Posts by Miss Rosen

The Historic “Battle of the Legends” at The Met

Posted on June 21, 2019

Malik Mugler, photography Benjamin Lozozsky

Fifth Avenue was set aflame as hundreds gathered at the footsteps of The Met to watch six icons of the ballroom scene in a vogue battle for the history books. Dubbed “Battle of the Legends: Vogueing at the Met,” this first-of-its-kind showcase was held to celebrate Pride and Costume Institute exhibit, Camp: Notes on Fashion — just hours before the season premier of season 2 of Pose.

“When we got to a ball, we will hug you but when its time to battle, it’s time to battle!” announced Jack Mizrahi, co-founder of House of Mizrahi, who emceed the evening’s festivities decked out in a custom-made mauve Dapper Dan ensemble complete with knee-high Gucci socks.

The competition was judged by no less than Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, who donned a Versace “Vogue” print top and long red flowing skirt. Wintour was joined at the judges’ table by ballroom icons José Gutierrez-Xtravaganza, Father of the House of Xtravaganza; Sinia Alaia, overall mother of House of Alaïa; and the Legendary Mother Lola Mizrahi as well as queer icons Twiggy Pucci Garçon, executive producer of Kiki; Our Lady J, executive producer and writer for Pose; and Jordan Roth, president of Jujamcyn Theaters.

The competition for the title of “Legend Slayer” was fierce. Ballroom favourites Bootz Prodigy, Omari Mizrahi, Ty Ebony, Malik Miyake Mugler (replacing the originally announced Dashaun Lanvin), Asia Balenciaga and Tamiyah Miyake-Mugler took the stage in a series of three semi-final rounds before Malik Miyake Mugler and Asia Balenciaga faced off in the finals.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Tamiyah Mugler, photography Benjamin Lozozsky

Jack Mizrahi, photography Benjamin Lozozsky

Categories: Art, Dazed, Manhattan

Roger Gastman: Beyond the Streets

Posted on June 20, 2019

Lil’ Crazy Legs during shoot for Wild Style. Riverside Park NY, 1983. Photo Martha Cooper

Graffiti first emerged on the streets of New York and Philadelphia half a century ago as marker tags by young teens with a desire to make their mark. A new art form emerged, and from it styles bloomed, transforming the age-old desire to mark our territory in the most literal way.

Graffiti hit like a bomb, leaving cities covered with the most electric kind of public art: one done for love, not money, at the risk of arrest, fines, and imprisonment. It spread from city to city like a virus through movies like Wild Style and Style Wars, books like Subway Art, and art exhibitions dating back to 1973. It inspired generations of artists from all around the globe to create, innovate, and leave their mark on society in a manner that was nothing short of in your face.

Although New York has largely been scrubbed clean of the art form it unleashed upon the world, “it is still considered the number one graffiti tourism destination,” says Roger Gastman, curator of Beyond the Streets. The exhibition features hundreds of large scale works by over 150 contemporary artists, including Charlie Ahearn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, the Guerilla Girls, Eric HAZE, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, and Dash Snow.

Read he Full Story at Huck Online

Style Wars car by NOC 167 with door open, man reading newspaper. 96th Street Station, New York, NY, 1981. Photo Martha Cooper

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Huck, Photography

Sex, Frocks and Rock & Roll

Posted on June 18, 2019

“Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all,” a deep voice slowly says before the pitch-black screen explodes with a heavy guitar riff and a montage of scenes beautiful and bizarre in the original trailer for the 1966 film Blow-Up — the ultimate art house tale of sex, frocks, and rock & roll.

We enter into a day in the life of Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer modeled on 1960s bad boys David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, Michelangelo Antonini’s first English language film deftly combines aestheticism and existentialism to flawless effect, giving us everything and nothing — much like the troop of mimes that bookend the film.

We first encounter Thomas dipping out of a doss house at the break of dawn and hopping into his Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III Drop Head Coupé, offering the first of many stark contrasts between the artist and his subject. Though set in Swinging London, the city is eerily empty, quiet, and perfectly manicured — an unnerving sense of alienation at every turn.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: 1960s, Art, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music, Photography

Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes: The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Posted on June 18, 2019

“We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” Langston Hughes said of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his landmark art book collaboration with Roy DeCarava recently republished by David Zwirner Books.

