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Lecture and Reception

March 10, 2026, 5:30-6:30 pm (Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall)

About the Exhibition

The series Sunlight, Shadow, Rainbow encapsulates a brief period within the continuum of Matt Eich’s documentation of family life. The photographs began when Eich started teaching full-time in 2019, but the heart of the work emerged during the pandemic years of 2020–2021, as his two young daughters were impacted in ways that are not yet fully understood. In seventh and third grade during this uncertain time, their childhoods were overshadowed by anxiety and global unrest. The resulting images filter that tension through the lens of fatherly love, as Eich observes his daughters becoming more independent and, in some ways, more unknowable.

The photographs first appeared across eight volumes of Seasonal Blues, a self-published series of zines released between 2019 and 2021. Copies of these zines have entered the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art Library. This work debuted in exhibition form at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2022 as part of the FRONT Triennial. A dos-à-dos-style monograph pairing this series with another series titled Grace Notes is scheduled for publication by Deadbeat Club in 2026.

Matt Eich was born in Richmond, Virginia and is the author of five books of photographs. He is a photographic essayist making long-form photobook works related to themes of memory, family, community and the American condition.  

Eich’s work has been exhibited in more than 30 solo shows, in addition to more than 100 festivals and group exhibitions. Matt’s prints are held in the collections of Cassilhaus, Chrysler Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Do Good Fund, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Portland Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The New York Public Library. Matt was an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work in 2013, and at a Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019. 

Eich is an Associate Professor at Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He makes books under the imprint Little Oak.PRESS and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia with his family.

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