Deborah Bright is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photography.
11 Facts About Deborah Bright
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Deborah Bright's work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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Deborah Bright joined the faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 with a joint appointment in History of Art and Visual Culture and Photography.
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Deborah Bright served RISD in many other capacities, from department head to stepping in as Acting Dean of Fine Arts, until 2012 when Bright left RISD to become chair of Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute.
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Deborah Bright is notable for her writing and photographic bodies of work on LGBT, queer, and women's rights subject matter, as well as for her writing about and work on landscape photography.
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Deborah Bright first gained renown for her series called Dream Girls, which challenged mainstream, heteronormative gender-sex identities propagated in Hollywood movies.
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Deborah Bright appears in place of such iconic romantic male leads as Spencer Tracy and Rock Hudson opposite their female counterparts, including Katharine Hepburn, in a fulfillment of lesbian desire that thematizes gender and LGBTQ+ subject matter.
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In 2008, Deborah Bright collaborated with other artists in an exhibition called Pink and Bent: Art of Queer Women.
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Between 2015 and 2017 after her retirement from Pratt, Deborah Bright began creating a series of works using colored pencil and graphite on Bristol board.
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Deborah Bright installed each piece based on their location; Bright wanted the work to reflect the area's de-industrialization in addition to former industrial areas through the local details.
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From 2000 to 2003, Deborah Bright created Glacial Erratic, which consists of nine photographs of Plymouth Rock at different tides and times of day, akin to Claude Monet's series of Cathedral and Haystacks 19th-century Impressionist paintings.