Included with Museum admission

In June of 1972, Nicholas Whitman photographed vintage circus posters, many layers deep, in the protected bay of a barn near the intersection of Routes 346 and 22 in North Petersburg, New York. Around 2000 he returned to see what had become of the posters. The barn had been converted to an antique store and just a few fragments of posters remained on the wall. However, a couple of lumps of circus posters, many layers thick and measuring about 3’ by 5’ each, advertising shows in Bennington, Vermont, and other local towns, had been pulled off the barn’s wall and were up in the former hay loft. Whitman became the caretaker and documentor of these delicate slices of local history.

In this gallery talk, Whitman will share stories about the posters and their conservation, and his work as a photographer. You will see fragments of the posters, Whitman’s photographs, and have the opportunity to have your questions answered. Whitman’s book, Circus Posters: Historic Posters Come to Light, is available in the Museum Store, and Nick will be signing copies.

Nicholas Whitman is an American photographer, best known for his work chronicling the decay and transformations of buildings, as well as his nature studies. His most recent work’s basis is the physical world, but more as an “evocative interpretation rather than a literal one.”  “Subject intersects with intangibles like mood. Symbols speak across cultures and through time.” These themes are manifest in the painting of Albert Pinkham Ryder, a recent focus of Whitman’s. Whitman’s show “After Ryder” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum from 2018-2019 which was an homage to the spirit of the painter, and in 2021 another show – A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art – which exhibited Whitman’s work alongside Ryder’s.

Whitman began photographing North Adams’ abandoned Sprague Electric Company factory in 1988 “because it would surely be razed.” Documenting the then-deteriorating 19th-century mill buildings, Whitman captured scenes ranging from vast postindustrial landscapes to Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s celebrated renovated factory campus— currently on display in the museum and accompanied by an expanded catalog, Whitman’s 2008 book, The Colonial Theatre: A Pittsfield Resurrection, showcases the transformation of the Miller Supply Company of Pittsfield, Massachusetts into an architectural jewel.

A graduate of RIT‘s photography program, Whitman was Curator of Photography at the New Bedford Whaling Museum from 1978 to 1986. ]He was an instructor at Williams College’s winter studies program between 2003-2018.

In concert with commissioned work, Whitman continues to mine numerous veins of expressive photography, several of which have resulted in books, gallery shows, and museum exhibitions.