Posts by Miss Rosen

David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

Posted on July 10, 2018

Artwork: David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz. Collection of Brooke Garber Neidich and Daniel Neidich, Photography Ron Amstutz

At the pinnacle of his career, American artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was the preeminent symbol the 1980s East Village art scene. Like his contemporaries Kathy Acker, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger, Wojnarowicz used art as a form of resistance and to unravel the mythical image of America.

Wojnarowicz came of age in New York City, where he was the victim of shockingly brutal childhood abuse. Pushed to the margins, he became a street hustler in his teens in order to survive. By the late 1970s, as a new avant-garde street culture came into vogue, propelled by the DIY ethos of punk, hip hop, No Wave, and graffiti, Wojnarowicz began to create art as a vehicle for political activism, rebellion, and rage against the institutions that oppressed and exploited the vulnerable.

Over a period of about 15 years, Wojnarowicz produced a body of work that was innovative as it was excoriating, working across a range of media – including photography, painting, collage, music, film, sculpture, writing, and performance – using art as a tool of exploration and a weapon to fight the power structure. An AIDS activist until his dying day, Wojnarowicz posed some challenging questions about American culture and history, tearing apart the respectability politics of polite society in search of the truth.

His death on July 22, 1992, which was caused by AIDS-related illness, cut short the life of one most incendiary artists of our time – he was just 37. Now, in celebration of his legacy, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, presents David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (July 13 – September 30, 2018), which will be accompanied by a catalogue of the same name published by Yale University Press. Here, we spotlight everything you need to know about David Wojnarowicz.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night (For Rilo Chmielorz), 1986

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions

Flint Gennari: Inside Art & Design

Posted on July 9, 2018

In 1936, four art teachers banded together to create what would become New York’s High School of Art & Design inside a former WPA Federal Theatre Project. Although the walls were ripped apart and there was no school furniture, a little ingenuity transformed orange crates and plywood into student desks and cupboards.

Over the past century, Art & Design has become one of the most pre-eminent public schools in New York, with a list of distinguished alumni that includes fashion designers Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein, photographers Peter Hujar, Steven Meisel, and Sheila Metzner, artist Lorna Simpson, supermodel Pat Cleveland, Andy Warhol Factory denizens Jackie Curtis and Gerard Malanga, downtown icon Fab 5 Freddy, and a host of graffiti legends including Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, and Roberto “FLINT” Gennari.

Gennari began writing graffiti in 1965, after his social studies teacher introduced him to the famed World War II doodle “Kilroy Was Here” in class one day. Inspired in equal parts by advertising slogans, psychedelic artist Peter Max, and the ability to be famous yet anonymous at the same time, Gennari began tagging “FLINT” on walls and trains around his native Brooklyn. He added pithy phrases like “For Those Who Dare” and “For Ladies Only” to let the public know just what was on the menu.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1970s, Art, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma: Paparazzi Self-Portraits

Posted on July 3, 2018

Angela Davis, c. 1975-79, from ‘Bettie’s FemmeFolio’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

Dictators from ‘Bettie Visits CBGB, 1976-87’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

In the mid-70s, the term “paparazzi” was beginning to seep into the cultural consciousness through a dazzling combination of art and life. While Federico Fellini’s 1961 film La Dolce Vita introduced the word “paparazzi” (Italian for “mosquito”), it was not until American photographer Ron Galella showed the world just what a paparazzo was willing to do to get the shot that it truly become part of everyday parlance; in 1973, Marlon Brando broke his jaw with a single punch; one year later Jackie Onassis sued him, managing to secure an order of protection that did not stop Galella from getting his most famous image.

Intrigued by this new phenomenon coming into its own, American artist Marc H. Miller and Dutch artist Bettie Ringma started making Paparazzi Self-Portraits in 1975. Here, they posed for snapshots alongside personal heroes including Angela Davis, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, and Patti Smith, as well as bands from the emerging punk scene at CBGB including Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

The project reached new heights in 1978 when Curt Hoppe, their downstairs neighbor, offered to create a large format photorealistic painting of Ringma with the Ramones, which was unveiled in Punk Art, the first exhibition to showcase the visual artists of the scene. Miller looks back at the sweet spot where pop culture and conceptual art met, and pays tribute to Ringma, who died on March 8 of this year.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Richard Hell and Voidoids from ‘Bettie Visits CBGB, 1976-87’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

Patti Smith from ‘Bettie Visits CBGB, 1976-87’ © Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Manhattan, Photography

Joshua Lutz: Mind the Gap

Posted on June 27, 2018

House of Cards. © Joshua Lutz

Ever since he was a child, Joshua Lutz has dealt with the reality of mental illness. When he was five years old, he realized something wasn’t right as he watched his mother struggle with schizophrenia. Fear that he would inherit the disease or pass it along to his children became an ever-present fixture in his life.

