In 2007 Gary Duehr was chosen as a Best Emerging Artist in New England by the International Association of Art Critics. In 2003 Duehr received an Artist Grant in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and his work has been featured in museums and galleries including Gallery Kayafas and Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston, MA; Exit Art, Umbrella Arts, and New York Arts, New York, NY; Gallery Tsubaki, Tokyo, Japan; SKC Gallery, Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba. Past awards include grants from the LEF Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
His public artworks include a photo installation funded by the Visible Republic program of New England Foundation for the Arts, and a commission from the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority) for a permanent photo installation at North Station.
Duehr is codirector of the Invisible Cities Group, which creates "large-scale urban detours" combining performance, poetry, and installations of visual art. He has written about the arts for journals including ArtScope, Art New England, Art on Paper, Communication Arts, Frieze, and Public Culture. Currently he manages Bromfield Art Gallery in Boston's South End.
Taken in natural history museums, including the Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, these photographs make close contact with the animals, while including all the context of the displays: glass cages, neon tubes, pedagogical labels.
It is as if the natural history dioramas are standing in for an overly mediated world, where instinct is frozen in place and categorized. Yet even as the artificiality is revealed, a kind of identification maintains its grip. An antelope noses the glass. A zebra peers out from a thicket. A swan bends its neck beside its own label.
The creatures, for the most part, appear content, concentrated, literally in their element. While the shadows of onlookers lurk at the edges, hurried and distracted. It's unclear whether the animals or humans are truly imprisoned, on which side of the glass lies a dys- or utopia.
