Jed Devine
Opening Reception: June 12th, 6pm to 8 pm
Jed Devine, June 12th- Labor Day
Benrubi Gallery is honored to present a memorial exhibition for our beloved Jed Devine.
Born on August 31, 1944, Jed grew up in Pleasantville, NY, the middle of three brothers. He attended Pleasantville High School, Deerfield Academy, and Yale, where he captained the baseball team and received his BA in fine arts and MFA in graphic design.
After graduate school, Jed focused on photography, notably the black-and-white palladium prints for which he is known, and later for his color digital prints. He exhibited with Daniel Wolf and then with our founder Bonni Benrubi from 1987 on. Jed has been an integral part of our gallery's story and legacy, shaping how we have seen pictures since our very inception as an organization. In 1986, Jed received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his photographs of Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace.
Jed’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Eastman House, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery, the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of art, the San Francisco Museum of art and the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, among other private and public collections.
Jed Devine—photographer, teacher, husband, father, and grandfather—passed away on October 29, 2024. He died at home on Martha’s Vineyard, surrounded by his wife Barbara Kassel, his son Jesse Devine, and his daughter Siobhan Devine. We invite you to join us for this celebration of life and throughout the summer as Jed fills our gallery with his eternal sense of humor, love and poetry.
Jed Devine was born in Mount Kisco, NY in 1944, and received an MFA from Yale in 1972. Originally trained as a painter, Devine began taking photographs in 1972 and became fascinated by the effects of light on objects and surfaces, and the sensuality that was possible with the platinum-palladium process.
This sensuality is on full display in Devine’s only book, Friendship, a collaboration with the writer Jim Dinsmore, whose sixty-four images “form an extended sequence that moves from innocence to decay and return. The images emphasize the beauty and primacy of light while capturing the visual drama and irony of the Maine landscape.”
Devine also has a long-standing relationship with New York City, which is most evident in his portfolio of panoramic photographs celebrating New York bridges, which, though printed on a small scale, still capture the grandeur of the monumental structures spanning the Hudson and East Rivers. These historic images exist in dialogue with The Bethesda Terrace, which showcases the well-frequented romantic spot in the middle of Central Park. Devine was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for The Bethesda Terrace in 1985.
When Devine developed problems with his balance as a result of inner-ear issues, he switched to smaller cameras and ultimately to digital. The artist describes this forced change of format as a “disguised blessing”: “Everything was new again. More spontaneous, more flexible, more surprising.” His most recent exhibition featured layers of imagery—art books and postcards, batteries, rubber bands, dice, and hard-boiled eggs on breakfast tables—that provide a diary of domestic activities as well as a library of the images that have defined the artist’s sensibility. The resulting eclectic collages veer gently into the realm of abstraction; at once concrete and elusive, they are, in the artist’s words, “wildly gregarious, and when they get together they often surprise with unexpected connections.”
Devine’s photographs are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
JED DEVINE
Jun 12 - Sep 20, 2025