Donna Gordon

In the Garden 

There’s a certain exchange that takes place between the figure and the landscape.  Ideas of blooming and decay, growth and awakening—all synonymous with human change and birth and aging.

Perhaps the ultimate pairing in idea and image is a human portrait with a backdrop of Nature.  This series of portraits of women works to dispel the widespread stereotype of Eve in the Garden of Eden.  

My portraits make visible contemporary women of many ages and backgrounds—showing their strength, diversity, imagination and vulnerability.

Each woman—in a nod to Eve—is accompanied by a garden element—whether set in a field, farm, grotto, yard, public park or indoor setting.                   

Photography witnesses that fraction of a second in which we live and breathe, the instant before moving on and morphing into something different.  Portrait photography in particular brings me face to face with a unique being—whose thoughts I think I contain for a fleeting second—before letting go.

Artist Bio

Donna Gordon is a figurative and portrait artist — embracing photography, photo transfer, and photogravure — in different ways and at different times — to investigate, deconstruct, and rebuild the human form.

She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, and received the 2024 LensCulture Jurors’ Choice Award.  She received the 2024 and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award for a portrait series, with work from the series exhibited at Foto Nostrum gallery in Barcelona in 2024.

Her work has been featured in Shots Magazine, Lenscratch, The Hand, and Art.Doc.  Prints, photographs, and drawings have been shown in both solo and group shows at the Danforth Art Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum, Cape Cod Museum, Cove St. Arts, ArtsWorcester, Providence Art Gallery, Bromfield Gallery, Kingston Gallery, Galatea Fine Art, Concord Art Association, George Marshall Store Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Featherstone Gallery, Union of Maine Visual Artists, Attleboro Art Museum, and Cambridge Art Association. 

Her work with former political prisoners in collaboration with Amnesty International culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience,” exhibited at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

Donna is also a fiction writer. Her debut novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me, (Regal House 2022) was named by Kirkus Review among the best 100 Indie novels of 2023.