The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced that alumni Meghann Riepenhoff (BFA 2003) has been awarded a prestigious 2018 fellowship. Awarded through a rigorous selection process, the fellowships are intended for individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Meghann Riepenhoff’s work questions the nature of our relationships to the landscape, images, time, and impermanence. Entitled Littoral Drift, a geologic term describing the action of wind-driven waves transporting sand and gravel, her current series consists of camera-less cyanotypes made in collaboration with the landscape and the ocean, at the edges of both. The elements that she employs in the process—rain, waves, wind, and sediment—leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with photographic materials. Photochemically, the pieces are never wholly processed; they will continue to slowly respond to the changing environments that they encounter over time.

Riepenhoff’s work has been exhibited and is held in the collections at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Worcester Art Museum. Additional collections include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which holds Riepenhoff’s largest work to date, a 12 x18 ft. cyanotype. Additional exhibitions include Yossi Milo Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Galerie du Monde, Euqinom Projects, the Aperture Foundation, and San Francisco Camerawork. She is part of upcoming exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum and the New York Public Library, and will have solo exhibitions in Atlanta and San Francisco in 2018.

Publications including her work are: ArtForum, Aperture PhotoBook Review, The New York Times, Time Magazine Lightbox, The Guardian, Wired magazine, and Photograph magazine. Her first monograph, published by Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery, will be released in this year. Riepenhoff is the recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation grant, residencies at the Banff Centre and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and an affiliate studio award at the Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2014, Charlotte Cotton awarded Riepenhoff first place in the Camera Club of New York’s Annual juried competition and was selected as a Top 50 Photographer by Critical Mass. 

Born in Atlanta, Riepenhoff is based in Bainbridge Island, WA and San Francisco, CA. She received an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, where she is also visiting faculty.