Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power

Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power is the first major exhibition to explore the life and work of American photographer Nancy Rexroth. Born in 1946, Rexroth is known for a unique and powerful body of work made with a simple plastic camera published in 1977 under the title IOWA. A book unlike anything that came before it, IOWA remains a touchstone for many photographers nearly fifty years later.

This exhibition tells a richly detailed story of Rexroth’s original, often defiant artistic vision amid the changing social, institutional, and creative landscapes of the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s. Drawing on extraordinary access to the artist’s archive, it sheds new light on her most beloved photographs and enables a previously unavailable perspective on her work across five decades. Rexroth’s creative accomplishment emerges as a poetic, cogent, and remarkably cohesive exploration of the self, the will to expression, and the qualities and meanings of light. 

Along with documents, snapshots, and personal possessions, the exhibition features nearly 150 artworks spanning the formative years before, during, and after Rexroth’s graduate studies at Ohio University to her later work with platinum, Polaroid transfer, and early digital tools. Many of the works on view exist in only one copy, and several are exhibited for the first time, including a 53-image carousel slide show, experimental multi-frame images on film, and a key corpus of self-portraits newly printed under the artist’s supervision from her negatives. 

Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power represents the public debut of the Nancy Rexroth Collection, an unparalleled archive of her life and work stewarded by the Cincinnati Art Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, multi-authored scholarly catalogue.