Posts by Miss Rosen

Nathan Farb: The Russians

Posted on February 28, 2018

Mother and Daughter, 1977. © Nathan Farb

In June 1977, during the height of the Cold War, American photographer Nathan Farb travelled to the city of Novosibirisk, Siberia, the third-largest city in Russia nestled deep in the South. Farb was travelling as part of Photography USA, part of the United States Information Agency, established as a cultural exchange program under President Carter’s administration.

Farb brought a four x five Polaroid camera and loads of film to create black and white portraits of visitors throughout the six-week exhibition. “There were as many as five or ten thousand people a day who came to the show,” he remembers. “Everybody wanted to be photographed because they were going to be able to take home a portrait. I could only do 30 or 40 a day as I wanted it to be very precise, like a gold wire that connects one point to another with the least resistance.”

While his subjects left with a print, Farb kept the negatives for himself, sending them back to the United States in a diplomatic pouch. Upon his return, Farb began publishing the photographs in The New York Times Magazine and in publications around Western Europe, before eventually being compiled in a monograph. The works, which were first exhibited in 1979 at the Midtown Y Gallery, New York, are once again on view in The Russians at The Wende Museum of the Cold War in Culver City, California, now through April 29, 2018.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Twins with cowboy hats. © Nathan Farb

Categories: 1970s, Art, Huck, Photography

Christopher Makos: Warhol at Montauk

Posted on February 28, 2018

Andy Warhol with Pat Cleveland. Photography Christopher Makos

Back in 1971, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey purchased Eothen, a 12-hectare oceanfront estate on the Long Island shore for $225,000. A true East End landmark, Eothen was built in 1931 by American architect Stanford White as a fishing camp for the Church family of Montana, who used it for two weeks in September when the striped bass were running.

Comprised of four individual cottages, a three-bedroom main house, a stable, a three-car garage, and nearly a kilometer of uninterrupted coastline, Eothen boasts a fabled pedigree that continues to the present day. In 2017, Mickey Drexler, the CEO of J. Crew, sold the property to Adam Lindemann, a private investor and influential collector of contemporary art and design.

Eothen is one of the crown jewels of Montauk, a town that has evolved into a destination locale. But back in the 1970s and 80s, during the Warhol era, it was a still tiny fishing town populated by local craftsman, property maintenance people, and a smattering of wealthy people like writer Tennessee Williams and talk-show host Dick Cavett, who sought out sanctuary from the madness of New York City.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Andy Warhol photographing Halston. Photography by Christopher Makos

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Daido Moriyama and the Aesthetics of Punk

Posted on February 26, 2018

“Pachinko”, 1982. © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery

Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Daido Moriyama has become one of the pre-eminent fine art photographers of our times. As witness to the changes that transformed Japan after World War II, Moriyama used the camera to expose a side of his native land that few outsiders know, creating a body of work that is gritty and jarring, yet profoundly beautiful.

Moriyama first arrived in Tokyo in 1961 and began working as a freelance photographer in 1964. It was during the ’60s that he developed his distinct style, stripping the photograph down to its bare bones, embodying the pure D.I.Y. ethos of punk in visual form and providing a fresh new way of seeing the world.

He first came to the attention of the world in 1974, when his work was included in the New Japanese Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Since then, his profile has continued to grow, with his work influencing generations of artists who can’t help but imitate the iconoclastic master of the form.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Hawaii, 2007/2008 © Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Japan, Photography

Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers

Posted on February 22, 2018

Photo: Guilda, [one of a triptych]. New York, United States, circa 1950.

At the tender age of 10, Sébastien Lifshitz began collecting found photographs of men and women who refused to conform to the strictures of gender roles that demanded dressing according to an arbitrary set of rules. Here, in the privacy of their own space, they were free to don whatever clothing they wished and created a picture that stood as evidence to who they knew themselves to be.

