Celebrating 30 Years
Yancey Richardson Gallery
July 16 – August 15, 2025
525 W 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
To mark its 30th anniversary, Yancey Richardson gallery presents Celebrating 30 Years, a celebratory and reflective exhibition that offers more than a simple retrospective. Rather than organizing the show chronologically or by artist, the gallery has created a thematic, almost intuitive journey through its history, inviting viewers to navigate an expansive archive of visual memory.
Founded in 1993, Yancey Richardson Gallery has played a central role in shaping the discourse around photography in New York. From its early days in Soho to its move to Chelsea in 2000, the gallery has championed both established and emerging voices in lens-based practice. It helped launch the careers of artists like Laura Letinsky and Mitch Epstein and has continuously foregrounded work that pushes photography beyond the documentary into realms of performance, intervention, and conceptualism. Celebrating 30 Years embodies that ethos. The exhibition is less about fixed narratives than about revealing connections—between intimacy and landscape, identity and construction, absence and presence.
What distinguishes Celebrating 30 Years is not only its impressive breadth but also its curatorial consciousness. The exhibition includes works dating from the 1970s to the present, and instead of presenting a linear history, the show opts for a constellation of visual encounters that speak to one another across time, geography, and genre. In doing so, it mirrors the ethos of the gallery itself, which has long resisted narrow categorization in favor of cultivating a broad, inclusive, and evolving dialogue within photography. The gallery’s commitment to both emerging and established voices over the past three decades is what gives the exhibition its depth. It’s a celebration not of nostalgia, but of vision—of what it means to sustain and champion photographic practices in an ever-shifting art world.
The installation takes full advantage of the gallery’s architectural space, layering black-and-white gelatin silver prints beside large-scale color images and pairing collage-based works with more traditional portraiture. This friction across eras and formats reflects the gallery’s long-standing commitment to photography as a pluralistic and expansive medium. Here, the image is not only a record of the world but also a proposition about how to see it.
Rather than separate works in self-contained chapters, Celebrating 30 Years draws subtle lines between artists and across decades. A thread of feminist reimagination runs throughout, from the performative glamour of Mickalene Thomas’s staged portraits to the quiet assertion of presence in Zanele Muholi’s self-imaging. Elsewhere, the rural quietude of Mark Steinmetz and the subversive theatricality of Larry Sultan converge in a shared interest in domesticity and desire.
As the photography world has shifted dramatically over the past thirty years—from analog processes to digital experimentation, from documentary to constructed image—Yancey Richardson has consistently remained attuned to photography’s porous boundaries. The gallery has played a crucial role in not only reflecting, but also shaping how contemporary photography intersects with performance, sculpture, collage, and social practice. Celebrating 30 Years reflects this hybridity, highlighting how photographic artists today increasingly treat the medium as one component in a broader interdisciplinary toolkit. In doing so, the exhibition makes clear that the gallery’s legacy isn’t just about championing photography, but about challenging and expanding what photography can be.
Celebrating 30 Years is a celebration, but it is also a reassertion of what it means for a gallery to hold space, to take risks, and to think deeply about images. It marks a milestone not by looking back, but by demonstrating how history lives on in the work we choose to show and the ways we choose to show it.
Celebrating 30 Years includes work by Guanyu Xu selected by David Alekhuogie, David Alekhuogie selected by Mickalene Thomas, Mickalene Thomas selected by David Alekhuogie, Olivo Barbieri selected by Lynn Saville, Jared Bark selected by Rachel Perry, Omar Barquet selected by Mary Lum, Ori Gersht selected by Terry Evans, Terry Evans selected by Victoria Sambunaris, Mary Ellen Bartley selected by Ori Gersht, Lisa Kereszi selected by Sharon Core, Sharon Core selected by Hellen van Meene, Mitch Epstein selected by Lisa Kereszi, John Divola selected by Mitch Epstein, Tania Franco Klein selected by Laura Letinsky, Carolyn Drake selected by Tania Franco Klein, Sandi Haber Fifi eld selected by Bryan Graf, Bryan Graf selected by Yamamoto Masao, Jitka Hanzlová selected by Laura Letinsky, Anthony Hernandez selected by Olivo Barbieri, David Hilliard selected by Kahn & Selesnick, Laura Letinsky selected by Carolyn Drake, Matt Lipps selected by Guanyu Xu, Mary Lum selected by Omar Barquet, Esko Mannikko selected by Sharon Core, Andrew Moore selected by David Hilliard, Zanele Muholi selected by John Divola, Rachel Perry selected by Sandi Haber Fifi eld, Victoria Sambunaris selected by Anthony Hernandez, Lynn Saville selected by Andrew Moore, Mark Steinmetz selected by Victoria Sambunaris, Kahn & Selesnick selected by Jared Bark, Larry Sultan selected by Anthony Hernandez, Tseng Kwong Chi selected by Zanele Muholi, Hellen van Meene selected by Jitka Hanzlová, Yamamoto Masao selected by Mary Ellen Bartley, Pello Irazu selected by Jared Bark and Lynn Geesaman and Sebastião Salgado selected by Yancey Richardson.
