Fred Lonidier

Michael Benevento is pleased to present Fred Lonidier’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring early works and more recent PowerPoints and digital prints.

For the last five decades Fred Lonidier has dedicated his life's work to documenting labor, institutional and class struggles. Lonidier is a core member of the San Diego group that includes Martha Rosler, Phel Steinmetz, and Allan Sekula. Treading the line between activist, artist and active spectator, Lonidier’s photographs are often contextualized though the lens of social documentary photography and conceptual art.

Lonidier has been compiling a digital photo archive by scanning his black & white and color negatives. New PointPoints in this exhibition are created by collaging these photos and presenting them as a slide show.

Recent works in the exhibition include Mission Bay Photo Shoot, 2022, which was created with other UCSD MFA candidates, including Phel Steinmetz, Steve Buck, Louise Kirkland, Barbara Greenlee and Ruth Krimmel, among others. These works explore Lonidier’s interest in the “male fetish” or “male gaze.” Although not overtly political at the time, these images touch upon pressing concerns in contemporary society. Lonidier uses his camera to point into the

direction of cancel culture, teasing out sexual politics, in our institutions and daily lives as they are made manifest by the camera.

Also in the exhibition is Body Bags, 1970, an anti-Vietnam War work; originally this piece was a slide-show comprised of photographs Lonidier took while he was a member of Draft Resistance Seattle. These negatives were later scanned and are now on the University of Washington library web page.

ABC VS CLC, 1982, IATSE Performance, 1989, and Labor link TV, are all artworks concerned with union struggles, including Desert Storm in San Francisco, 1990 which is new from Lonidier’s archive.

Fred Lonidier was born in Oregon in 1943 and lives and works in San Diego. He served as a faculty member at UCSD from 1972 to 2013. His work is included in An Incomplete History of Protest an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lonidier was also in the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 1977. His work has also been exhibited at the Reina Sofia, Madrid; United Nations Headquarters, Geneva; Istituto Svizzero di Roma; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Centre de la Photographie de Genève; Bronx Museum; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Berkeley Art Museum; Long Beach Museum of Art; MOCA, Los Angeles; FRAC Poitou-Charantes; High Museum, Atlanta; New Museum, New York and many other venues.