Marnie Gillett 1953-2004

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2005

Marnie Gillett, the executive director of SF Camerawork for the past twenty years, died of breast cancer on Friday December 3, 2004, in her San Francisco home. She will be remembered as an extraordinary, creative and insightful curator as well as a very successful administrator who asserted SF Camerawork as a major component of the American photographic scene.

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Gillett helped discover new talents and organized several key exhibitions in the lives of such now renowned artists as Robert Mapplethorpe (whose work she showed a few months after moving to Camerawork). Joel Peter Witkin, Judy Dater, Robert Dawson, Graciela Iturbide, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, Abelardo Morell, Shana and Robert Parke-Harrison, Sylvia Plachy, Carry Mae Weems, and the Starn Twins, among a very long list. She also worked with talented young curators who went on developing their own careers: Geoffrey Batchen, Jeanne Finley, Rupert Jenkins, Diana Gaston....

Two of her most memorable shows are the ground-breaking Digital Photography: Captured Images, Volatile Memory, New Montage co-curated with Jim Pomeroy in 1988, and the more recent Moving Targets: The Art of Resistance (2004) on issues regarding the war in Iraq. In 1999, the year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Camerawork, she co-curated Rattling the Frame: The Photographic Space 1974-1999, a survey of the work of innovative photographers who had challenged the medium in the past 25 years. She was also a very active editor and writer of Camerawork, the organization's magazine. Launched as a newsletter in 1974, the publication became one of the best photographic magazines in the country. A fellow publication whose reading we, at Afterimage, never miss, it has gone through the same hardships as the ones we have endured. It is still published bi-annually from the current location of SF Camerawork at 1246 Folsom Street.

Marnie Gillett was born in New Jersey, grew up near New York City, did her undergraduate studies at the University of New Mexico, and graduated with an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. There she then worked as a curator of exhibitions, and archivist at the Center for Creative Photography. Before moving to San Francisco and Camerawork, she was the assistant director of Light gallery in New York and an instructor in photography as Columbia College in Chicago. Once in San Francisco she rapidly established herself as a key and active of the local art scene. She was also very active with the National Endowment for the Arts. After receiving a grant from them she served as one of their panelists. She also sat at the California Arts Council, and at the San Francisco Arts Commission.

A public memorial will be held at 2 p.m. on January 9 in the Green Room of the War Memorial Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. The family asks that memorial donations be made to San Francisco Camerawork, or the Oster Center for Integrative Medicine in San Francisco.

Following her death, SF Camerawork is conducting a nationwide search for an executive director. In the meantime, the Board of Directors has appointed Sharon Tanenbaum as an Interim Administrative Director and Trena Noval as an interim Artistic Director.