Brian Ulrich

Brian Ulrich

Fellow: Awarded 2009
Field of Study: Photography

Competition: US & Canada

Columbia College Chicago; School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Brian Ulrich was born in 1971 in Northport, New York, and currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. Since 2001 he has been engaged with a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live. This project, titled Copia, explores not only the everyday activities of shopping, but the economic, cultural, social, and political implications of commercialism and the roles we play in self-destruction, over-consumption, and as targets of marketing and advertising.

His photographs reside in major museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Mr. Ulrich earned his M.F.A. in photography at Columbia College Chicago and a B.F.A. in photography at the University of Akron. Since finishing his graduate studies in 2004, he has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; the Julie Saul Gallery; and the Robert Koch Gallery. His work has also been included in many group exhibitions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; Galerie f5.6 in Munich; the Krannert Art Museum; the Contemporary American Photography Festival in Mannheim, Germany; the Walker Art Center; and the Carnegie Museum of Art. His first monograph, Copia, was published in 2006 by Aperture as part of the MP3: Midwest Photographers Project. Brian Ulrich teaches part time at the School of the Art Institute and is Adjunct Faculty at Columbia College Chicago.

Brian Ulrich is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery in New York, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, and Galerie f5.6 in Munich.

A solo exhibition of his recent work from two chapters of his Copia project, Thrift and Dark Stores, is scheduled to open at the end of May 2009 at the Julie Saul Gallery.

 Profile photograph by Dawoud Bey, 2002, Fellow, Photography.

 

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