Brian Ulrich was born in 1971, in Northport, NY. His photographs portraying contemporary consumer culture reside in major museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Ulrich earned an MFA in photography at Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in photography at the University of Akron. An internship at the Akron Art Museum further fueled Brian’s research and knowledge of the history of the medium. He later spent considerable time working at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in NYC and then at the Cleveland Museum of Art, often staying after hours to sift through the vast libraries, collections and archives of photography. It is this understanding of history that informs much of his work, which today addresses issues social, political and historical.
Since finishing his graduate studies in 2004, Ulrich has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; the Julie Saul Gallery, New York; and the Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco. His work has also been included in many group exhibitions, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Krannert Art Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Carnegie Museum; Galerie f5.6 in Munich; and the Contemporary American Photography Festival in Mannheim, Germany, among others.
His first monograph, Copia, was published in 2006 by Aperture as part of the MP3: Midwest Photographers Project. In 2007, Ulrich was named one of the year’s 30 Emerging Photographers by Photo District News. His work has been recently featured in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Artforum, Harper’s, Leica World and PHat PHOTO (Japan). He is also a frequent contributor to the like-minded magazine Adbusters.
Ulrich lives and works in Chicago, and he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Columbia College. In addition to curating exhibitions, Ulrich is an active member of a community of young photographers and artists, both local and global, through his website and blog. This spirit of community building extends to an active lecturing schedule, appearing in the last six months at the Aperture Foundation; the Museum of Contemporary Art La Jolla; St. Edwards University; the School of Visual Arts; Mississippi State University; Youngstown State University; the University of Illinois; the San Francisco Art Institute; and the Society for Photographic Education’s National Conference in Miami. Brian Ulrich is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and Julie Saul Gallery in New York.
