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A popular tourist destination since the early 20th century, Florida is a place where fantasy and reality collide. On October 14, 2024, The Met will open Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans, an exhibition bringing together photographs and paintings of Florida by Anastasia Samoylova (born 1984), a Russian-American photographer based in Miami, and Walker Evans (1903–1975), an influential originator of American documentary-style photography. By juxtaposing two bodies of work depicting the same geographical area during different historical periods, the show will highlight the continuities and discontinuities in Florida’s natural, cultural, and political landscape.
The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.
“This fascinating exhibition offers up a lively dialogue between Walker Evans, a canonical American artist of the 20th century, and Anastasia Samoylova, an exciting new voice in contemporary photography,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The works on view provide a palpable sense of place and powerfully nuanced interpretations of a region’s culture and environment.”
Mia Fineman, Curator in the Department of Photographs, said “With their lush colors and collage-like compositions, Anastasia Samoylova’s photographs offer a vivid portrait of present-day Florida in all its beauty and strangeness. Her work is layered with subtle references to the region’s complex history and to the ways it has been represented by others.”
Drawing extensively on The Met’s Walker Evans Archive, the exhibition will explore the changing landscape of the American South while highlighting the larger themes of artistic influence and affinity across generations.
“Florida is ghastly and very pleasant where I am,” Evans wrote to a friend during his first visit there, in 1934. Over the next 40 years, he returned repeatedly, creating a large body of work depicting the state’s unique natural and cultural landscape: palm trees and pelicans, real estate billboards and souvenir stands, Gilded Age mansions and “tin can” tourist camps.
In 2016, decades after Evans’s engagement with Florida, Samoylova began photographing the state, finding inspiration in Evans’s exploration of visual surfaces and the shifting play between image and reality. Her vibrant photographs and mixed-media collages temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism.
“Following the footsteps of documentarians before me, my work examines Florida through my perspective as an insider-outsider and a woman on the road,” said Anastasia Samoylova. “I hope that my photographs contribute meaningfully to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be American.”
Credits and Related Content
Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans is organized by Mia Fineman, Curator in the
Department of Photographs at The Met.
Coinciding with the exhibition, Samoylova’s career-to-date monograph, Adaptation (Thames & Hudson, 2024), will be published.
The exhibition is featured on The Met website, as well as on social media using the hashtag #MetPhotographs.
Image: Anastasia Samoylova (American, born Russia, 1984), Venus Mirror, 2020. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Diana Barrett and Bob Vila Gift, 2024 (2024.320) © Anastasia Samoylova
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Featuring work by Walker Evans in dialogue with contemporary photographs by Anastasia Samoylova, the exhibition will feature over 70 objects exploring how the two artists sought to understand the state’s complexity and contradictions.
