CULTIVATE is pleased to present an artist talk and conversation with contemporary artist and documentarian Nate Larson.

For the past twenty years, Larson has created site-responsive portraits of communities and examined contemporary American identity by deeply investigating our interactions between digital and physical spaces, probing the influence of cultural history on current events, dissecting societal use of surveillance technologies, repurposing big data for new uses, gleaning insights through oral history storytelling, and recording observations in the contemporary landscape. His on-going and critically acclaimed project Geolocation, in collaboration with Marni Shindelman, tracks GPS coordinates associated with Twitter tweets and pairs the text with a photograph of the originating site to mark the virtual information in the real world.

In 2022 Larson received a residency award to attend Cultivate’s La Baldi Residency program in Montegiovi, Italy. He was interested in what partnerships, conversations, and relationships might evolve and guide the making of a collective portrait of the village. His investigation yielded photographic portraits of people from the community of Montegiovi in their homes, workshops, and on the land. The project is still in-progress, but it has forged a significant bond between village, artist, and the residency program.

Larson will share images and reflections about his experience in Italy within the context of his past projects that explore the relationships between identity, culture, history, media, and virtual and physical geographies.

About Nate Larson:
Nate Larson (he/him) is a contemporary artist and documentarian working with photographic media, artist books and time-based media. His projects have been widely shown across the US and internationally as well as featured in numerous publications and media outlets, including Wired, The Guardian, The Picture Show from NPR, Slate, CNN, Hyperallergic, Gizmodo, Buzzfeed News, Vice Magazine, the New York Times, Utne Reader, the BBC News Viewfinder, the British Journal of Photography, The Washington Post, and many others. His artwork is included in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, the High Museum Atlanta, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago.  

Nate Larson is a professor at MICA / Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, serving as Photography Department chair from 2018-2022. Honors include: The McCullough Research Fellowship at Marietta College, the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Artist Fellow at Duke University, a Rubys Artist Fellow with the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, and an artist-in-residence with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Florida, among other honors.  www.natelarson.com