STAN STREMBICKI: The Lost Library

Since 1982, Stan Strembicki has visited New Orleans two or three times a year and photographed the city. In November 2005, he began focusing on objects in the debris field following Hurricane Katrina, particularly storm-lost photo albums, wedding albums, and snapshots. At that time, he found the library of Alfred Lawless High School. The school, located in the Lower 9th Ward, had filled with flood water and one of its library walls had burst, scattering books across an adjacent field. Over the course of a year, Strembicki photographed the books as they began to dissolve into the landscape, symbolic to him of lost knowledge, traditions lost, and history lost. His exhibition at Joslyn featuredphotographs of the books.

Stan Strembicki has exhibited at universities and galleries across the U.S., and his works are part of the permanent collections of such institutions as the New Orleans Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, and Suwa Art Museum (Suwa, Japan). For 25 years, he has been a professor of art and photography at Washington University's College of Art in St. Louis, Missouri.

This Print Gallery exhibition was a companion show to Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Stan Strembicki (American, born 1952), Untitled, from the Lost Library Portfolio, 2006, color photograph, Museum Purchase with funds from the James Art Acquisitions Fund, 2007, Collection of Joslyn Art Museum

Stan Strembicki (American, born 1952), Untitled, from the Lost Library Portfolio, 2006, color photograph, Museum Purchase with funds from the James Art Acquisitions Fund, 2007, Collection of Joslyn Art Museum

Stan Strembicki (American, born 1952), Untitled, from the Lost Library Portfolio, 2006, color photograph, Museum Purchase with funds from the James Art Acquisitions Fund, 2007, Collection of Joslyn Art Museum