Becca Albee
Becca Albee
Becca Albee is a visual artist who works in photography, often in combination with video, sound, sculpture, scent and/or printed matter. Her projects bear witness to a constellation of histories: natural histories, art histories, and subcultural histories, many underrecognized or forgotten.
Her process is informed by her germinal years participating in a feminist queer punk music community in the Pacific Northwest US in the 1990s. This experience strengthened a lifelong commitment to community-building, collaboration and interconnectedness, which carries into her visual art work today.
Becca Albee is a visual artist who works in photography, often in combination with video, sound, sculpture, scent and/or printed matter. Albee’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Situations, New York, NY; 356 S. Mission Rd, Los Angeles, CA; and Et al., San Francisco, CA. Fellowships include MacDowell, Yaddo, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Artlink. Albee is currently an Associate Professor at The City College of New York, CUNY.
....my work as a premature memorial to myself, others, and perhaps our world. Now that’s an ending.
Becca Albee’s pieces in The World Was All Before Them are from a larger body of work that started with a commission at MIT List Visual Arts Center. In depicting horseshoe crabs, the works look toward survival, grief, climate, blood, marine ecosystems, and interspecies dependence. Virtually unchanged for 450 million years, horseshoe crabs are hardy enough to withstand almost anything—even the Cretaceous–Paleocene extinction event, which wiped out three-quarters of the earth’s plant and animal species, are now vulnerable to extinction. The work selected for this exhibition includes a silent three-channel video of the horseshoe crab spawning under the full and new moon on Plumb Beach in Brooklyn and a suite of photographs of the aftermath, taken the morning after before the tide returns.
The titles for these works and all pieces within this greater project are quotes from artist Robert Blanchon (1965-1999), who was Albee’s professor and friend and who inspired this body of work. The titles are sourced from various texts including syllabi, exams, emails, letters, change of address cards and artist’s statements.
In addition to MIT List Visual Arts Center, this work was created thanks to MacDowell, Ellis Beauregard Foundation, The Estate of Robert Blanchon, PSC-CUNY, NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections, Yuri Stone, and Monika Uchiyama.
Image: Becca Albee, Felix dies rather young. So does Joe Orton. Consider the congested matrix we now know as history’s machinery, and draw parallels and opposites as to how one is remembered, by whom, for whose benefit. How many voices are involved? With the artists no longer with us, who speaks for them? Do you always agree with posthumous posturing? (0-4) Installation view of 3 of 5 photographs, silver gelatin prints, 2019. Photo credit: Lindsay Metivier.