In 1952, DeCarava became the first African-American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He used the one-year grant of $3,200 to make the photographs that would appear in the book, a tribute to Harlem glowing in the final years of its legendary Renaissance.

DeCarava gave Hughes a selection of prints from which the poet wrote the story of Mecca through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley, a fictional grandmother who knows everybody’s business and will put you on if you listen.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Motherward, 1985: Photographs by Elbert Howze

Posted on June 14, 2019

A few months after Elbert D. Howze died in 2015, his widow Barbara Howze paid a visit to the Houston Centre for Photography. The photographer had requested that his archive was donated to the centre, and she wanted to honour his final wishes.

Director and curator Ashlyn Davis remembers Mrs. Howze’s distress after learning that the Centre was not a collecting institution. “She said, ‘But I have a whole trunk full!’ So we went and got six portfolio boxes with hundreds of photos,” Davis recalls.

That summer, Davis went through the boxes and discovered a spiral-bound maquette for a photo book Howze had titled Fourth Ward. The book featured a collection of portraits made 1985 of the residents of Freedmen’s Town, a historically black community founded in 1866 by people finally liberated from the shackles of chattel slavery.

Rather than move north, residents built at least 558 settlements that formed the heart and soul of black Houston. Originally built on swamps no one wanted, Freedmen’s Town occupied prime real estate in the centre of the city – and in due time began attracting developers and gentrifiers who wanted a stronghold downtown as the city began to rapidly expand during the 20th century.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Barry Blinderman: The Downtown Art Scene

Posted on June 11, 2019

Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, Futura 2000. Courtesy of Barry Blinderman

The Director of Semaphore Gallery in Soho, Barry Blinderman was also a freelance writer for Arts Magazine, where he wrote very early articles on Keith Haring and Robert Longo, among others. In the fall of 1981, he curated a very popular exhibition called The Anxious Figure, reflecting the new figuration by artists like John Ahearn, Jedd Garet, Ed Paschke, Longo, Haring, and others. He speaks with NYC, 1981 about the art scene as it was happening on the streets and in the galleries, in the studios and the clubs.

Miss Rosen: Please talk about the art scene, as it was downtown in 1981. I am very interested in the relationship between the street and the gallery, and the way in which outsider artists migrated into the mix of curators, collectors, and critics. Could you speak about how the door was opened to this new generation of artists?

Barry Blinderman: In 1980-81, some of the most vanguard art being created in New York wasn’t on view within the white-walled sanctuaries of SoHo. At lower Manhattan nightspots such as Mudd Club or Club 57, young artists, musicians, filmmakers, poets and other performers congregated to collaborate on one- or two-evening events. I first met Keith Haring at Club 57, which occupied a church basement on St. Mark’s Place, and a few years later I met Martin Wong at Danceteria on the West Side. It was a time when you could keep up with what was going on by scanning the layers of posters that decorated walls and construction sites downtown. New Wave rock bands, many featuring art school dropouts, were exhibiting some of the most innovative artwork in the form of concert announcements. Cryptic messages by SAMO and other graffiti poets began to appear at regular intervals between the East Village and Tribeca.

In addition to the clubs, guerrilla art spaces and organizations flourished: ABC No Rio on Rivington Street, Group Material, Colab (Collaborative Projects), and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx, organized theme exhibitions and performances that were open to virtually any artist. It was at Fashion Moda that I first saw the work of the charismatic trickster Rammellzee, the progenitor of “Iconoclast Panzerism,” and his young disciple A-1.

The Times Square Show, organized by Colab in a former Midtown massage parlor, brought together over 100 artists. Some were art-school trained, like Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, John Ahearn, Tom Otterness, and Jane Dickson, and others got their training on the streets and subways, such as Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quinones, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museums like the New Museum (Events: Fashion Moda, December 1980-January 1981) and P.S.1 (New York/ New Wave, February-April, 1981) soon followed suit with large, well-publicized exhibitions mixing the talents of “studio” artists and street artists. Graffiti artists first shown at Fashion Moda and the Times Square Show were within a year or so offered exhibitions at Fun Gallery, named by Kenny Scharf and run by Bill Stelling and underground film star Patti Astor. Fun showed Dondi, Futura 2000, Fab 5 Freddy, and many other graffiti artists, along with Haring, Basquiat, and Jane Dickson. European collectors showed up to Fun’s openings in limousines and snapped up plenty of work, and seasoned American collector Hubert Neumann, who later held a symposium on graffiti art, visited and bought there as well.

