Tvs from Craigslist is an ongoing project consisting of photographs of televisions for sale on the Internet. Penelope Umbrico downloads these images from the Craigslist classified ads website; she cuts out the screens, and enlarges them to the scale of each television. After being reframed and enlarged, the photographs reveal traces of the personality and home life of the people who created them. Despite having made and published the images for a utilitarian purpose, the spaces and the bodies of the people who are selling the televisions are reflected in the screens, inadvertently showing their messy rooms or varying degrees of undress.

Since the series began in 2009, Penelope Umbrico has searched for new images to add every time the project is exhibited. The progressive updates on the work allow us to glimpse technological advances such as the evolution of television screen surfaces, the increase in the resolution and size of images on the Internet or the decline in the use of flash as cameras become more sophisticated. Tvs from Craigslist documents the evolution of production tools and the circulation and consumption of images, while exploring the tensions between their intimate and commercial uses.

She was born in Philadelphia, USA, in 1957. Penelope Umbrico is an artist best known for her work that appropriates images found using search engines and picture sharing websites. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada in 1980 and obtained her M.F.A. in 1989 at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, NY, Museum of Modern Art, NY, MassMoCA, Massachusetts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Art Museum Gosta (Finland), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), The Photographers’ Gallery, (London), Daegu Photography Biennale (Korea), Pingyao International Photography Festival (China) Kunstverein Ludwigshafen (Germany), Rencontres d’Arles (France), Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane), among many others. Her work is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Grant, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award or Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship. Her monographs have been published by Aperture NYC and RVB Books Paris. She teaches on the BFA and MFA Photography courses at the School of Visual Arts.

Penelope Umbrico (USA, 1957)
Tvs From Craiglist

2021 Edition
Indoor and outdoor installations
Venue: Amezti Hall