Quiet Eccentricities

A reconsideration of Lewis Koch's seminal photographic work on vernacular architecture, Quiet Eccentricities: The Vernacular Seen presents mostly unpublished work made for a National Endowment for the Arts Photography Survey project which took place in southern Wisconsin, in the early 1980s. In addition to a key selection of the original images, an essay by curator and art historian Lisa Stone examines Koch's photographs of commonplace structures in relation to his early work which preceded the NEA project, and the later work which it in turn inspired.

Drawing upon aspects of photography, sculpture, assemblage and text, Lewis Koch calls attention to the often unremarked upon elements of everyday life. Over the past fifty years, he has presented installations in garages, on kiosks and billboards, as well as in museums and galleries, in solo exhibitions internationally.  His work is held in permanent collections which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, and many more.

Jill Sterrett is Director of Collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Before her tenure in Wisconsin, she held leadership positions at the Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), and for 28 years at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Lisa Stone is an independent curator/collaborator, preservation consultant, and retired (2020) curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, both at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).