The more established galleries soon followed suit, most notably Tony Shafrazi Gallery and Barbara Gladstone in SoHo, and Sidney Janis on 57^th Street. A little later, in 1985, we showed Lady Pink at Semaphore EAST on Tompkins Square, and then Futura 2000 at Semaphore Gallery, Soho, in 1986.

Keith Haring’s championing of graffiti artists, both through exhibitions he curated at clubs and his public acknowledgment of their influence upon his own art, was also a factor in their greater acceptance by the art world. For example, in his first exhibition at Shafrazi in 1982, he showed work he had co-created with LAll, a teenager at the time. When I watched Keith paint a frieze a few hundred feet long at P.S. 22 on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1981, I felt it was one of the most important exhibitions of the year. I still have a video of him drawing some of this monumental project with a refillable marker. On the walls below this frieze were spray-paintings by Lady Pink, Futura, Lee, Dondi, and several others.

nstallation shot of Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi at Semaphore EAST, October, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.

Miss Rosen: Keith Haring is an excellent example of this confluence between public to private space. Can you speak about why you think Haring best exemplified the spirit of the times, and why his work resonated so deeply with people from all walks of life?

Barry Blinderman: Keith Haring was, quite simply, a phenomenon, the kind of artist that comes around just once in a great while. From the very start, he was driven to share his art with as many people as possible. While a student at School of the Visual Arts in 1978-79, he opened his first-floor studio on 23^rd Street to passersby as he painted huge drawings on photo backdrop paper on the floor. Performance was of the essence to him, and not long after, in December 1980, he carried this impulse into the greatest uncommissioned public art project New York had ever seen—the chalk drawings on covered-over ad spaces in subway stations.

When I saw the very first of these: space ships looking like sombreros zapping babies, dogs, and pyramids, I was living on the Upper East Side, taking the #6 train downtown every day to my gallery in SoHo. There would be new ones every day, as others got covered up by new ads. I had no idea who was doing them, and at first thought it was some secret campaign—and in essence it was. I got hooked, traveling the subway sometimes for no other reason than to see his latest drawings.

Here, for perhaps the first time, was sophisticated contemporary art that could be understood by anyone—much more accessible even than Warhol, whose appeal did not extend to children, minorities, and everyman straphangers. And, unlike standard graffiti, it was meant to be impermanent, ever-changing, and done right out in the open, not covertly in deserted train yards after dark. And unlike just about any other artist, he never had to show his slides to a dealer. They all came to him. It was nothing short of brilliant, and there has never been anything like it since.

Haring’s interest in promotion began with the “crawling baby” buttons he carried with him at all times, handing them to anyone expressing interest while he was drawing in the stations. This eventually grew into the idea for the Pop Shop, which granted him access to audiences barely reached by a fine artist. You could wear a Haring tee shirt or hat, put colored magnets on your refrigerator, grab a poster. Some said he’d sold out, but these days so many artists have followed in his footsteps in the area of marketing.

Martin Wong in front of the billboard for his first show at Semaphore, 1984. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.

Miss Rosen: As a writer for Arts Magazine, you had the opportunity to speak directly with some of the most dynamic figures of the era. At the same time, as Director of Semaphore Gallery, you had the opportunity to show their work, and engage directly with the public. How did being a director and a critic inform and shape your understanding of the artists you engaged with

Barry Blinderman: I really have to thank Richard Martin, the late editor of Arts magazine for taking a chance and opening the door for me and other young critics at the time like Dan Cameron and Peter Halley. He imposed little or no control over what I wanted to submit, and offered nothing but encouragement. One of the first reviews I published, on Warhol’s Ten Jews series at the Jewish Museum (February 1981), led to my interview with Warhol published in October 1981. Between those two articles, I got to write an essay on Robert Longo, which became his first cover story, Keith Haring’s first art magazine interview, and an interview with Roger Brown. Meeting Warhol, and being able to get responses from him about his influences and working process, was one of the most exciting encounters I’ve ever known. And that interview has made its way into an anthology of selected Warhol interviews edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.

