Umbrico, Penelope

American, b. 1957

Biography
Penelope Umbrico examines the sheer volume and ubiquity of images in contemporary culture. She uses various forms of found imagery—from online picture sharing websites to photographs in books and mail order catalogs—and appropriates the pictures to construct large-scale installations. She states: "I take the sheer quantity of images online as a collective archive that represents us—a constantly changing auto-portrait."

In the MoCP permanent collection is a striking piece titled 8,146,774 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/10/10. It is an assemblage of numerous pictures that she found on the then widely used image-sharing website, Flickr, by searching for one of its most popular search terms: sunset. She then cropped the found files and creates her own 4x6 inch prints on a Kodak Easy Share printer. She clusters the prints into an enormous array to underscore the universal human attraction to capture the sun’s essence. The title references the number of results she received from the search on the day she made the work: the first version of the piece created in 2007 produced 2,303,057 images while this version from only three years later in 2010 produced 8,146,774 images.

In another series represented in the MoCP collection titled Mountains, Moving, Umbrico appropriates images of mountains she found in Aperture’s Masters of Photography publications made by artists such as Edward Weston, Wynn Bullock, Henry Cartier-Bresson, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, among others. Umbrico feeds the images through digital algorithms, which fragment and change the images. Umbrico re-photographs the mountain images using her smart phone and various filters available from apps. Many of the apps she uses mimic analogue photography, creating the illusion of light leaks, chemical burn effects, discoloration or blemishes—mistakes that may occur when using analog film, but seem absurd in the digital realm. Although she creates new pictures, it is important to Umbrico that the original photograph remains identifiable, thus offering a view of the history of analog photography through digital processes.
Penelope Umbrico graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto (1980), and completed her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York (1989). She has received numerous awards and grants, including the John Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2012), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2011) and the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship (2002). Umbrico has participated extensively in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, at venues such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe,Hamburg, Germany (2015); Aperture Foundation, New York (2012); Foto Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (2012); Photographer’s Gallery, London (2012); PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2009); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009/2010). Her work is part of numerous public collections, including the John S. Guggenheim Museum, New York; International Center of Photography, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN. She has taught in the photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, NY since 1998.