Over the years, Lifshitz haunted flea markets, garage sales, junk shops, and eBay, amassing an impressive collection of amateur photographs of mostly anonymous men and women from Europe and the United States that date between 1880 and 1980. A selection of these works is on view in Under Cover: A Secret History of Cross-Dressers at The Photographer’s Gallery (February 23 – June 3, 2018).

“The subject of gender non-conformity and trans identity is something that feels very urgent right now: in our press, our social consciousness,” observes Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery. “We live with socially cultivated assumptions that men are one way and women are another when it comes to our dress, our actions, our accessories, our ambitions even – and historically there hasn’t been a lot of freedom in how we respond to these things. The more these issues are discussed openly, the more we educate each other and see gender as a spectrum.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

René Boivin photographer, Paris, France, circa 1930.

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

Valérie Belin at Huxley-Parlour

Posted on February 21, 2018

The Stranger, from the series All Star, 2016. © Valérie Belin, courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery

We revel in the splendour of surfaces, rarely delving below them and often mistaking the appearance of things for their inner truth. With an unmistakable understanding of the pleasures of sight, French photographer Valérie Belin gives us what we want while simultaneously examining the intersections between identity and artifice with a luxurious exploration of the feminine in her large-scale artworks.

Belin’s gift lies in her ability to make us question the nature of our desires. Taking the notion of gender as a construct to the logical extreme, she photographs mannequins and models alike in a manner that simultaneously embraces and deconstructs our stereotypes.

“What I am trying to express in my work is related to my status as a woman, in a humble way. It doesn’t have a militant aesthetic nor a political discourse,” Belin says. She does just this in her eponymous exhibition, opening February 21 at Huxley-Parlour, London, which features 15 works from the series Transsexuals, Mannequins, Brides, Super Models, All Star, and Painted Ladies, made between 2001 and 2017. Here, Belin speaks about the power of images to shape our beliefs about what “female” means.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Brides_XXX, from the series Brides, 2012. © Valérie Belin, courtesy Huxley-Parlour Gallery

Categories: AnOther, Art, Photography, Women

Philip Trager: New York in the 1970s

Posted on February 16, 2018

West Broadway, 1978. © Philip Trager

In 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan convinced the Nixon White House to support a policy of “benign neglect,” wherein basic government services were systemically denied to cities across the United States with large African-American and Latinx populations.

New York City quickly became the nation’s most famous victim of “urban blight” at the hands of the state. The city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy as manufacturers fled en masse, while landlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings knowing they could get more money from insurance than they could from resale. The city fell into desolate and desperate straits. Yet within this horrific landscape, New York maintained its dignity and strength, becoming the site for the most explosive cultural movements of the late 20th century.

The city’s landmark buildings and dramatic vistas were a symbol of the potent energy that lay within, a vision that spoke to American photographer Philip Trager. He and his wife Ina packed a view camera and two tripods into their Jeep Commando and drove into Manhattan from Connecticut, where they lived at the time.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

West 122nd Street, 1979. © Philip Trager

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

John Edmonds: Family Pictures

Posted on February 16, 2018

American Gods, 2017. Photography John Edmonds.

In 1952, Roy DeCarava became the first African American photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship and he used the grant money to create a stunning series of black and white pictures documenting intimate moments of daily life of his native Harlem. The resulting work was a warm and wondrous portrait of the familial spirit of the community when Harlem was the Mecca of black life in the United States.

After book publishers rejected the work, DeCarava packed the photos up and kept them in his closet until epiphany hit. He decided to share them with his neighbour, the poet Langston Hughes, who immediately recognised the beauty of the world in which he lived. Hughes sifted through the 500 photographs DeCarava gave him and began to pen a fictional account of their hometown, a story of family among stranger that became The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the landmark photography book released in 1955, a feat of publishing to which countless artists and authors continue to aspire.

The Sweet Flypaper of Life has been chosen as the starting point for Family Pictures, a group exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, opening February 16, 2018, that spans a period of 60 years. Bringing together an intergenerational mix of some of the greatest African American photographers of our time – with works from John Edmonds, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Lorraine O’Grady, Gordon Parks, Sondra Perry, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems – the exhibition illustrated the ways in which family is a vital force in shaping the black community from the Civil Rights era to the present moment.

