I grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Washington, DC in 1981 at age sixteen. In 1985, I graduated from the Corcoran College of Art with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. The Washington, DC punk/alternative music community of the early 1980s greatly influenced my artistic and photographic styles, lending an energy to my work that was drawn from -- and pointed toward -- the "DIY" (do it yourself) ethic. By natural progression, I wanted to create my own art "scene" or contribute to a community the same way the local music scene had.
In 1986, I spent six months in San Francisco working on the punk music magazine Maximum Rock 'n' Roll, where my ideas were distilled even further. While in San Francisco, I decided to return to the east coast and document the punk music scene there. Once back in Washington, DC, I established my own publishing company and compiled the book Banned in DC, a collection of stories and photographs that I put together with the help of Leslie Clague and Sharon Cheslow. Banned in DC was published in 1988; since then, I have sold over 13,000 copies of the book.
While working on Banned in DC, I began to book bands, art, performance art and musicals in a local alternative arts space called d.c. space. For six years, I promoted shows featuring performance artist Karen Finley, jazz musician Don Cherry, rock band Big Black, and other artists from around the country. With d.c. space serving as a platform for art and music, I realized the importance such an intimate, non-traditional outlet for shows and performances could have on a community.
In 1988, I saw a turning point in the local music scene, so I decided to document that change by recording a number of bands. I subsequently produced and manufactured a live recording called The Pre-Moon Syndrome Post Summer of Noise album, the proceeds of which were donated to a free medical clinic.
During this time, I also worked at Dischord Records, doing advertising and promotions at this DC based record/CD label. I worked at Dischord until 2002.
In about 1993, I started avidly doing photography after documenting the project "DC musicians with their cars" for Speed Kills magazine. At this point, I decided that what I had learned in school restricted my imagination, so I taught myself the rudiments of color and black and white photography. I decided to apply the same DIY aesthetics of the music shows I had promoted at d.c. space to my art projects by booking openings in spaces where art isn't traditionally shown. Many of my early shows included performance art, storytelling, or spontaneous music performances, which both exposed art to new minds and created a multi-media experience that combined the energetic elements of live performances with the visual energy of my photographs.
Since those early days, my photographs (including the "car" series, a 35mm black and white landscapes series, and a color half-frame series) have been shown all over the world. Because of the flexibility of my job at Dischord Records, I was able to take my photographs "on tour," organizing month-long shows in galleries or other spaces and traveling to or from each show, photographing all the while. My friend Pat Graham and I collaborated on these tours -- the photos were shipped to each venue in advance, then I or another artist would take turns hanging or dismantling the show. I also did all the promotions for these tours, which ran from 1997-2000.
In May, 1999, I did a solo show of 80 framed works at Milky World Gallery in Seattle, Washington. Later that year, I became interested in the European ideal of the American landscape, so I organized an international "tour" of the Seattle show and reprinted my photographs in a larger format. I took these photos in a box, unframed, to five European locations. Also that year, I was selected for Pennsylvania's Photo Review competition.
In 2000, I was the winner of Arlington County's Juror Award, Summer Salon. That year, I began to see a direction in my photography -- I primarily take photographs of things or people leaving or changing, where I feel a photograph is needed for us to remember what it once was. I want to photograph true and unique American landscapes and document these scenes before it's too late.
While I have continued to do about one solo show a year, more recently, I've organized several groups shows. In 2001, I curated and organized the "Four Hour Art Sale and Self Serve Auction" -- artists hung their work, then we held a silent auction. At the fourth hour, the artists collected the money for their art, and the buyers took their work home. By this point, I had invested in a large letterpress, and I was able to promotional posters to go alongside the shows. These events were conceived to support artists, and to make art accessible to the people, two factors I've always found important.
In 2001, I also organized the launch party for a set of postcards I designed and manufactured of my work, called the "box of ice boxes". For my opening, I printed my photographs in 11X14 format and displayed them on the side of a building that faced an alley and hosted my first "drive through" art show.
In 2002, I was selected for Artist in Residence at Harper's Ferry National Park.
In 2002/03, I quit my job at Dischord Records to move south and become an outreach student at the Rural Studio in Newbern, Alabama. Here, I photographed a world full of drastic contrasts: poverty and excessiveness, desperation and love, and the lush, raped rugged landscape that is the backdrop for Alabaman lives. With the help of a grant that I won from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, I designed and built an organic vegetable stand that incorporated the work of a regional folk artist, white oak baskets made by a local woman, and letterpressed posters promoting farmer's markets in the area. In July 2003 I was chosen to lecture on my project and the Rural Studio Outreach program at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Summer Design Institute. Elements of this work will be shown in the Sambo Mockbee/Rural Studio exhibit which will debut in the fall of 2003 at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
While at the Rural Studio, I created two postcard sets -- a series of color half-frame deckled edged cards of Alabama landscapes, and a set documenting Rural Studio sites. Like the "box of ice boxes," these postcard sets are very personal documents of my American vision. They are also part of my continual network of the community of art -- my postcards have become like grafitti tags, or a patchwork quilt of photographs depicting the places I have been. People excited to find my postcards in the nooks and crannies of the world often mail them to my po box, along with messages explaining where and when they were found.
My postcards -- another example of art accessible to the people -- can be seen in larger venues like The New Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Colette in Paris, and Scalo in Zurich, as well as smaller book stores, art/gallery stores, and music stores around the world.
Also this year, I won a grant from Arlington County, Virginia to document bluegrass musicians who meet in an area park and jam twice a month. This project, which will incorporate framed photos along with digital field recordings, will be on display at an Arlington location sometime next year.
In March, 2004, my photographs will be included in a show called "Beautiful Losers," which will open at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and continue on to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. "Beautiful Losers" encompasses work by artists that I befriended in the early '90s. Although we all resided and worked in different communities across the United States, we had many things in common -- we have all worked individually, largely in isolation, and outside societies’ perception of art.
My work has been printed in many magazines including Index Magazine, Anthem, Paper Magazine, Emigre, Jane Magazine, YM, 7X7 San Francisco, After Hours, Tokion's "disobients" (art) issue, Bust Magazine, Gargoyle Literary Magazine, Tape Op, Heckler, Blue, The Photo Review, The Washington Post, Washington City Paper and Great God Pan, Speed Kills, Concussion, Cool Beans, Double Negative, and Punk Planet; and such books as The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, Our Band Could be Your Life, Declaration of Independents, Foder's Rock 'n' Roll Traveler, USA, Dance of Days, and Hitori-"altogether one", from Japan. I am working on a book with poet/songwriter, Lee Ranaldo, to be released in 2004, while many of my photographs will also appear in a book published in conjunction with the "Beautiful Losers" show in 2004.
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