Sonja Thomsen: Two Schools

Sonja Thomsen will present a screening and conversation drawn from Two Schools, a multi-channel film in development centered on Hazel Larsen Archer and Lucia Moholy, two photographers whose images built the canonical visual records of Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus. Both women’s contributions were made peripheral by the institutions they helped define. The excerpt screened from Two Schools currently draws on three years of archival research, including sustained collaboration with Hazel Larsen Archer's daughter Erika Zarrow, who holds the family archive in Tucson.

Presented during her residency at the Cloud House, Thomsen will introduce the project and screen a section of the film, followed by an open conversation. The evening offers an early encounter with the work while it is still actively taking form.

Sonja Thomsen is a Milwaukee-based artist whose twenty-year practice uses light as a tool for intergenerational collaboration with women whose contributions to art history were absorbed into other people's legacies. Working in photography, large-scale installation, kinetic sculpture, film, and artists' books, she builds new material vocabularies from sustained archival research. Her current project, Two Schools, is a multi-channel film and installation examining Lucia Moholy and Hazel Larsen Archer, the photographers whose images built the canonical records of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. She has exhibited at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin; the Reykjavik Museum of Photography; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. She was the 2025 Josef Breitenbach Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and is Full Professor Adjunct in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.