Hailing from Washington, D.C., John Edmonds is one of the youngest artists included in Family Pictures. Now 28, the Yale MFA graduate is a rising star on the photography scene, best known for creating a series of portraits that reveal a poignant and potent sense of intimacy that occurs in the act of creating art.

Growing up in the Christian church, being queer became a source of inner conflict that drove Edmonds in search of an understanding of self, of queer blackness, and of a place where he could be among family – a family he built himself through the act of making portraits. His photographs featured in the exhibition, made between 2012 and 2017, illustrate how one’s passions can create an empowered space for agency, community, and self-actualisation.

Edmonds, who will be publishing his own book with Capricious later this spring, speaks with us about how to create a portrait of your family in every sense of the word.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Biker Jacket, 2017. Photography John Edmonds.

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography

Kehinde Wiley & Amy Sherald; The Official Obama Portraits

Posted on February 16, 2018

When the official portraits of former President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama were unveiled on Monday, February 12, at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, all the world had something to say. Love them or hate them, one thing is sure: nothing about the portraits was in keeping with the traditions of the White House.

As the first African American President and First Lady, the Obamas brought vibrant colour and dynamic style to the conventional representation of supreme power. The choice of Kehinde Wiley, 40, and Amy Sherald, 44, was a political as well as aesthetic act, reinforcing the Obamas’ ongoing commitment to African American artists that includes the inclusion of Alma Thomas and Glenn Ligon in the official White House art collection.

With an intrinsic understanding of legacy, the Obamas know that political progress, like art, requires us to step ahead of the status quo and recognise that it may take them time to catch up. To some, the work of Wiley and Sherald might seem avant-garde but within the realms of art, they are very much of the here and now.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama” – 2018Amy Sherald, on display at National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Categories: Art, Dazed, Painting

A Portrait of the Legendary Barkley L. Hendricks

Posted on February 15, 2018

In October 1968, Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, made it plain in a court of law, when he faced conspiracy charges as part of the Chicago 8, stating: “We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people. You got that?”

Seale gave voice to a fact that was widely understood. So long as black folks are denied the opportunity to share their vision with the world, their lives and stories would be marginalised, misrepresented, or eradicated from the historical record.

Seale’s words were not lost on African American artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017), who donned a novelty Superman t-shirt, sunglasses, and nothing else for a self-portrait titled “Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved any Black People – Bobby Seale)” in 1969. The North Philadelphia native embodied the height of cool, a sensibility that dates back to 15th-century Nigerian Empire of Benin and has found its way across the African diaspora for six centuries.

Adopting the “cool pose,” with his arms folded across his chest against a simple grey backdrop framed in red, white, and blue, Hendricks tells it like it is. He is calm, fearless, and aloof, fully in control, poised, and dignified. Such is the strength of the painting that it was chosen as one of the primary images to promote Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the landmark traveling exhibition which originated at Tate – opening just a couple of months after Hendricks’ death on April 16 at the age of 72.

“If you’re gonna do it, you might as well be memorable,” Hendricks told Thelma Golden, the Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, in the seminal 2008 monograph, Birth of the Cool (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University), which has just been republished to include a memoriam to the artist and a selection of new images from his oeuvre.

The book, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher, brilliantly presents a masterful look at the figurative painting, a selection of which can be seen in the next iteration of Soul of a Nation, which opened earlier this month at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as in the exhibition catalogue, available from the Tate, which features Hendricks’ painting “What’s Going On” (1974) on the cover.

But Hendricks’ genius goes far beyond the known. In his death, a wealth of previously unseen works have been revealed. Today, at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, will present Barkley L. Hendricks, Them Changes, the first ever exhibition of newly discovered works on paper made contemporaneously with his famous portrait paintings.