In the same year, 1981, I’d published the pieces on Longo and Haring, I curated my first theme exhibition at Semaphore Gallery in SoHo, called The Anxious Figure. It was one of the first exhibitions to address the new figuration appearing in the work of Jedd Garet, John Ahearn, Longo, Haring, Mike Glier, and others, mixed in with paintings by artists of the preceding generation like Alice Neel, Robert Colescott, and Peter Dean. So basically I was showing for a brief time some of the work I was writing about, getting to work with artists from different angles, and getting to know them pretty intimately. The Anxious Figure got a lot of publicity, including a feature article in the Village Voice by Peter Schjeldahl entitled “Anxiety as a Rallying Cry,” a nod to my exhibition title. As my gallery became more prominent, and we began advertising our own exhibitions in Arts, I was faced with a potential conflict of interest as someone who was both a critic and a dealer. So by the end of 1982, it was time to stop publishing in the magazine.

At Semaphore, and later at Semaphore EAST, I began exhibiting several emerging artists on a regular basis, including Martin Wong, Tseng Kwong Chi, Duncan Hannah, Walter Robinson, Robert Colescott, Nancy Dwyer, and Mark Kostabi. I also included Donald Baechler, Joseph Nechvatal, Mimi Gross, Cara Perlman, and Jane Dickson in two- or three-person exhibitions. Annie Herron, later a pioneer in Williamsburg, became director of Semaphore EAST and organized early one-person shows for Lady Pink, Ellen Berkenblit, Felix, Lori Taschler, and Bobby G. The opening show at Semaphore EAST, by the way, in October 1984, was a two-person show with Keith Haring and Tseng Kwong Chi. Kwong Chi exhibited light boxes with color transparencies of Keith’s subway drawings in situ, and Keith had us paint the entire gallery black so he could fill every inch of the gallery with chalk drawings interacting directly with the installation of light boxes. For some reason, the show received very little critical attention, but for me it was an amazing moment. I wish we could have preserved it somehow.

In 1987, I closed Semaphore and took the position of Director of University Galleries of Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve had the privilege of organizing large traveling exhibitions for many of the artists I worked with in New York, including Jane Dickson, Duncan Hannah, Martin Wong, Keith Haring, and just last fall, Walter Robinson, the first show in our brand new space off campus. My writing these days consists mostly of catalogue essays for either our publications or those by other museums and galleries.

First published at NYC, 1981 in 2015

Barry Blinderman in front of billboard for our summer 1984 exhibition. Photograph courtesy of Barry Blinderman.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Manhattan, Painting

Robert Giard: Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s

Posted on June 6, 2019

Robert Giard. Pamela Sneed, NYC 1992.

In 1985, Robert Giard (1939-2002) went to see The Normal Heart – Larry Kramer’s largely autobiographical play about the rise of the AIDS crisis. The set was austere. Newspaper headlines, statistics, and the names of those who had died were painted on the walls of The Public Theater.

“The fact that we knew so many of those people was deeply moving and motivating,” remembers Jonathan Silin, Giard’s life partner, co-president of the Robert Giard Foundation, and executor of the Robert Giard Estate.

Inspired, Giard set forth on a journey to photograph LGBTQ writers, artists and activists across the United States, creating over 600 portraits between 1985 and 2002. Giard’s sitters include Stonewall veterans Stormé DeLarverie and Sylvia Rivera, Samuel R. Delany, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Eileen Myles, Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsberg, Jacqueline Woodson, and Gertrude Stein, among many others.

A new exhibition, Particular Voices: Photographs of LGBTQ Writers, Artists and Activists, 1980s – 90s, presents a selection of 53 portraits from Giard’s archive, curated to illustrate the photographer’s inclusive spirit, inquisitive mind, and generous heart.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Robert Giard. Sylvia Rivera, Brooklyn, 1999.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Marc Jacobs Introduces THE Marc Jacobs

Posted on May 30, 2019

All clothes, shoes, and accessories THE Marc Jacobs Photography Cruz Valdez, styling Emma Wyman

Marc Jacobs is sitting in the showroom of his Spring Street offices in New York, vaping, and thinking about something which, for almost four decades, has been a hallmark of his work. “I like something old, something new, something borrowed,” Jacobs says with his natural effervescence. “A mix: high and low – when people with style don’t dress head-to-toe off a runway, they incorporate pieces that work for them into their own language and tell their own story with their clothes.”

