Barbara Kasten: Threshold

Barbara Kasten: Threshold includes both new work and career-spanning selections by one of photography’s most innovative practitioners, presented across two interconnected sites at the Akron Art Museum: a sculptural installation in the Beatrice Knapp McDowell Grand Lobby and a survey of photography and video in the Fred and Laura Bidwell Gallery. 

For more than five decades, Barbara Kasten has worked at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice involves constructing elaborate studio environments of geometric forms, mirrors, and theatrical lighting, then photographing them to create images that exist between the documentation of three-dimensional space and the pure shape and color of two-dimensional abstraction. Through these luminous compositions, Kasten celebrates photography’s unique capacity for optical illusion and spatial ambiguity, even prompting questions about the medium’s relationship to reality. 

Translucent acrylic I-beams suspended above the Museum’s glass entryway (designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au) begin the exhibition before visitors have crossed into the building proper. The beams refract natural light, washing the space with shifting color as visitors pass beneath them; time of day, season, and weather become active participants in the work.  

In the Bidwell Gallery, works in photography and video from across Kasten’s career trace the full arc of her investigation of her chosen media. Metaphase 5 and Construct 32, two color photographs from 1986 recently acquired by the museum, anchor the earlier work, exemplifying the artist’s approach to color, light, and spatial construction during a pivotal period in her career. These works are shown alongside more recent projects in which Kasten extends her practice to engage with significant modernist buildings, a thread that connects directly to the lobby installation and its interaction with the museum’s own architectural threshold. 

Barbara Kasten: Threshold has been organized in celebration of Kasten’s selection as winner of the Akron Art Museum’s 2025 Knight Foundation Purchase Award for Photographic Media. The Knight Award was established in 1990 through a generous gift from the Knight Foundation, allowing the Museum to recognize living artists’ achievements in photography while bringing their work into the permanent collection. Past winners include some of contemporary photography’s most accomplished artists: Zanele Muholi, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Carrie Mae Weems, and many more.