In the Grand Central Madison Concourse, photographs by Roe Ethridge from the recent series “Shore Front Parkway” and “Beach Umbrella” are presented in ten large scale SEG fabric light case boxes. All images were taken at Rockaway Beach where the artist lives and works.   

“Beach Umbrella” consists of imagery created on four consecutive Mondays in July and August of 2020 after the beaches reopened during that first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. The artist has described the vibrant broken umbrellas as “joyful in an archaeological way, like discovering the remains of a party or ritual celebration” after a period spent in isolation. The brightly colored patterns of these umbrellas behave as colorful geometric abstractions and are juxtaposed with other signifiers of a day at the beach: a model with a body board, a vision of flipflops in the sand, and sunflowers.

This group of five images is balanced by a selection from “Shore Front Parkway” that unfold a narrative of the changing seasons, from the waning of summer into the spectral atmosphere of autumn. The photographs from this series are unified by depictions of light, both actual and fabricated, including a captured rainbow, sun rays in a still life, a sunny side up egg, an artificial sunset backdrop, and shifting LED globe lights.   

Composed like commercial editorial photography, an aspect of Ethridge’s practice, he also utilizes digital manipulation and staged portraiture fluidly blending various photographic types with results that are at the same time surreal and beautiful. The exhibition was generously sponsored by Griffin Editions, Berger Textiles and Underground Visuals with installation support by OUTFRONT Media.

Roe Ethridge takes equally from his work as a commercial photographer, and artist. Blurring the lines that separate the two, Ethridge creates images that are simultaneously generic and intimate, often treading between humor and cynicism. Functioning in tandem, these motivations coalesce into an ongoing investigation into the mechanics of photographs, and their ability to both retreat into the personal, and expand to relay collective experiences.

In early 2025, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented Shore Front Parkway, Roe Ethridge's eleventh exhibition with the gallery, accompanied by a new catalog of the same title. In 2024, 10 Corso Como, Milan presented a survey exhibition of his work titled Happy Birthday Louise Parker, curated by Alessandro Rabottini. In 2023, his work was the subject of the solo show AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC, presented in collaboration with Gagosian in New York, to coincide with the publication of AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC, the most comprehensive monograph on Ethridge's work to date. In 2022, his work was featured in Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in 2020 he participated in the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Høvikodden, Norway. From 2016 to 2017, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati hosted the first comprehensive survey of Ethridge’s work in the United States, titled Roe Ethridge: Nearest Neighbor. Other solo exhibitions include Shelter Island at Foam, Amsterdam, 2016, and Roe Ethridge, curated by Anne Pontégnie, at Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2012, which traveled to Museum Leuven, Belgium later that year.

Ethridge’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Aspen Art Museum, CO; Marieluise Hessel Collection at CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; International Center of Photography, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New Museum, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.