Andrew Borowiec
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American, born 1956
Projects/Portfolios
The New Heartland
Introduction
The New Heartland is a photographic investigation of Ohio’s cultural landscape that explores how our prevailing social and environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values are reflected in the ways that people shape their surroundings.
The photographs illustrate a region that is representative of the American mainstream. Ohio is the quintessential heartland state: it is the bellwether state that has voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election; it is where fast-food companies test-market new products; even its motto is The Heart of it All. I began this body of work in response to the 2004 presidential election. Over the course of a long and depressing day working as a poll-watcher, I thought about the extent to which the Midwest had changed during the two decades that I had lived here. That elections revealed deep divisions among America’s citizens that are not only manifest in choices made at the ballot box, but also visible in the landscape. The rolling farmlands and idyllic small towns that used to define Middle-America are rapidly giving way to vast developments of mini-mansions and shopping “villages” designed to evoke an imagined era of luxurious consumerism, while traditional regional characteristics are becoming effaced by a ubiquitous global culture of material consumption. In the new heartland you can buy a quick fix of trendy espresso even out among the cornfields.
Lee Marks Fine Art, Shelbyville, IN, United States
Sasha Wolf, New York, NY, United States
Artist Statement
The New Heartland is a photographic investigation of Ohio’s cultural landscape that explores how our prevailing social and environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values are reflected in the ways that people shape their surroundings.
Process Statement
Archival pigment ink prints, 27"x40", from scanned 6x9cm negatives.
Andrew Borowiec has photographed America’s changing industrial and post-industrial landscape for over twenty-five years. His books include Along the Ohio (2000), Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast (2005), and Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills (2008).
He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and in 2006 was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize.
Borowiec’s photographs have been exhibited around the world and are in the collections of the Chicago Art Institute, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others.
Borowiec was born in 1956 in New York City but moved to Paris with his parents when he was nine months old. He spent his childhood in France, Algeria, Tunisia, and Switzerland, where he graduated from the International School of Geneva.
He received a B.A. in Russian from Haverford College in 1979 and an M.F.A. in Photography from Yale University in 1982.
He has worked as a photojournalist, as the staff photographer for the International Center of Photography in New York City, as the Assistant Director of Workshops for the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, and as the Director of the University of Akron Press.
Borowiec has taught photography at Parsons School of Design, the New School for Social Research, Germantown Academy, and Oberlin College. Since 1984, he has taught at the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art. In 2009 he was named a Distinguished Professor of Art. He lives in Akron, Ohio, with his wife, Andrea and a beagle, Boudreaux.
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