Builder Levy
Artist Biography
Intertwining social documentary, fine art and street photography, Builder Levy has been making photographs as objects of art that celebrate the human spirit for almost fifty years.
He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (’08), an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship (‘04), a Furthermore Grant (‘03), Puffin Foundation Grant (‘01), and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship in Photography (‘82). He received commissions from the Appalachian College Association (’95 and ‘02).
Levy’s two books are Images of Appalachian Coalfields, Temple Univ. Press, with a foreword by Cornell Capa, and Builder Levy Photographer, A.R.T. Press, with an introduction by noted photo historian Naomi Rosenblum.
Levy has exhibited in more than 200 shows, including more than 50 one-person exhibitions in New York City, throughout the United States and around the world. He is showing gold-toned gelatin silver and recent platinum prints at the Flomenhaft Gallery’s Portraits exhibit, summer 2011. He is included in the traveling exhibit, Posing Beauty, curated by Deborah Willis--it was at the Newark Museum of Art, and will be at USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, 9/11-12/11. In October 2011 he will be included in the Photo Forum exhibition at the Museum of fine Arts, Houston, and at Atlanta Celebrates Photography. In March 2012 he will show recent platinum prints at AIPAD prints with June Bateman Fine Art.
The High Museum of Art included Levy’s photographs in the exhibition, Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968 (and the accompanying eponymous book/catalogue), organized by the curator Julian Cox. The show opened at he High Museum of Art in 2008, then traveled for two years to museums in D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.
The Rubin Museum of Art in NYC featured 14 of Levy’s photographs in the show Mongolia: Beyond Chinggis Khan, 11/06-4/07.
Levy’s work is in more than 50 public collections in the US and around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, and La Bibliotheque Nationale.
His photographs are featured in more than 25 books including, Harlem, A Century in Images, Studio Museum of Harlem, Skira/Rizzoli 2010, Freedom, Phaidon Press, Cityscapes, Columbia University Press, 100 New York Photographers, Schiffer Press ‘09, Deborah Willis’ Posing Beauty, Norton Press, ‘09, and Coal Country, Sierra Club Books, ’09, and Road To Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968. He was the featured artist (with 22 photos) in Appalachian Heritage, Spring 2010 (Berea College). He was also featured in the last issue of Doubletake Magazine (Fall/Winter ‘07), edited by Robert Coles.
Levy’s subjects include inner-city New York City where he was a NYC teacher of at-risk adolescents for 35 years; coalfield Appalachia (spanning more than 40 years), civil rights and peace demonstrations (in the 1960s & new millennium), Mongolia and other Developing Nations including Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa and Bolivia.
