Penelope Umbrico (b. 1957 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist best known for appropriating images found using search engines and picture sharing websites.
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Penelope Umbrico received her O.A.C.A. at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada in 1980. She obtained her M.F.A. in 1989 at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, NY; LMAKprojects, NY; Julie Saul Gallery, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL; and P/M Gallery, Toronto.
Her project "Suns from Flickr " started in 2006 when she found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the photo-sharing web site Flickr while looking for the most photographed subject (which the sunset turned out to be). She took just the suns from these pictures and made snapshot prints of them. For each installation, the title reflects the number of hits she gets searching "sunset" on Flickr at the time – for example, the first installation was “541,795 Suns From Flickr” in 2006; subsequent installations were: “2303057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07” (2007); “3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08” (2008); “5,911,253 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 8/03/09” (2009) - the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities and a reflection of the collective content there. And since this number only lasts an instant, its recording is analogous to the act of photographing the sunset itself. Umbrico says: “I think it's peculiar that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of optimism and vitamin D… and so ubiquitously photographed, is now subsumed to the internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit.”
Umbrico has participated in numerous group exhibitions including those at MoMA PS1, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; The Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY; International Center of Photography, NY, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Umbrico is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Catalogue Project Grant, and a Harvestworks Scholar Fellowship. She is currently a member of faculty at Bard College Summer MFA (Chair of MFA Photography from 2004–2010), and she is a core faculty member at the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography Video and Related Media in NYC.
In her work, Umbrico explores the connection between the virtual and the natural, the private and the public, the distinctive and the superfluous.
Her work has recently been featured in the New York Times Magazine, on the cover and inside spreads accompanying "Ghosts In the Machine", on January 9, 2011. Her first monograph, "Penelope Umbrico (photographs)", was published in the spring of 2011 by Aperture.
• 2011 : Exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles Festival, France.
• 2011: Laureate from The Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award.