Jan Groover

Using a variety of camera formats to affect perception and plane, Jan Groover creates complex, abstract spatial arrangements in her still-life, portrait, and landscape photography. Untitled #1308, a platinum/palladium print on luminous vellum-like paper, aptly demonstrates her craftsmanship in the darkroom with its finely-wrought delicacy. A painter by training, Groover makes reference to art history in her photographs, from Renaissance perspective drawings to Cezanne's tabletops.

Groover was born in New Jersey in 1943. She received her BFA in 1965 from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and her MA from Ohio State University in 1970. Her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is also the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018