Builder Levy
From Arist's Website.
Builder Levy was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1942 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BA in art from Brooklyn College (1964), where he studied painting with Ad Reinhardt, photography with Walter Rosenblum, and art history with Milton Brown. He studied the Photo League and the photography program of the Farm Security Administration in conjunction with his master’s degree in art education at New York University (1966). Close friendships with Paul Strand and Helen Levitt (during the 1970s) provided greater insight into his role and possibilities as an artist.
His photographs intertwine the traditions of fine art, social documentary, and street photography. He has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2008), the Alicia Patterson Foundation (2004), the Puffin Foundation (2001), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). He is also a recipient of a Furthermore publication grant (2003) and two commissions from the Appalachian College Association (1995, 2002). Monographs of his work are Images of Appalachian Coalfields, with a foreword by Cornell Capa (1989); Builder Levy Photographer, with an introduction by Naomi Rosenblum (2005); and Appalachia USA. His work is included in more than thirty other books.
Life of the Appalachian Coal Miner, a limited-edition Stonetone portfolio printed by Sidney Rapoport, was published in 1976.
Levy’s work has appeared in more than two hundred exhibitions, including more than fifty one-person shows: in New York City, throughout the U.S.A., and around the world. More than 70,000 people saw his exhibition, Images of Appalachian Coalfields when it was shown at the West Virginia State Museum in Charleston in spring 1991. He was given a one-person exhibition of his Appalachian work at the Doris Ulmann Galleries at Berea College in 2008. Also in 2008, the High Museum of Art included Levy’s work in Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956–1968. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City featured his photographs in Mongolia: Beyond Chinggis Khan, in 2006–07. He was included in the Asia Society’s exhibition Coal + Ice, which opened at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, in 2011. His on-going current project, Developing Nations was shown at the Flomenhaft Gallery in New York in 2012, and reviewed in ArtNews.
His photographs are in more than fifty public collections in the U.S. and abroad, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art; the International Center of Photography; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of the City of New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.
Among Levy’s major projects are New York City, where he was a teacher of at-risk adolescents for thirty-five years, Appalachia, civil rights and peace demonstrations in the 1960s and the new millennium, and developing nations.