Lutz turned to photography as a way to explore the impact of mental illness on his mother, his family, and his sense of self. In 2012, he published a book about his relationship with his mother; Hesitating Beauty (Schilt) is a poignant encapsulation of the woman who gave him life. To create it, Lutz stepped into a netherworld, a space where reality is filtered through an irrational lens, where quiet moments of lucidity are like rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds.

The book allowed Lutz to both explore and separate himself from the dark shadow schizophrenia cast across his life. This ability to be both insider and outsider at the same time led him further into the dark corners of the soul. This month, Lutz released another book grappling with similar subject matter; Mind the Gap (Schilt) is a poignant search for truth that explores the spaces between coherence and confusion that exist for those living with mental illness.

Lutz spoke with VICE about his personal journey and what it’s like delving into the murky, muddled realities of living with mental illness.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Paukers. © Joshua Lutz

Categories: Art, Books, Photography, Vice

Daybreak: New Affirmations in Queer Photography

Posted on June 25, 2018

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. Complex Occupation, 2016

As photography evolves, a new generation is coming of age, pushing the formal and conceptual properties of the medium beyond their existing boundaries.

With these advancements, fresh perspectives about how to represent not only the self but also the very nature of the queer experience have come to the fore in the exhibition Daybreak: New Affirmations in Queer Photography now on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, through September 2, 2018.

The genesis for the exhibition began in 2016, when curators Matthew Jensen and Ka-Man Tse witnessed an explosion of young artists in schools around New York City, whose range of styles and techniques were as diverse and expansive as the LGBTQI lives themselves.

They chose 12 emerging artists, including Kevin Aranibar-Molina, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Ryan James Caruthers, Ryan Duffin, Andrew Jarman, Mikaela Lungulov-Klotz, Groana Melendez, Vanessa Rondón, Alexis Ruiseco-Lombera, Matthew Papa, Jess Richmond, and Elias Jesús Rischmawi, each of whom is forging ahead in the genres of portraiture, self-portraiture, documentary, and conceptual photography.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. The company of her shadows,
2016

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Jean Pigozzi: The Unofficial Creator of the Selfie

Posted on June 20, 2018

ME with Ai WeiWei and Maurizio Cattelan, 2016. Copyright Jean Pigozzi

Photographer and philanthropist Jean “Johnny” Pigozzi was a student at Harvard University in 1973 when he spotted actress Faye Dunaway at a party and asked to take a picture with her. “Every year the Hasty Pudding, a Harvard theater club, invites a famous movie star [to visit],” Pigozzi explained to VICE. “Everyone wanted an autograph, but I felt autographs can be fake.”

So when Dunaway said yes to a photo, Pigozzi did something extraordinary (for the time). He stood beside her, held his arm forward, pointed the camera back at the two of them, and pressed the button—snapping a selfie with a celebrity decades before the invention of Instagram. “Now, you have an iPhone and a screen and you can look at yourself and take many photographs. But when I started doing selfies, I only had the chance to take one picture, so I had to get it right,” Pigozzi said.

After college, Pigozzi became an insider in a rarefied world. In 1974, he exhibited photographs in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Soon after, his close friend Bianca Jagger helped him land a small part in a film (though it was never released). One night, Jagger invited Pigozzi to an intimate dinner with Liza Minelli, who told him about a new nightclub in New York called Studio 54. Nights at the club yielded selfies with celebrities like Grace Jones, Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, and Ai Weiwei. Then in the 80s, Pigozzi began throwing lavish pool parties at his house in Cannes and turned his lens on his guests, capturing candid moments between famous friends.

Ahead of an exhibition of Pigozzi’s work at IMMAGIS Fine Art Photography in Munich from June 22 to August 4, VICE caught up with the photographer to gripe about modern selfie culture and chat about using a camera to collect mementos of his glamorous life.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Naomi Campbell, Villa Dorane, Antibes, 1993. Copyright Jean Pigozzi

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Photography, Vice

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA

Posted on June 19, 2018

Anthony Friedkin, Jim and Mundo, Montebello, East Los Angeles, 1972. From The Gay Essay, 1969–73. Gift of Anthony Friedkin. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Courtesy of Anthony Friedkin

Teddy Sandoval, Las Locas, c. 1980. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

Born in Tijuana in 1955, Edmundo “Mundo” Meza was raised in East LA, in the heart of the Chicano scene. As an artist, Meza worked outside of the mainstream, building a network of radical creatives who were dealing with issues political activism, identity, and social justice connected with the emergence of the Chicano Civil Rights, Women’s, and Gay Liberation Movements.

His untimely death from complications due to AIDS at the age of 29 in 1985 changed everything. As an early casualty of the epidemic, his voice was silenced too soon. Shortly after, his work stopped being exhibited and began to disappear.

Curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz were on an urgent mission to preserve what remained. As they began their work, they tapped into a gold vein. An explosion of artists from Mundo’s underground network began to pour forth, and over a period of four years, the curators developed relationships with more than 50 artists, groups, and bands working between the late ’60s and early ’90s.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Patssi Valdez, Reclining (Betty Salas and Gloria), c. early 1980s. Courtesy of Patssi Valdez

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects

Posted on June 19, 2018

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

In 1958, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff moved to Paris and met Jeanne-Claude, a Moroccan-born French woman who had studied philosophy at the University of Tunis. The young Bulgarian artist received a commission to paint a portrait of her mother and fell in love with the vibrant redhead, who serendipitously shared his birthday: the 13th of June, 1935. Fate conspired to unite this extraordinary pair of Geminis, who worked together until Jean-Claude’s death in 2009, transforming the experience of public art into something equal parts powerful and profound.

“I have a real need to appropriate reality,” Christo reveals in the stunning new book Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects (D.A.P./Verlag Kettler), the first volume to give a comprehensive account of their work inside cities around the globe.

“The real is the real. The work is not a photograph, a film, or an image. It is the real thing,” Christo says, speaking with passion over the phone from the US. “This is because I have the enormous visceral pleasure of the real thing. I understand many people do not like to be in an uncomfortable place that is windy, hot, boring, because it is demanding of your effort, but if you have a physical pleasure to only do things like that (laughs), you understand. It is something.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“The Gates” (2005)

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions

Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre: To Survive on This Shore

Posted on June 18, 2018

From 2012 through 2017, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre travelled across the United States to meet with older trans and gender non-conforming people who live on their own terms, surviving and thriving despite all of life’s unexpected turns.

Understanding the power of representation, Dugan and Fabbre assembled an incredible collection of portraits and stories of people who live within the complex intersections of gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, geographic location, and age for the incredible new book To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer Verlag). The result is a phenomenal portrait of people from all walks of life who have lived to tell their tales – a feat unto itself given the fact that the average trans life expectancy is just 35 years old.

“From the beginning, we were mindful of trying to include as wide a range of experiences as possible,” Dugan explains. “Some people may think of LGBTQ as one community, but each person featured in the book approaches their identity in a different way.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Fabio Sgroi: Palermo 1984-1986, Early Works

Posted on June 18, 2018

Picture it: Sicily, 1984. A young man named Fabio Sgroi is coming of age in Palermo, while a mafia war rages around him. The city is dark and desolate, but Sgroi and his friends find solace in the town’s nascent punk scene that – at this time at least – is strictly underground.

Over the next two years, Sgroi documents the punks, anarchists, surly drunkards, and melancholy monsters who gather regularly in Politeama Square or in each other’s homes, playing music and plotting schemes. Theirs is a teen rebellion filled with adolescent angst, the final chapter of a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; the last moment before the realities of adulthood begin to set in.

With the publication of Palermo 1984-1986, Early Works (Yard Press), Sgroi’s second book, we are transported to this Palermo – “an apotheosis of anarchy, where anomaly is normalcy,” as Francesco De Grandi describes it in the afterword. Ahead of the book’s release this Friday, Sgroi tells us more about this moment in subcultural history and the unique nature of Palermo punk.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Represent: Hip-Hop Photography

Posted on June 14, 2018

Salt’n’Pepa, outside Bayside Studios, Bayside, Queens, Feb. 6, 1989: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Photo by Al Pereira, © Al Pereira

“Rap is something you do. Hip hop is something you live,” KRS One memorably said, reminding fans that the culture of hip hop is more than just an MC on the mic. Hip hop is a style, an attitude, and a way of life that transcends all boundaries, be it cultural or political, and brings people together in celebration of black power, pride, and principles.

At the foundation of hip hop are DJs, MCs, B-boys and B-Girls, and graffiti – which represent the music, literature, dance, and visual arts. Although MCing (aka rapping) has become the most famous element, it’s the fruit of a tree with much deeper roots, one that Rhea Combs, curator of photography and film, and director of CAAMA, explores in the new exhibition, Represent: Hip-Hop Photography.

Represent takes work from Bill Adler’s Eyejammie Hip Hop Photography Collection as its departure point, visually sampling from the seminal archive that includes more than 400 iconic photographs by 60 leading artists including Charlie Ahearn, Harry Allen, Janette Beckman, Al Periera, and Jamel Shabazz. For the exhibition, Combs has paired these works with historical photographs and other objects from the museum’s permanent collection, to illustrate the ways in which the innovative practices can be found in African-American history decades before hip hop was born in the Bronx.

Read the Story at Huck Online

Queen Latifah, NY, June 23, 1991. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Photo by Al Pereira, © Al Pereira

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Photography