This year’s winner: “Gidon, Dining Room,” 2008. By Shai Kremer. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Friends of Photography.
By Greg C. Truax, Publisher
Attendees to Pick-a-Pic Sunday evening (Jan. 21) at the Museum of Fine Arts selected a photograph by Shai Kremer, an Israeli artist, to add to the downtown St. Petersburg musuem’s collection, one of the finest in the Southeast.
“Beautiful and thought provoking, this important photograph will remain on view through Feb. 25 in the Miriam F. Acheson Gallery of photography,” said Robin O’Dell, curator of the MFA Photographic Collection.
Each year the MFA’s Friends of Photography group displays three photographs selected from galleries and artists from around the world. Attendees to Pick-a-Pic vote on which photograph the group will purchase for the museum.
The winning selection, “Gidon, Dining Room,” 2008, is from Mr. Kremer’s “Infected Landscape” series, which documents the imprint of the military on the Israeli landscape. Mr. Kremer’s work is in a number of museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
The two other photographers this year, Ms. O’Dell said, were Andrea Grützner, who was born in East Germany, and Fatoumata Diabaté, who is from Bamako, Mali.
” I am deeply grateful to everyone who attended and those who continue to support photography at the MFA,” said Ms. O’Dell.
The museum is located at 255 Beach Drive N.E.
The image of last year’s winner: “Woman with a Purple Cape,” 2015. By Harsha Biswajit. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Fla. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Friends of Photography.