These works take us inside Hendricks’ process, giving us a look at the way he crafted and mastered a visual language entirely his own. “While best known for his bold life-sized portraits, Hendricks is also an accomplished photographer, landscape painter, watercolourist, draftsman, assemblage artist, carpenter, and jazz musician,” Schoonmaker wrote in the introduction to Birth of the Cool, reminding us that the man behind the easel was just as fascinating as the subjects he painted.

Here Elisabeth Sann, Director of Jack Shainman Gallery, shares insights into Hendricks’ singular career that never fails to surprise and delight people from all walks of life.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith)”, 1976© Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Painting

Mr Chow: 50 Years

Posted on February 15, 2018

“Michael Chow, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat’s mother and friends” (1984). Silver gelatine print; 77/8 x 97/8 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Portrait of Michael Chow” (1984). Polymer silkscreened on canvas; 80 x 80 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Restauranteur. Designer. Architect. Art Collector. World Traveler. Icon of style and substance Michael Chow – or M, as he is known – has transformed fine dining into an art at Mr Chow, providing a magical bridge between the East and the West for the past fifty years.

M was born Zhou Yinghua in 1939 in Shanghai to Zhou Xingfang (1895-9175), a leading figure in the Peking Opera who wrote and acted in more than 650 titles during his illustrious career, and Lilian Qui (1905-1968), who hailed from a wealthy family whose fortune was made in tea.

At the age of 13, everything changed when M was sent to boarding school in London. What he didn’t know at the time was that he would never see or communicate with his father again. “Suddenly there was a void within me,” M reveals.

Into that chasm, M plunged – first in despair, then finding himself in art. He studied at St. Martins and went on to paint for a decade before the market forces made it apparent that it was not receptive to a Chinese artist. Once again, M turned to art to guide the way, launching the very first Mr Chow in Knightsbridge in February 1968.

From the very outset, Mr Chow was not just a restaurant – it was theatre: a stage for pleasure, passion, and intrigue, where Italian waiters served fine Chinese cuisine to sophisticated clientele and artworks by Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, and Jim Dine became an integral part of the experience. He established three restaurants in London before setting a course to conquer America.

Over the past half-century, M has opened restaurants in Beverly Hills, New York, Miami, and Las Vegas, always bringing glamour and theatre to the dining experience. Now, on the occasion of Mr Chow’s golden anniversary, M has released, Mr Chow: 50 Years (Prestel/Delmonico), a beautifully illustrated volume that explores a singular life in art, architecture, design, and cuisine, combining the very best of the east and the west.

Featuring works by Helmut Newton, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, Francesco Clemente, and Ed Ruscha, just to name a few, the book reveals the significant role Mr Chow has played in the art world over five decades. Here, M speaks with us about a life in art: the past, present, and future vision of a man whose magic has touched countless hearts.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Exclusive: Photographer Jamil GS Says Kendrick Lamar’s ‘LOVE.’ Video Copies His Work

Posted on February 13, 2018

Photo: Left: Kendrick Lamar’s ‘LOVE.’ video / Right: Jamil GS’s ‘Stick-ups’ series

About a minute and a half into the music video for Kendrick Lamar’s “LOVE.”, a scantily clad woman appears against a black backdrop, pulling pin-up poses, illuminated by a single source of light. It’s a stylish shot, and for any fans of hip hop photography, it might be familiar.

The image recalls “Outta Darkness”, a 2004-05 calendar of pin-up-style photos by Jamil GS, an influential photographer who has previously shot the likes of JAY-Z and Diddy and had his work exhibited alongside the likes of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. As the godfather of the ‘ghetto fabulous’ style of photography that reigned supreme during the 90s and early 00s, Jamil GS pioneered a look that took hip hop culture to the next level. He was surprised when he believed he saw his signature style replicated in Kendrick’s video.

“I’m disappointed that someone whose music I respect, and with such resources, would copy my work,” Jamil GS sighs. “When another artist or peer appropriates my work, it devalues it. I have a clear signature style that has taken years to develop and situations like this, if not called out, make it harder for me to market my work.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Art, Dazed, Music, Photography