Sonja Rieger, Professor

"The"
From: The Club, Inc. of Birmingham, Alabama 11 x 14.5" Giclee Print, 2003

Professor of Photography and Drawing

Biographical Information
B.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst
M.F.A. Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University

Artist Statement
Sonja Rieger was born in Ansbach, Germany, and grew up in the northeastern United States. In addition to her professional degree programs, she studied in the seminar program of the Whitney Museum of Art in 1978.
Rieger has exhibited widely at regional and national venues, most notably in New York at A.I.R. Gallery, the Sherry French Gallery, and White Columns; in Washington, D.C. at the Jones Troyer Fitzpatrick Gallery, the Martin Gallery, and at the National Museum of Women in the Arts; in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Fotogalerie Bordenau; and in Hitachi, Japan. Her work is in the collections of the International Polaroid Corporation, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and other museum, corporate, and private collections.
Recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, Rieger has also received grants for projects from the Polaroid Corporation, the Southern Arts Federation, and the National Endowment for the Arts
Sonja Rieger is known for her large color photographs depicting urban Southern landscapes eerily lit by orange/red neon lights. Recently she began a project in black and white that documents major life events. Adopted shortly after birth, Rieger found her birth-mother in 1993 and discovered that she grew up within a few hundred miles of her. In 1996 the artist found her birth-father in Germany and her three half-siblings.
She explained, "As I was finding new family members, my brother, with whom I was raised, was very ill and finally died of complications from AIDS in October, 1997. He and I were close in spirit and in age, and throughout our lives we were mistaken as twins. I took photographs of him as he slowly slipped away. After his death I used the photographs to illuminate his life and death and began a parallel project to document the extraordinary meetings with my new family members."