Instant Happy: Lost and Found Polaroids 

Instant Happy: Lost and Found Polaroids

Opening reception Friday, Sept. 11.

In the past two decades, Curtis Cates has collected more than 1,500 Polaroids. And in a project that began in 2024, Cates, his wife and collaborator, Cindy Connolly, along with friend and writer David Bjerklie, selected images for this show. It was a process that took more than a year; the sheer variety of the images made selection a daunting, but fascinating challenge.

How do photographs shape our perceptions of the passage of time? How much of a photo’s value is intent, how much is context, how much is interpretation? As Cates, Connolly, and Bjerklie began to compare and evaluate which images were “best” or “most interesting,” they found there were no simple answers. Photos that one week were immediately put into the “absolutely must include” category would often be reconsidered and moved into the “probably not” category. And vice versa. It seemed like a crazily arbitrary project at times.  But that probably should not have been a surprise, given the nature of the images. In the Q&A that accompanies this exhibition, Cates and Connolly make this point perfectly; above all, their aim is to stimulate conversation and new perspectives on what can be seen in the most ordinary of snapshots.

Curtis Wade Cates, a native of Lubbock, Texas is a musician, collector of street art, amateur archivist, and former network news cameraman. He has been a public-access TV producer, documentary filmmaker (Peace Through Understanding: The 1964/65 New York World’s Fair), and video editor (Ramones: Around the World). In 2012, Curtis curated The Coloring Book exhibition at Manhattan’s ABC No Rio Gallery, in which more than 100 artists interpreted pages of a Masterpieces coloring book which Cates found on a radiator in the Lower East Side building where he lived.

In 2023, Cates and Connolly, an Omaha native and a longtime reporter, curated the Rodeo Coloring Book exhibit at the Old Feed Store gallery in Bassett, Nebraska, an homage to the late rodeo rider Casey Jochem. Cates and Connolly live in Long Pine, Nebraska.

David Bjerklie grew up in North Dakota and since 1984 has been a reporter, writer and editor for TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Special Editions. He has written on a broad range of science, environment and medicine topics, with special emphasis in recent years on mental health, language, animal intelligence, the nature of hope, the character of facts, and the psychology of being wrong. He has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T., a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow, two-time grant recipient at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany, and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.