Museum of American Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Yale University Art Gallery, Eastern Connecticut State University, Benton Art Museum at the University of Connecticut, and the LeWitt Foundation.

Included in her many grants and awards she has received are three Coffin Grants from the University of Hartford, two grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and grants from the Te Foundation in Avon, CT and the Greater Hartford Arts Council.

She is an “Elector” of the Wadsworth Atheneum and a member of the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Patricia Rosoff, an art critic and teacher at the Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford until her tragic and untimely death in 2014, provides a fitting description of Carey and her work.

“What is remarkable about Ellen Carey is, first of all, that her work is entirely abstract, and secondly that her abstraction is for the most part joyously accessible – large scale, glossy, and gorgeously colored. Simply put, it is a pleasure to stand in front of this work and just look. If you stop there, however, you’ve missed essential parts of the potential experience – the complexity of the artist’s conceptual foundation, the surprisingly personal genesis of her imagery – which is the wacky irreverent, and well-informed character of her experimentation. For all the polish of Carey’s finished works, they are the result of an ecstatic, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, crazy-assed instinct…..Ellen Carey does not “take” pictures; she makes them.”

Carey, Ellen, “Curriculum Vitae”, 2014

Carey, Ellen, unpublished “Bio Narrative”, 2014

Fleischer, Donna, “Let There Be Light: The Black Swans of Ellen Carey”, 2010, 2014

Rosoff, Patricia, “Innocent Eye: A Passionate Look at Contemporary Art”, 2013