Charlee Brodsky: The Audacity of the Mundane
November 4, 2026 – April 2027
Charlee Brodsky, Obelisk, 2019, photograph, 17 × 22 in.
opening november 4
bacon Gallery
The Audacity of the Mundane brings the photography of Charlee Brodsky to the Erie Art Museum, on view November 4, 2026 through April 2027. The exhibition features a collection of images built around a simple, recurring setup: inanimate objects—miniature pigs, fake flowers, the occasional grape tomato—staged on a table in the artist's own guest room.
From this modest set, Brodsky builds small, endearing stories between her staged “characters,” finding humor, affection, and narrative in materials most of us would never think to photograph. The resulting body of work carries a surprising emotional range—innocence and joy sit alongside affectation, impending doom, and hope—amounting to a quiet, often funny commentary on the world we live in and the world we'd like to inhabit.
events
OPENING RECEPTION - GALLERY NIGHT
December 11, 2026
5-10 pm
ARTIST TALK: CHARLEE BRODSKY
December 12, 2026
11 am
Charlee Brodsky
artist
Charlee Brodsky is a fine-art documentary photographer and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, where she taught for 43 years. At the heart of her work is an exploration of social issues and the beauty of the ordinary, using photography to tell stories about individuals, communities, and the complexities of human experience.
Among her honors are the Tillie Olsen Award, received with writer Jim Daniels for their book Street; an Emmy Award with the team that created Stephanie, a documentary based on her friend’s life with breast cancer; Pittsburgh’s 2012 Artist of the Year Award, sponsored by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; the Pearl of Hope Award from Sojourner House for her work with students in the Pittsburgh community; an Honored Educator Award from the Society for Photographic Education, Mid-Atlantic Region; and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Her books include From Mall Town to Mill Town, with writers Jim Daniels and Jane McCafferty; I Thought I Could Fly… Portraits of Anguish, Compulsion, and Despair; Street, with poet Jim Daniels; Knowing Stephanie, with writer Jen Matesa; and A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead, with anthropologist Judith Modell.
Brodsky has also curated exhibitions exploring the history of photography in Western Pennsylvania. This work culminated in Pittsburgh Revealed, a major exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1997, accompanied by a book of the same title, produced with Linda Benedict Jones.
Brodsky exhibits nationally and regionally. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art and her Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College.
To see more of Brodsky’s still-life series, The Audacity of the Mundane, visit www.charleebrodskyphotography.com. For her other projects, visit www.charleebrodsky.com. Her work is represented by BE Galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She may be contacted at cb12@andrew.cmu.edu.
