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Walker Evans, Anastasia Samoylova

WALKER EVANS, ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA

Floridas Metropolitan Museum of Art 14 October 2024–11 May 2025 New York
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Press Release

Nothing in Florida is quite what it seems. A popular tourist destination since the early twentieth century, it is a place where fantasy and reality collide, a subtropical paradise threatened by hurricanes and rising sea levels, a refuge for extremism and eccentricity. This exhibition brings together photographs and paintings of Florida by two artists of different generations who have sought to understand its complexity and contradictions: Anastasia Samoylova (born 1984), a Russian-American photographer based in Miami, and Walker Evans (1903–1975), an influential originator of documentary-style American photography.

Florida is ghastly and very pleasant where I am, Evans wrote to a friend during his first visit there, in 1934. Over the next forty years, he returned repeatedly, creating a large but little-known body of work depicting the state’s unique natural and cultural landscape: palm trees and pelicans, real estate billboards and souvenir stands, Gilded Age mansions and tin can tourist camps. In addition to photographs, the exhibition includes paintings, negatives, and postcards drawn from The Met’s Walker Evans Archive.

Samoylova has been photographing Florida since 2016, crisscrossing the state in a series of meandering road trips, from the southernmost Keys to the state’s borders with Alabama and Georgia. Building on Evans’s legacy, she creates vibrant photographs and mixed-media paintings that temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism.

The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

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Artists Exhibiting

Anastasia Samoylova contemporary artist
Anastasia Samoylova b. 1984 Follow +
Walker Evans contemporary artist
Walker Evans 1903-1975 Follow +

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About the Gallery

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) is one of the world’s most well-loved landmark museums located on Fifth Avenue along Central Park’s Museum Mile in Manhattan, New York. Renowned for its monumental Beaux-Arts architecture and encyclopedic collection, it also presents an exceptional showing of contemporary art.

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New York
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Daily, 10am – 5pm
Friday – Saturday, 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday
(1)
New York 1000 Fifth Avenue, NY
Metropolitan Museum of Art contemporary art institution in New York United States
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, NY, New York, United States
+1 212 535 7710
http://www.metmuseum.org

Opening hours
Daily, 10am – 5pm
Friday – Saturday, 10am – 9pm
Closed Wednesday
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