Olivia Parker

(AMERICAN, b. 1941)

After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in the History of Art, Parker began her career as a painter, and became involved in photography in 1970. Mostly self-taught she makes ephemeral constructions to photograph and experiments with the endless possibilities of light. She has had more than one hundred one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in major private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Portfolios of her work have been published in Art News, American Photographer, Camera, Camera Arts, The Sciences and numerous other magazines in the United States, Europe, and Japan. There have been three monographs of Parker’s work: Signs of Life (Godine, 1978), Under the Looking Glass (New York Graphic Society, 1983), and Weighing The Planets (New York Graphic Society, 1987). She has lectured and conducted workshops extensively both in this country and abroad. In 1996 she received a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. Residencies include Dartmouth College in 1988, The MacDowell Colony in 1993 and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1997. Currently she is working on Still and not so Still Life that comprises images of both the expected and the unexpected.