Abelardo Morell: Face to Face

These photographs by Abelardo Morell are the results of his intimate interaction with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its staff and his reflection on the collection while an artist in residence in 1998. In the photograph, Tim and Rembrandt, Gardner Museum, 1998, on the cover, Morell pairs a Gardner Museum staff member, who is an artist, with the Museum's Self-Portrait by Rembrandt, invoking a conversation across time. Essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic and the Gardner Museum's curator of contemporary art, Jennifer R. Gross, explore Morel's process of revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary in his photographs.

Born in Cuba, Morell was educated at Bowdoin College and Yale University. His work is included in the collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Morell currently resides in Boston.