Pinky/MM Bass
American
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1936 - )
Pinky M. M. Bass is an Alabama artist whose many years of fruitful experiments with alternative photographic processes have been exhibited, collected, and published widely. A veteran of more than forty solo shows plus participation in numerous national and international group exhibitions, her work is in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the High Museum of Art, and museums in Houston, Huntsville, Asheville, Birmingham, and Mobile. It has been published in "Aperture," "Pinhole Journal," "The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes," and numerous gallery and museum catalogs, including "In View of Home: Alabama Landscape Photographs"—an exhibition organized by the Huntsville Museum of Art that travelled to Anniston, Mobile, and Montgomery. (1) Bass was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Fairhope, Alabama. For many years she was married to a missionary and they lived and worked in Mexico. Years later a divorce ended the marriage and disease ended the life of her husband. Tragedy struck when their son was killed in an automobile accident en route to visit his father on his deathbed. In 2000, Pinky also suffered the loss of her sister, Francis McCall, to cancer, but not before Pinky and her father shaved their heads in Fran’s support and Pinky took her on a cross-country trip to visit places Fran had long wanted to see. Family and tragedy have long informed Pinky’s art. Issues of life and death and transformation pervade her deep and broad oeuvre. (2) Throughout her creative career, Pinky has pursued unconventional paths to artistic success. Long interested in pinhole photography, in 1989 she obtained funding through a RAP grant to renovate a pop-up camper trailer into a portable pinhole camera and darkroom in which she exposed and printed photographs as large as three by five feet. She took Pinky’s Portable Pop-up Pinhole Camera and Darkroom to arts festivals and sites around her family home in Silver Hill, Alabama (near Fairhope, in Baldwin County). At times she used glass plate negatives of local landmarks and people that her grandmother, Lois Slosson Sundberg, had made around 1900 to print images that she integrated into her pinhole pictures. Slosson’s cameras were also in Pinky’s possession, and those simple instruments may have influenced her grand-daughter to make her own cameras and to create sculpture from those creations. Pinky created a series of about fifteen “Photographic Musical Instruments” that she described as sculptures “in which strips of photographs are run through the mechanism and create music abstractly according to how the holes are punched in the strip of photos (somewhat like a player piano)—some were on cameras, others on mannequins and musical instruments” (3). Even in the wake of hip replacement, the artist remains quick and creative as she approaches her eighties, engaged in photography, sculpture, installation art, life, and transformation. (4)
(1) See the artist’s resume and biographical statement in the MMFA artist file. Bass discovered photography at age 50 and earned an MFA in photography at Georgia State University in 1988. Aperture 141 (1995); 115 (1989). Pinhole Journal 19, No. 1 (2002); 9, No. 1 (l993); 6, No. 3 (l991); 6, No. 1 (l990); 5, No. 1 (1989); and 3, No. 2, (1987). Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning, ca. 2009), Fig. 1–15. Francis Osborn Robb, In View of Home: Alabama Landscape Photographs (Huntsville: Huntsville Museum of Art, 1989), 74-5.
(2) See Panhorst memo to the file regarding Pinky Bass "Scorpio" photo, 18 July 2007, in the MMFA artist file. About this same time, Pinky lost both her parents and her friend, Kitty Couch, the model for "In the Country," who was killed in a traffic accident in Vietnam (interview with Donna Pickens, MMFA curator of education, 27 June 2013).
(3) Bass email correspondence with the author, 27 June 2013, copy in MMFA artist file.
(4) See copy of interpretive text panel for Bass and Lois Slosson Sundberg exhibition at MMFA, March 17 through May 13, 2007, in MMFA artist file.
MPanhorst.6.2013
American
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1936 - )
Pinky M. M. Bass is an Alabama artist whose many years of fruitful experiments with alternative photographic processes have been exhibited, collected, and published widely. A veteran of more than forty solo shows plus participation in numerous national and international group exhibitions, her work is in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the High Museum of Art, and museums in Houston, Huntsville, Asheville, Birmingham, and Mobile. It has been published in "Aperture," "Pinhole Journal," "The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes," and numerous gallery and museum catalogs, including "In View of Home: Alabama Landscape Photographs"—an exhibition organized by the Huntsville Museum of Art that travelled to Anniston, Mobile, and Montgomery. (1) Bass was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Fairhope, Alabama. For many years she was married to a missionary and they lived and worked in Mexico. Years later a divorce ended the marriage and disease ended the life of her husband. Tragedy struck when their son was killed in an automobile accident en route to visit his father on his deathbed. In 2000, Pinky also suffered the loss of her sister, Francis McCall, to cancer, but not before Pinky and her father shaved their heads in Fran’s support and Pinky took her on a cross-country trip to visit places Fran had long wanted to see. Family and tragedy have long informed Pinky’s art. Issues of life and death and transformation pervade her deep and broad oeuvre. (2) Throughout her creative career, Pinky has pursued unconventional paths to artistic success. Long interested in pinhole photography, in 1989 she obtained funding through a RAP grant to renovate a pop-up camper trailer into a portable pinhole camera and darkroom in which she exposed and printed photographs as large as three by five feet. She took Pinky’s Portable Pop-up Pinhole Camera and Darkroom to arts festivals and sites around her family home in Silver Hill, Alabama (near Fairhope, in Baldwin County). At times she used glass plate negatives of local landmarks and people that her grandmother, Lois Slosson Sundberg, had made around 1900 to print images that she integrated into her pinhole pictures. Slosson’s cameras were also in Pinky’s possession, and those simple instruments may have influenced her grand-daughter to make her own cameras and to create sculpture from those creations. Pinky created a series of about fifteen “Photographic Musical Instruments” that she described as sculptures “in which strips of photographs are run through the mechanism and create music abstractly according to how the holes are punched in the strip of photos (somewhat like a player piano)—some were on cameras, others on mannequins and musical instruments” (3). Even in the wake of hip replacement, the artist remains quick and creative as she approaches her eighties, engaged in photography, sculpture, installation art, life, and transformation. (4)
(1) See the artist’s resume and biographical statement in the MMFA artist file. Bass discovered photography at age 50 and earned an MFA in photography at Georgia State University in 1988. Aperture 141 (1995); 115 (1989). Pinhole Journal 19, No. 1 (2002); 9, No. 1 (l993); 6, No. 3 (l991); 6, No. 1 (l990); 5, No. 1 (1989); and 3, No. 2, (1987). Christopher James, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning, ca. 2009), Fig. 1–15. Francis Osborn Robb, In View of Home: Alabama Landscape Photographs (Huntsville: Huntsville Museum of Art, 1989), 74-5.
(2) See Panhorst memo to the file regarding Pinky Bass "Scorpio" photo, 18 July 2007, in the MMFA artist file. About this same time, Pinky lost both her parents and her friend, Kitty Couch, the model for "In the Country," who was killed in a traffic accident in Vietnam (interview with Donna Pickens, MMFA curator of education, 27 June 2013).
(3) Bass email correspondence with the author, 27 June 2013, copy in MMFA artist file.
(4) See copy of interpretive text panel for Bass and Lois Slosson Sundberg exhibition at MMFA, March 17 through May 13, 2007, in MMFA artist file.
MPanhorst.6.2013
