JoAnn Verburg

JoAnn Verburg is an American photographer. Verburg is married to poet Jim Moore, who is frequently portrayed as reading the newspaper or napping in her photographs. She lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota and Spoleto, Italy.

Early life and education JoAnn Verburg was born in 1950 in Summit, New Jersey. She studied at Ohio Wesleyan University, earning her B.A. in sociology in 1972. While she was studying sociology at OWU, she realized as she was looking at Edward Weston's Daybooks and Robert Frank's photo book The Americans that photography can also be art. She worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the innovative Urban Outreach department which encouraged the awareness of art from 1972 to 1974. Between 1978 and 1981, Verburg led an Artist Support Program at Polaroid Corporation where she invited painters and photographers to experiment with the large format 20 x 24 and 40 x 80 cameras. In 1981 her career pivoted to teaching, when she accepted a visiting artist position at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Since then she has also taught at Yale University. In the 1980s she shot group portraits across multiple frames. Considering the evolution of her photography, Verburg notes that her practice "treat photographs more and more like sculpture," considering the viewer's relationship to setting, scale and time.

Verburg has held over 75 group shows and over 20 solo exhibitions, including those at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Kansas City Art Institute, and a retrospective "Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg" at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The focus of this project was to re-photograph sites that were previously shot by well-known 19th-century photographers of the American West, using the same vantage point, similar equipment and under comparable weather conditions.

Selected exhibitions New Works, 1984, Thomson Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota Present on the Road to Bazzano, 2001, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota Poet Under Water, 2006, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, Washington

Group exhibitions

Philadelphia Wall Art, 1973, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Labor/Leisure, 1994, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin