Speaking in Pairs: 2/5–4/19, 2026

  Left: Migrant Mother, 1936, Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photograph by Dorothea Lange. Right: Holding Emmanuelle, 2008, Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Elinor Carucci. Left: Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf at the beach, New York, c. 1936. Photographer unknown. Right : Bertha Leubsdorf, Berlin, Germany, c. 1912. Courtesy John Leubsdorf. Photograph by Martin Balg.   Speaking in Pairs February 5 – April 19, 2026 Opening Reception: Thursday February 5, 6–8 pm Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery Hunter West Building 132 East 68th Street New York, NY 10065 RSVP HERE Can a portrait represent violence and healing at the same time? A photograph made by artist August Sander of Hermann Leubsdorf in 1938, in Cologne, Germany, suggests that it can. Speaking in Pairs, on view Spring 2026 in a gallery endowed by the Leubsdorf family, looks at the aesthetic, material, social, and political layers that portraits offer—revealing how the people they portray, their makers and viewers, and the changing world they exist in connect and conflict in shifting cycles over time. More than eighty contributors—artists, historians, lawyers, doctors, writers, curators, and more—come together for this exhibition, which presents works in a continually evolving installation and uses books, posters, and ephemera to visually illuminate the connections between vernacular photography and art, nobody and somebody, the personal and public. An array of viewpoints blurs the lines between artists, curators, and other subjects, and between non-fiction and fiction.  Along the way, we note the 200th birthday of photography (2026), the 150th birthday of August Sander (1876–1964), the 125th birthday of playwright Marieluise Fleißer (1901–1974), the 100th birthday of Boris Lurie (1924–2008), and the approaching 40th anniversary of the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery on March 8th, 2027. August Sander (1876-1964), Hermann Leubsdorf, Victim of Persecution, 1938, Cologne, Germany, Courtesy of John Leubsdorf. © Die Photographische Sammlung/Sk Stiftung Kultur–August Sander Archiv, Cologne/VG-Bildkunst 2025. Reiner Leist, exhibition curator and Hunter College Professor, writes:  “Portraits allow immortality. This exhibition asks: Who gets to be pictured and seen? Who may tell their story? Such evidence of being present, alive, can also increase visibility or hasten our demise. Speaking in Pairs seeks to offer navigational references across time and geography, between works and the practitioners making, or pondering, them. The Leubsdorf family fled Germany in 1938 and in the 1980s descendants of Hermann Leubsdorf endowed the Hunter College Art Gallery on the 68th Street campus. Speaking in Pairs considers art's historical and contemporary response to oppression and crisis, in a space long used to offer representation to those impacted by extraordinary and unspeakable events.” Juxtaposing images created at points of conflict and growth in history, Speaking in Pairs examines h...