Alum David Samuel Stern’s Work on View in Weil Hall

“Unknown (American) is by far the largest and most complicated piece I’ve ever made,” Stern wrote in an email newsletter. “It took my work to new places technically, philosophically, and even logistically.”

The school invited Stern to propose a piece in late 2022. Amy Hauft, director of the College and Graduate School of Art and curator of this project, recalled that she “had encountered David’s work in another context and recognized what an interesting opportunity it could be for him to create something for the Weil wall. The prior iterations of the series were always referred to as ‘murals.’ The idea of a photograph on the scale of a mural seemed like a great possibility.” After initial planning, he came to visit the site and the university’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum to photograph a work he found particularly intriguing: a 19th-century limestone bust of George Washington, attributed to “Unknown (American).”

Stern was drawn to George Washington as a figure whose likeness changes significantly between artists and eras, noting how collective memory of individuals and events “can be bent and manipulated by motley … political forces.” For Stern, the attribution “Unknown (American)” might be seen as referring to the subject himself.

The resulting work is a colorful eight-by-nine-foot grid of eight custom-built backlit panels — which Stern said “had to be basically invented,” — that, read together, form one large-scale image. The basis of the image is three photographs of the Washington bust converted into red, green, and blue monochrome channels, then printed on translucent, plasticized paper. Combining digital and physical mediums into one, Stern cut the prints into 15-millimeter-wide strips, then wove them into a composite image by hand.

“I am interested in the way David makes his photographs physical,” Hauft said. “He does this in multiple ways: by photographing the subject three times from different angles and with differing lighting. He then cuts the photos into strips that he then weaves together in a complex three-way weave. The resulting image appears slightly pixelated — the result of the woven triangles optically interacting. To our digitally saturated eyes, the image looks digitized, when in fact, the visual effect is completely physical. The tension between these understandings of image are palpable.”

Stern noted that he wanted “to draw attention to the special relationship enjoyed by portraiture and photography,” and the medium’s “often-overlooked physical properties.”

In addition to the installation in Weil Hall, Stern has an exhibition in Steinberg Hall’s Weitman Gallery called Keeping Time. The exhibition includes several pieces from the last three years, as Stern became more and more interested in portraits of leaders who lived before photography, particularly those created as busts. In his description of the exhibition, Stern describes how portraiture’s mission is impossible. “We can’t know a person by looking at their image,” he wrote. “Yet within all this impossibility, to me photographic portraiture is filled with longing.”