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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Thomas Corbett, Publicist
Image Management Associates
(847) 398-9808 or (866) 310-8294
E-mail:
tcorbett@image-manage.com
RENOWNED NATIVE AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER LEE MARMON TO
RECEIVE PRESTIGIOUS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
JOINS R.C. GORMAN, ALLAN HOUSER AMONG NATIVE AMERICAN
ARTISTS WITH REMARKABLE AND INSPIRING LEGACIES
(Laguna, New Mexico – June 9, 2006) – It will be a proud
moment of high honor and recognition for renowned Native American
photographer Lee H. Marmon of Laguna Pueblo, when he receives the
prestigious 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from one of the nation’s
leading authorities and proponents of Native American art and culture.
Mr. Marmon will accept his award in person from the Santa Fe-based
Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) at a special ceremony
and reception in the Zuni Ballroom at the Inn and Spa at Loretto in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. The festivities will take place on Thursday, June
15, 2006 at 6:00 pm.
“I am both humbled and greatly honored to receive this tremendous and
inspiring recognition,” said Marmon, 80, from his home in Laguna Pueblo.
“SWAIA has always stood for excellence and achievement in the Native
American art world. To be so recognized by this outstanding organization
is a memorable and remarkable milestone in my fifty-plus years of taking
photographs.”
Initiated in 1995, SWAIA’s annual Lifetime Achievement Awards honor
select practitioners in the Indian arts and culture for a lifetime of
outstanding work. The award celebrates and pays homage to those unique
individuals who, through their singular passion, creativity, and
commitment to excellence in their crafts, have created a legacy of
exceptional integrity that will inspire future generations of native
artists.
Mr. Marmon’s award places him in distinguished company. SWAIA’s 2006
Lifetime Achievement Award also goes to three other highly accomplished
native art practitioners. They include the late R.C. Gorman (Navajo),
potter Grace Medicine Flower (Santa Clara Pueblo), and bead and quill
worker Joyce Growing Thunder Fogarty (Assiniboine Sioux). Past
recipients of the award include famed bronze sculptor Allan Houser
(1995).
This marks the second high profile moment of recognition
in as many months for Lee Marmon. In May, Mr. Marmon appeared as a guest
lecturer at Phillips Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Andover,
Massachusetts. He also attended a special reception and showing of more
than a dozen of his most well known prints at the school’s Oliver
Wendell Holmes Library. His visit was arranged after a private collector
donated a number of Mr. Marmon’s prints to the Academy’s Robert S.
Peabody Museum of Archaeology.
Lee Marmon was born on the Laguna reservation in New
Mexico in 1925, and has lived there for most of his life. He bought his
first camera at the age of 25, and made an early practice of shooting
portrait images of the aging senior members of his Laguna tribe, and
neighboring tribes, including the Acoma tribe in New Mexico. His
distinguished collection of thousands of black and white images have
since become a national historical and cultural treasure, as they
comprise a rare visual chronicle of the last generation of Native
Americans to live by their traditional ways and values. His best-known
photograph, "White Man's Moccasins," (1954) has been reproduced and
published worldwide.
From the late 1960's to the early 1980's, Mr. Marmon
lived and worked in California, where he served as official photographer
for the Bob Hope Desert Classic. His images have appeared in various
national publications, including The New York Times and Time Magazine.
In 1992, he won an ADDY Award for contributing to the Peabody
Award-Winning PBS-TV documentary, "Surviving Columbus".
Marmon's acclaimed 2003 book, "The Pueblo Imagination"
was voted best Art book of the year in the Mountains and Plains
Booksellers’ Association’s 2005 Regional Book Awards Contest. It also
took a First Place Award from Independent Publisher Online in 2004.
Marmon's 159-page book is a groundbreaking, multi-dimensional showcase
of Native American culture, talent, and history. It features a
collection of Marmon's best-known tribal photographs and landscape
images, dating back to 1949. Collectively, they chronicle the last
generation of the Laguna and Acoma tribes to live by their traditional
ways and values. The images are lovingly interwoven with native poetry
and prose by Leslie Marmon Silko, poet Joy Harjo, and poet Simon Ortiz,
all of whom co-authored the book with Mr. Marmon.
A gallery of Mr. Marmon's best-known images and full bio
can be found at his publicist-sponsored website:
www.leemarmongallery.com
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