March 13, 2014
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
5:30 p.m.
Cialdella is a fine art photographer, an architectural photographer, educator and writer. He has taught at Kalamazoo College, Kendall College of Art and Design, Western Michigan University, University of Notre Dame and currently at Academy of Art University. Cialdella earned his M.F.A. in photography from the University of Notre Dame. In 2009 his book, The Calumet Region: An American Place – Photographs by Gary Cialdella was published by the University of Illinois Press, and the Brauer Museum of Art. In 2011, his essay, Words and Photographs: Imaginative Literature and the Making of the Calumet Region: An American Place was published in Miscellany, the Journal of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, and republished in the online South Shore Journal. Two of Cialdella's photographs were included in the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition An Open Land: Photographs from the Midwest, 1852–1982, and published as an Aperture Monograph. The Shoreline Project: 1982–1983, funded by the Michigan Council for the Humanities, and Landscapes of Southwest Michigan: 1984–85, supported by the Michigan Council for the Arts. Other series include, Delta Blues: The Entertainment Landscape of North Mississippi: 1997–2003; After Hurricane Katrina: Photographs of the Gulf Coast: 2006, and American Habitat, on going. Cialdella's current project, Picturing Pilsen, is set in Chicago's largest Latino neighborhood. These primarily color images include panoramas, and multiple combination images. His work has been represented in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Archive and is included in corporate and private collections, including Bank of America, Pfizer Corporation, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Brauer Museum of Art and private collections.