Melissa Shook
Melissa Shook was an American documentary photographer, artist and educator. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and is held in the collection there, as well as at the Center for Creative Photography, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Life and work
Shook was born in New York City on April 18, 1939. She studied at Bard College and the Art Students League of New York. Shook taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Creative Photo Lab in 1974, and at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1975 to 2005. Her subjects included her daughter; a series of daily self-portraits; a shelter for homeless men and women; and a wheelchair basketball team.She died in Chelsea, Massachusetts on August 27, 2020.
Publications
- Streets are for Nobody: Homeless Women Speak. Boston: Boston Center for the Arts, 1991. With Jane Peterson.
- My Suffolk Downs. Pressed Wafer, 2012.. Poetry and photography.
- He Says, She Says, I Say, and Nobody Tells the Truth, Whatever That Is, on the Backside of Suffolk Downs: a narrative by Melissa Shook. WordTech, 2014..
- Daily Self-Portraits 1972–1973. TBW Books, 2023..
Group exhibitions
- Recent Acquisitions, 1974–1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1976
- Pictures by Women: a History of Modern Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010/11
Collections
- Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Arizona: 83 prints
- International Center of Photography, New York: 1 print
- Light Work, Syracuse, New York: 8 prints
- Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO: 208 prints
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 2 prints
- Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden: numerous prints
- Museum of Modern Art, New York: 37 prints