The CONCORD ART ASSOCIATION will open an exhibition featuring the work of Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, from the collection of Gus and Arlette Kayafas on Thursday, March 11th at 6:00 pm. The exhibition will run from March 4 through April 1, 2004.

The exhibition, curated by Gus and Arlette Kayafas will include a lecture by Gus Kayafas on Tuesday, March 16 from 6:30 – 7:30 pm.

Gus and Arlette Kayafas have been collecting art (mostly photography) for the 36 years they have been married. A testament to their collaboration as collectors in their marriage and their careers is found in the following excerpt from an essay written by Gus for a 1998 Fuller Museum exhibition entitled “Photographs from 1840-1998, From the Collection of Gus and Arlette Kayafas.”

“The initial shaping forces for our collecting have been opportunity and enthusiasm. Throughout the first twelve years of our marriage, I traded prints and photographic services with other artists, collectors and dealers. The collection had gathered it’s own momentum. In 1980 we began Palm Press, Inc., an artist’s atelier devoted to printing and publishing original photographic images and objects. Until this time the work we collected always related intimately to what we found personally inspiring and was often representative of our relationships with other artists and friends. The pictures were full of immediately remembered experiences or interests made all the more accessible by their presence in our home. A more critical relationship with the photographs evolved. What had been an unexamined attraction to certain photographs provided an opportunity for historical and intellectual explorations that profoundly effected the evolution of the collection.”

Gus Kayafas is a Trustee of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the president of Palm Press, Inc., a photographic atelier and publisher of limited edition portfolios. He graduated from MIT with a degree in Architecture/ Art & Design, where he studied and taught with Minor White and Harold Edgerton and received his MFA in photography at RISD, where he worked closely with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Gus Kayafas founded the Photography Department and Graduate Photography program at Massachusetts College of Art. His book on Harold Edgerton, “Stopping Time,” is in it’s ninth edition published by Harry Abrams. He is currently working on a book about Aaron Siskind.

Arlette Kayafas is an overseer at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Chair of the Store Committee, co-creator of the Annual Style Event, an the Founder and Director of Gallery Kayafas, Boston.