ART & DESIGN

Oct 21: Camera Solo

Patti Smith’s first U.S. museum show in almost a decade.


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In “Camera Solo”—Patti Smith’s first U.S. museum show in almost a decade, featuring more than 70 photographs she’s taken since 2002 with a vintage Polaroid camera—black and white images of Arthur Rimbaud’s silverware or of Roberto Bolaño’s desk chair are really portraits of the people who left their mark on them. The exhibition, which runs October 21, 2011, to February 19, 2012, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, also includes a multimedia homage to Rimbaud, who has been an influence on Smith since her youth. The title of Smith’s show—which in Italian means, roughly, “alone in a room”—indicates an evolution in her working methods: “When Patti was young, photography wasn’t such a solitary endeavor for her,” explains curator and museum director Susan Talbott. “Now it’s become very private.”

Photo: courtesy of the artist and Robert Miller Gallery