Summer 1982: “Discovering the Maya: Photographs by A.P. Maudslay” and “Sicily: Legacy of a Civilization”, both exhibitions of photographs, will be on view at The Brooklyn Museum on June 19th through August 29, 1982.
“Discovering the Maya: Photographs by A.P. Maudslay” was photographed in the late 19th century. This exhibition includes 40 of A.P. Maudslay’s dramatic large-scale photographs of the Maya ruins in Central America and Mexico. Maudslay, an Englishman born in 1850 and educated at Cambridge University, first visited Central America in 1872. Inspired by the “unexpected magnificence” of the Maya monuments, he devoted the years between 1881 and 1894 to archaeological expeditions in the difficult tropical environment in an effort to preserve and record the Maya intellectual and artistic achievement. Four of the major sites he worked on are represented in the exhibit: Chichen Itza, Palenque, Quirigua, and Copan. These superb photographs that Maudslay published in the 1890’s are still basic to Maya research today.
“Sicily: Legacy of a Civilization” was photographed by Arthur Mones in 1977. Mones spent two weeks wandering about Sicily with his camera, recording the ruins of a once flourishing civilization, the westernmost outpost of Greek culture. This exhibition, which consists of twenty silver prints culled from over seventy-five images, presents an arresting vision of classical architecture, much of it in remarkably unvandalized condition. Mones brings the same intense involvement with subject for which he is widely known in his portrait photography, to these monuments of a great civilization.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1982, 008.
