Art Seen & Scene: Jo Brenzo, A Life In Photography

By John Dodge Meyer and Meryl Truett

Once upon a time in San Miguel, artists came from all over the world to study at the Instituto, to take advantage of the inexpensive rents and revel in the colonial charm and beauty of our fair city. One of the pioneers of that time who continues to be a local arts influencer is Jo Brenzo, the owner/curator of Photographic Gallery SMA, the hub for photographers in San Miguel de Allende. Exhibitions are changed eight times a year. Local and visiting photographers meet weekly each Saturday at 11:00 a.m. to discuss topics of interest, view demonstrations or see the work of visiting photographers. Before opening the gallery in 1997, Jo was the professor of photography for two decades at Bellas Artes, where she introduced photography as a fine art to the public. "Seeing deeply is impossible without feeling deeply," is Jo's continuing message to beginning photographers.

Jo has managed galleries, taught photography, and exhibited her work throughout the United States, Europe and México. Her formal education began through the Fine Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she majored in photography. She still teaches special photography classes and leads serious traveling workshops throughout Latin America.The gallery attracts and exhibits fine art photographers with a dedication to their craft and art form; a desire that is unstoppable and is not driven by commerce. Brenzo looks for photographers who are compelled and obsessed with expressing themselves through the medium of photography. She looks for artists who are involved in achieving excellence and is especially drawn to photographic practices that go far beyond the straight digital print.

Dan Burkholder was one of the first fine art photographers to champion digital technology by creating the digital negative in 1992. A master platinum printer, Dan also developed methods leading to pigment-over-platinum print and platinum/palladium over gold leaf print.

Wendi Schneider is a Denver based visual artist known for her ongoing series of hand gilded photographs entitled “States of Grace.” Drawn to the serenity and transcendence she finds in the sinuous elegance of organic forms, she creates illuminated impressions of light on vanishing beauty in the natural world. Her process creates ephemeral illusions that seemingly dance on the paper’s surface amid reflections of light on precious metals.

Sandra Klein is an artist whose images portray a layered world which (though filled with anxiety and trauma) is still rich with joy. Her photographs are visual poems, small stories that evoke universal emotions. Her focus has been on self-portraits and layered images created digitally in Adobe Photoshop. These are often combined with embroidered text and collage, adding a three-dimensional element to the page.

Kirsten Hoving is a photographer and multimedia artist from Charleston, SC, whose art balances between fact and fiction. Hers is an art of transcendence and she frequently combines photographs with unusual processes to evoke quiet dreams and half-remembered tales. Using unexpected viewpoints, three-dimensionality and kinetic elements, she expands photography’s decisive moments into visionary states of wonder. Our imagination, she believes, is what makes us human, and our ability to see the world through metaphors, stories, and poetic allusions connects our minds to our hearts.

Local photographers represented include Ri Anderson, Allan Baillie and Constance Stevenson. Jo is currently looking for emerging and established fine art photographers for gallery representation and solo exhibitions. She wants to see personal projects and in-depth portfolios as well as works in progress. She is interested in analog and alternative processes as well as digital photography.

Big news for the gallery! Photographic Gallery SMA will be moving at the end of this month to a new space on Hernández Macías #72. The next exhibit will feature the work of Shannon Reece.

Contact Jo at acdphoto@yahoo.com to join the gallery mailing list.