George Tice | American, 1938 -
Renowned for their attentive and quotidian descriptions of the everyday structures and places that define the American cultural landscape, Tice’s exquisitely printed photographs catalog a rich and layered journey that is both personal and universal. In the photographs that comprise Urban Landscapes, Tice defines a sense of America within a tradition rooted in the work of other American masters, namely Edward Hopper and Walker Evans.
Tice’s photographs of New Jersey in the early to mid 1970’s describe a particular time and place; however, as the artist states, “It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal”. Now, with decades past, Tice’s observations have become even more poignant depictions, everlasting a specific era and landscape, as the artist intended.
His photographs have formed an impressive catalog of eighteen notable monographs, including the highly celebrated Paterson (1972), Urban Landscapes, A New Jersey Portrait (1975), and Tice’s most recent book, Seldom Seen (2013), a collection of previously unpublished photographs.
Tice’s photographs have been exhibited in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions both here and abroad. They are held within the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, The J Paul Getty Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Bibliotheque Nationale, Newark Museum, among others.
As well as being one of the 20th Century’s most prominent photographers, Tice is revered as a master printer, having printed limited-edition portfolios of some of his favorite photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Edward Weston and Frederick H. Evans, as well as other important photographers including Francis Bruguiere, Ralph Steiner and Lewis Hine.
Tice has received fellowships and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Media Museum. In 2003 he was awarded a honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from William Paterson University and in 2015 Tice was awarded The Luice Lifetime Achievement Award.