Arthur Tress: Photographs from the Collection

September 14, 2023–May 9, 2024 

Vibrantly colored images and archival materials originally from Arthur Tress’s 1994 CSULB exhibition, Requiem for a Paperweight are on view in the Prints and Drawings and Archives Room. Narrating existential crises of an office worker navigating capitalist society, Tress described this series of work as a “meditation on the destiny...of an individual contemplating his own definitive departure from existence.” Archival materials related to Arthur Tress: Photographs from the Collection, are on view through May 9.

Arthur Tress (b. 1940 New York City) is an American photographer known for his personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. Early bodies of work in the 1960s and 1970s sought to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. through photographing the neglected fringes of the New York City urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. Later bodies of work dealing with the hidden dramas of adult relationships and the reenactments of male homosexual desire evolved from this primarily theatrical approach. The Museum presents composite Cibachrome prints which were gifts from the artist in 1995. These vibrant color works which explore narrative still life within a children’s toy theater, a portable nineteenth-century aquarium, and other composite images which contain complex social themes, yet feel almost surreal in nature.

Installation image by Tatiana Mata.
Works on view are gifts of the Artist.