Over-the-Rhine’s Iris BookCafé and Gallery is now hosting a new exhibit featuring the work of American storyteller, internationally celebrated photographer and Cuban refugee Tony Mendoza.
The exhibit, I Like to be in America: Tony Mendoza’s photo(his)stories, features a mix of photos and text, similar to Iris’ recent FotoFocus’ Biennial Backstories-themed exhibition, Afterwords Words: Looking Back on 53 Years in Words and Images by Arno Rafael Minkkinen. However, instead of self-portraiture — although there are a few, says Iris — this exhibit will be more autobiographical, forming a photo/text memoir of Mendoza. A slightly different version was previously presented as Short Stories in Columbus last year.
Captured through the lens of his peculiar, perpetually amused sensibility, Mendoza’s work features photographs in conjunction with text to tell stories of family, friendship, pets, love, counterculture and more.
“In addition to its being engaging and amusing, the exhibition explores class and culture as [Mendoza,] a well-groomed product of Cuban aristocracy[,] navigates the shedding of both to recast his own version of the American Dream and settles somewhere in the middle,” Iris said in a press release.
Born to a wealthy, land-owning family in Cuba in 1941, Mendoza moved to the United States as a boy to attend the prestigious college-preparatory school Choate Rosemary Hall before attending Yale for engineering. His entire family left Cuba for Miami in 1960 following Fidel Castro’s communist revolution.
After Yale, Mendoza went to Harvard for graduate school, where he studied to become an architect. Needing photos for his work, he took night courses in photography, which is what he pivoted to after he was laid off from his architect job in 1973.
The photographer found acclaim in the ‘80s after publishing his first and best-known book, Ernie — named after a cat he lived with in New York. In 1986, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s first New Photography exhibition, and two years later, he was hired as a professor in the art department at The Ohio State University, from which he retired in 2013.
Mendoza’s work has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the Columbus Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have also bought his photographs (usually the dog or cat ones). Mendoza is also the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim photography fellowship and five Ohio Arts Council fellowships in photography, creative writing and video.
I Like to be in America: Tony Mendoza’s photo(his)stories runs from now through June 16. Mendoza will visit Iris to present a free artist’s talk on Sunday, May 18 at 5 p.m.
Iris BookCafé and Gallery,1331 Main St., Over-the-Rhine. More info: irisbookcafeotr.com.
This article appears in Mar 5-18, 2025.
