Builder Levy
Artist Biography
For nearly five decades, Builder Levy has been making photographs, intertwining social documentary, street and art photography. His work is about celebrating the indomitability of the human spirit. He has photographed in New York City’s inner city communities where he was a New York City teacher of at-risk adolescents for 35 years, at civil rights and peace demonstrations in the 1960s and the new millennium, Mongolia, Cuba, other developing nations, the Tummon family, and since 1968 up to the present, has been visiting and photographing life in coalfield Appalachia.
He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2008. He also received an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship (‘04), Furthermore Grant (‘03), Puffin Foundation Grant (‘01), and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship in Photography (‘82). In 2002 he received a commission from the Appalachian College Association to photograph "in Central Appalachia.”
Levy has exhibited in almost 200 shows including more than 50 one-person exhibitions in New York City, throughout the United States and around the world.
He has had one person exhibits of his Appalachian photographs at the University of Kentucky Art Museum, West Virginia State Museum in Charleston, the Doris Ulmann Galleries, the art museum of Berea College in Kentucky (10/08), O.K. Harris Gallery, NYC, and 32 other venues.
Last year the High Museum of Art in Atlanta included Levy in their historic exhibition, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968 (and the accompanying eponymous catalogue), organized by the their curator Julian Cox. The show travelled to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC (11/08-3/09 is traveling to venues in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City before returning to the permanent collection at the High.
The Rubin Museum of Art in NYC featured Levy’s photographs in their show Mongolia: Beyond Chinggis Kahn (11/06-4/07).
His work is in numerous collections in the US and abroad including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography and La Bibliotheque Nationale.
Levy’s two books are Images of Appalachian Coalfields (93 duotone photos) with a foreword by the late Cornell Capa, and Builder Levy Photographer (143 spot-varnished tritone photos) with an introduction by noted photo historian Naomi Rosenblum. He is featured in many books and periodicals, worldwide, including Freedom, a Photographic History of the African American Struggle, Phaidon Press. This year he will be included in Deborah Willis’ forthcoming book (and exhibition), Posing Beauty, the book, 100 New York Photographers, by Cynthia Dantzic, and Coal Country, Rising Up & ESP Against Mountaintop Removal Mining, Edited by Mari-Lynn Evans, et al, Sierra Club Books & ESP. Bonnie Yochelson, noted photo historian, wrote a 300 word essay on Levy and his accompanying demonstration photos, in Taking it to the Streets, for The New York Times, Sunday November 2, 2008 (City Section).
