Steve Yates

Curator, lecturer, researcher, editor, artist, and essayist, S. Y., is the first Fulbright Scholar to the USSR, Russia and Eastern Europe. He is a specialist in early modern photography including Central and Eastern European contributions as well as the diversity of contemporary photographic practices after the modern era in the 21st century.
Recent writing publications include: “The New Renaissance: Reconstructing Photographic History and Collections for the Twenty-First Century, Foto & Video, Moscow; Born in the CCCP, Igor Moukhin ((L.Gusev, Moscow); editor and essayist for Alexander Rodchenko: Modern Photography, Photomontage and Film (Bilbao: BBK Fundación); Idea Photographic: After Modernism (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press) and the website www.museumofnewmexico.org/idea including historical and contemporary work from the museum collection; and poétics of espacio: anología crítica sobre la fotografía (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili). International lectures, writing, and traveling exhibitions in new history of photography center on pioneering modernists as Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Georgy Zelma, and László Moholy-Nagy to major contemporaries as Joel-Peter Witkin, Betty Hahn, Robert Rauschenberg and Aleksandras Macijauskas.
Yates is the first curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts and serves as Adjunct Professor, Art & Art History Department, University of New Mexico. Most recently he researched the formative years of László Moholy-Nagy in Hungary, Serbia and Moscow in collaboration with the Hungarian Museum of Photography, supported by the American Association of Museums in Washington, DC, which leads to the first comprehensive retrospective on the artist in thirteen mediums in 2008. Since the late 1980s he exhibited and lectured on his site-specific color photographic installations in the U.S. to Eastern Europe, which is published and a part of museum and private collections internationally.
He received awards from the Senior Fulbright Scholar with the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, the American Association of Museums, the National Endowment for the Arts including the Photographers Fellowship and special exhibitions, International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), and projects with American embassies abroad. Most recently he researched on the formative years of modernist László Moholy-Nagy in collaboration with the Hungarian Museum of Photography 2004-5 with support from the American Association of Museums. Since the late 1980s he exhibited and lectured on his site-specific photographic installations in the U.S. to Eastern Europe. His work is published and part of art museum and private collections internationally.