Linda Lindroth

Early life

Lindroth was born Linda Lee Hammer in Miami, Florida in 1946. Her father Mark (Morris) Roger Hammer was a manager of a series of hotels in Miami Beach after serving in the Army Air Force during WWII. Her mother, Mae (known as Maisie) Lang Hammer was a homemaker. When Lindroth was seven years old her father moved the family to Coral Gables, FL where Lindroth became an avid photographer of tourist sights like the Coral Castle, the Serpentarium and the 'Parrot Jungle with her Brownie camera. When she was ten her father, then a traveling salesman for White Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, took her with him on a business trip to New Orleans where she photographed the St. Charles Cathedral. At 13 her father, moved the family to Springfield, NJ. Maisie Hammer was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and was hospitalized frequently for depression and in manic episodes would shred family photographs including her daughter’s photographs and early journals.

Education

Lindroth attended Douglass College/Rutgers University 1964-1968 where she was photography editor of the yearbook, wrote a column for the school newspaper and worked part-time at the Rutgers Division of Instructional Television. She convinced a graduate student to teach her how to process film and made her own prints in the school darkroom though there were no formal photography courses. She focused instead on traditional printmaking with [1] Geoffrey Hendricks who introduced her to the Happening scene in New York City] She graduated with a B.A in Studio Art in 1968. Lindroth continued to take courses throughout the 1970s. She studied photographic printmaking with George Tice at the New School in 1974. In 1975 Lindroth heard that architect turned sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark was to be teaching a course at the School of Visual Arts and she enrolled in that and studied with Garry Winogrand at St Johns/Germain School of Photography in 1976. Returning to Rutgers in 1977 she studied critical writing with Leon Golub, taught photography courses, and received an MFA in Art from the Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1979.

Early professional life

After graduation, Lindroth took a job as advertising copywriter for radio station WCTC in New Brunswick, N.J. In 1969 she left to work at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as an Art Editor and later as a freelancer her photographs and mixed media work appeared on album covers including Firefall’s Mirror of the World and book jackets and special projects for many different publishers. She met editor Joe Fox at Random House, (a friend of Richard Heffner with whom she studied at Rutgers) and worked as his picture editor until the mid-1980s including H.G. Wells Aspect of A Lifeby Anthony West. From 1984 to 1987 Lindroth owned an art gallery in New Haven called Gallery Jazz where she exhibited work by photographers and architects. From 1990-1993 she curated exhibitions for The Pump House Gallery, the municipal gallery in Hartford, Connecticut and later for other institutions.

Family Life

While working at the Rutgers Division of Instructional Television in 1967 Lindroth met David George Lindroth, an MFA candidate. They were married at Rutgers Voorhees Chapel in 1968. In 1985 the Lindroths were divorced and Linda Lindroth moved to New Haven, CT with Craig David Newick, a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture. Lindroth and Newick were married in 1987. Their son Zachary Eran Newick was born in 1990. He graduated from Princeton University in 2012.

Career in photography

Lindroth’s early photographs consisted of street photography, self-portraits, image/text, and mixed media,^, that she continued well into the 1990s. In 1974 Lindroth submitted her portfolio to the Museum of Modern Art for review and John Szarkowski selected the first photograph for a permanent collection]. In 1975 a limited edition, mixed media artists book entitled BOOK—produced in part in the course taught by Gordon Matta Clark at the School of Visual Arts, and with her first grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1974—was purchased for numerous collections including in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Franklin Furnace Archive .^{,,, ,} The U.S.I.S. invited Lindroth and seven other photographers to participate in a traveling exhibition in Italy and Germany in 1975. In the early 1980s Lindroth concentrated on two landscape surveys: one on the New Jersey Meadowlands and the other on Santa Catalina Island, California.^,

Polaroid SX-70 and 20x24 photographs

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Lindroth worked in the Polaroid Artists Program using the Polaroid SX-70 camera and later the Polaroid 20x24. Her first ever solo museum show was at the Newark Museum in Newark NJ in 1986] of work done with the Polaroid 20x24 camera. Lindroth produced a series of three limited edition portfolios entitled TRIPTYCH I, II, III of Polaroid 20x24 images, copies of which are in the High Museum of Art and the Newark Museum. Other Polaroid work was exhibited in Canada^, and in the WestLicht_Schauplatz für Fotografie, Vienna. Lindroth experimented with embedding Polaroid 20x24 images inside of large gelatin silver prints enlarged onto photo linen and stretched over wood frames. The resulting work was called the Bronx Zoo Triptych.^, In 1995 Lindroth collaborated with Open Society Fund and Pen Pals for Peace to create Polaroid 20x24 photographs for a book of Children’s Letters from Sarjevo entitled Dear Unknown Friend. The exhibition, Dear Unknown Friend, Children’s Letters from Sarajevo consisted of the Polaroid 20x24 photographs of the letters toured the Balkans in 1996 and 1997 and returned to the State Museum of Pennsylvania in 1999. In 1988 Jonathan Edwards College of Yale University commissioned Lindroth to photograph six former, current and future Masters of the College with the Polaroid 20x24 camera. The six were Beekman Cox Cannon, H. Catherine Skinner, Frederic Lawrence Holmes, E. J. Boell, Bernard Lytton and Gary Lee Haller. The photographs hang in the Junior Common Room. Other photographs have appeared in the New York Times.^,

Installation Art

By the late 1980s Lindroth was doing installation art with Craig Newick whose work had caught the attention of The Architecture League of New York. They were including in Emerging Voices in 1996 and received three Annual Design Review Awards in the magazine I.D. 1990, 1991, and 1993.^,, They received grants and prizes through the 1990s including a Second Prize in the African Burial Ground Memorial Competition and a project for Storefront for Art and Architecture. In 1995 with a grant from the Humanities Council of Fairfield University for the installation High Jump on the Moon, Lindroth made and exhibited her first large format digital prints.^, Lindroth and Newick did a mini-golf hole for DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA in 1995.

Lindroth has received grants and fellowships from The Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism 1995-96, 2000, 2006, 2012, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, 1989, 1990. The New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1974-75, 1983-84) and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2002 Lindroth, an avid collector of vintage clothing, and Deborah Tornello published Virtual Vintage: The Insider’s Guide to Buying and Selling Vintage Clothing Online with Random House. She curated an art exhibition entitled 101 Dresses in honor of the centennial of the birth of Eleanor Estes in 2007 at Artspace in New Haven. The Artist’s Studio, a short story, was published in artis in 2005.

Trickster in Flatland

In 2011 Lindroth began her Trickster in Flatland series exploring the subject of American commerce during the early part of the twentieth century by photographing the tattered remains of small boxes that contained products once invented and manufactured in the United States. These artifacts chosen for their design elements and materiality offer up evidence of the level of skill and anonymity of their makers. The work is strongly influenced by constructivist and abstract expressionist painters of the first 50 years of the century. Linda Lindroth lives and works in New Haven, CT where she has been an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT since 1998.

Artwork in Museum Collections