It’s a sensibility that has inspired and guided the designer throughout his career, perhaps most notably in the controversial (and recently reissued) SS93 grunge collection for Perry Ellis that put him on the map – and got him fired. Inspired by what he saw on the street, the designer took a $2 thrifted shirt and had it remade in $300-a-yard silk, before hitting up Converse to make Duchesse satin sneakers. “I grew up in a time when young people wore bits of army surplus like thermals and t-shirts, went to vintage stores and had one or two pieces of designer clothing if they could afford them by saving money,” he surmises of his approach.

Reminder: this was decades before must-have $900 trainers, back when the idea of high-end casual was still a novelty – a notion Jacobs took to new levels when he introduced Marc by Marc Jacobs for SS01. At the time, he was setting trends both at his own label and Louis Vuitton – where he went on to introduce ready-to-wear in 1997 – and getting promptly ripped off in the process. With a debut collection featuring girlish rainbow glitter belts and plastic cherry hair ties alongside military-esque button downs, smartly tailored blazers, and denim mini skirts, the new, lower-priced MBMJ elevated the ordinary, putting youthful fun and irreverence firmly on the NYFW runway.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

All clothes, shoes, and accessories THE Marc Jacobs Photography Cruz Valdez, styling Emma Wyman

Categories: Dazed, Fashion

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Female Gaze in a World of Men

Posted on May 30, 2019

Vogue 1971. Portrait of artist Niki de Saint-Phalle painting one of her large Nanas sculptures in her studio outside Paris. (Photo by Jack Nisberg/Condé Nast via Getty Images)

“Very early on I decided to become a heroine,” said artist, filmmaker, and feminist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002). “What did it matter who I would be? The main thing was that it had to be difficult, grandiose, exciting.

De Saint Phalle shaped her destiny from a young age after realizing those closest to her would destroy her if they could. Physically abused by her mother and sexually abused by her father as a child, de Saint Phalle refused to become a victim of the petty bourgeois who raised her to be a housewife and mother.

“I could not identify with Mother, our grandmothers, our aunts, or Mother’s friends. Their territory seemed too restrictive for my taste,” de Saint Phalle said. “I want the world that belonged to men… Very early I got the message that men had the power and I wanted it. Yes, I would steal their fire from them.”

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Niki de Saint Phalle (kneeling) by Dennis Hopper, 1963

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Jacques Marie Mage, Painting, Women

Vivien Goldman: Revenge of the She-Punks

Posted on May 29, 2019

Vivien Goldman still remembers what it was like to be the only woman in the room when she began working as a music journalist in London during the early 1970s. “My whole generation was very into music and there was a very vibrant music press known as ‘the inkies,’” Goldman recalls. “It’s a relic now, but it was started by young rebels.”

“There were hardly any women in the field. When you look back it’s insane. I remember big battles at editorial meetings. There was real hostility to my ideas of covering more women and encouraging women. People would say things like, ‘Women don’t make music. Women aren’t into music.’ I was like, ‘Look at me! I’m here in front of you!’ But it was a phalanx of the patriarchy.”

For Goldman, punk was and forever will be a liberating force for women – one which she explores across time and around the globe in the captivating new book Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot (University of Texas Press). Taking a lateral approach, Goldman weaves a fascinating tapestry that threads together themes of identity, money, love, and protest over five decades.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Jerry Hsu: The Beautiful Flower is the World

Posted on May 28, 2019

Back in 2006, skateboarder Jerry Hsu got a Blackberry. He began taking notes, snapping visual one-liners, jotting down locations and references that he’d send by BBM to friends.

“By today’s standards, those photos are really bad but back then it was like, ‘Ohh these are pretty good!’” Hsu remembers. “It was a fun new technology. Many of the photos are personal messages for specific people or a specific group of people. It’s that shorthand language of photos that we use now.”

Three years later, Hsu started his blog, NAZI GOLD, a chronological feed of work curated from the thousands of photographs he was taking on his phone. He has no clue exactly how many there are in all: “On the phone I’m holding right now there are 45,000 photos. Over a 10-year period, it might be double that, or more.”

From this vast archive, a vision emerged, one that became shaped into the new book, The Beautiful Flower Is the World (Anthology Editions). The publication takes its name from a photograph of a t-shirt made in Asia. “The t-shirt is obviously mistranslated,” Hsu says.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography