Photographer Ron Testa Named Artist of Distinction

Oct. 28, 2010 - PRLog -- Ron Testa, named Artist of Distinction in Still Point Art Gallery's current exhibition Global Lifestyles: Cities, Towns, Villages, has been making photographs since 1962. His experience and confidence is evident in his work, as is his eye for subject matter and composition. His winning images are scenes of structures from Illinois and Utah. The structures are interesting, but the stories that lie hidden, yet speak so eloquently from within these images, are even more interesting, In some fascinating way, these images are as essential, realistic, and respectable as any rural American town is expected to be.

Testa has been making photographs for nearly fifty years and has had his work exhibited in a broad array of formats and venues - nationally and internationally, solo and group, casual and elite, publications, galleries, and museums. It began with Testa receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree in photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He then took on a brief stint as assistant photographer at the Cleveland Museum of Art before joining the U.S. Navy as a combat photographer and serving three tours of duty in Vietnam stationed aboard an attack aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf. In 1973 Testa received a masters of fine arts degree in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. He went on to teach at the Baldwin School of New York City from 1973 to 1975 and was head photographer at the Field Museum in Chicago from 1975 to 1989. During that time he taught photography at Columbia College in Chicago and was a consultant to the collection at the Chicago House archeological dig in Luxor, Egypt.

Testa’s work has been shown internationally in England - 200 American Photographers, American Arts Centre (1970) - and in France - Contemporary Artists, Centre International d'Art (1986). He has exhibited nationally at numerous solo and group shows over the last forty years, including the acclaimed George Eastman House (1968, 2006), Cleveland Institute of Art (1974), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1982), University of Memphis (1992), Anchorage Art Museum (2006), University of Indianapolis (2009), and the University of Illinois, Urbana (2010).

Examples of his work are represented in the permanent collections of museums across the country, including the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art  in Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the International Center for Photography in New York, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

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