Posts by Miss Rosen

Richard Boch: The Mudd Club

Posted on September 15, 2017

Photo: Mudd Club Fashion Show, 1980. Photography Nick Taylor.

Photo: Jackie Curtis and Bowie. Photography Bobby Grossman.

The Mudd Club: the name alone embodies the mystical, mythical essence of Old York – a city where you could reinvent yourself from the ground up. All it took was ingenuity, desire, and nerve to do-it-yourself, take it to the streets and show out on the world stage.

In the fall of 1978, the Mudd Club opened its doors at 77 White Street, long before anyone referred to the triangle below Canal as “Tribeca.” Back then it was an outpost on the frontier of downtown. As manufacturing shops packed up and left town, huge industrial buildings stood bare, attracting artists who transformed these commercial spaces into studios and homes. When they needed a break, they hit the Mudd, a tiny spot that became the ultimate nightclub, bringing together people from all walks of life.

Here the No Wave rubbed shoulders with Hip Hop, while graffiti writers and post punk musicians filled the joint. Everyone from Halston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Bowie to Nan Goldin, Lydia Lunch, and Dee Dee Ramone could be found in the mix. This is the place where Fab 5 Freddy taught Debbie Harry to rap and no one thought twice about a white woman dropping rhymes on the mic.

From 1979 to 1983, the Mudd Club was the place to be, the ultimate scene for insiders and outsiders alike, a place where art, music, fashion, and culture completely reinvented itself with luminaries like trans model Teri Toye, drag legend Joey Arias, and performance artist Klaus Nomi sharpening the cutting edge. On any given night, something wild and wonderful was going down, whether it was a theme party like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Funeral Ball,” a reading by William S. Burroughs, or a live performance by Nico.

For two years, at the Mudd Club’s height, Richard Boch manned the door, deciding who would make it past the legendary ropes and enter the delirious den of iniquity that embodied the downtown scene at its height. As a doorman, Boch played a critical role in casting the characters you would see inside, a glorious mélange of celebrities, local legends, and underground superstars. He has just released his memoir The Mudd Club (Feral House) and speaks with us about how to throw the hottest party in New York.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Ivy crash out at Mudd Club on the second floor, 1979. Photography Alan Kleinberg

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Stephen Barker: The ACT UP Portraits – Activists & Avatars, 1991–1994

Posted on September 15, 2017

Photo: Mark Harrington, copyright Stephen Barker

Halston. Robert Mapplethorpe. Keith Haring. Freddie Mercury. Eazy E. Antonio Lopez. Martin Wong. David Wojnarowicz. Herb Ritts. The list goes on – and on. More than 675,000 people have died of Aids-related illnesses since the epidemic first hit in 1981, devastating a generation coming-of-age in the wake of the gay, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Where it was once an all-consuming force decimating lives, survivors of the terror and trauma rarely revisit those horrific times. It is difficult to express the scale and scope of the agony of illness and the pain of death that happened day after day, year after year, for decades. Imagine a funeral for friends and family every week. Envision the fear spread by misinformation and ignorance, in the wake of a government that turned its back on the victims of the virus.

During the first four years of the crisis, President Ronald Reagan never said a word about the disease, which had infected nearly 60,000 people – 28,000 of whom had died. In 1987, Senator Jesse Helms amended a federal bill to prohibit Aids education, saying such efforts “encourage or promote homosexual activity.”

The battle lines were drawn: it was the people vs. the government.

In 1987, ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in response. Organised as a leaderless network of committees working with affinity groups, members of ACT UP took it upon themselves to battle the disease and the government firsthand. Their slogan, “Silence = Death,” became the rallying cry for activists, who, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, refused to go gently into the night. They raged until their actions turned the tide.

ACT UP took on every aspect of the crisis, coming up with grassroots solutions to clearly defined problems. Photographer Stephen Barker worked as part of ACT UP’s Needle Exchange Program on New York’s Lower East Side. He also participated in the first “Funeral March,” one of the most powerful public protests against the regime, wherein Mark Fisher’s body was carried in an open coffin from Judson Memorial Church to the steps of the Republican National Committee on the eve of the 1992 presidential election.

Barker’s photographs made during these actions, along with a selection from the “Nightswimming” series made in places where men regularly went for trysts, will be on view in the exhibition Stephen Barker: The ACT UP Portraits – Activists & Avatars, 1991–1994, at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York (September 14 – October 28, 2017). Below, he speaks with us about the lessons he learned in the fight for life and the war against death.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo; Funeral March, copyright Stephen Barker

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Sadie Barnette: Dear 1968…

Posted on September 12, 2017

Detail from My Father’s FBI File, Project III, 2017. Laser prints, aerosol paint, rhinestones, mounted on plexiglas, 28 pages, each 10 1_2 x 8 3_4.© Sadie Barnette. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI put Rodney Barnette on a watch list after the Vietnam veteran became co-founder of the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party. At the time, the FBI was running COINTELPRO at full speed, illegally using government operatives and resources to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise “neutralize” the Panthers.

For years, the FBI tracked Rodney’s every move, creating a 500-page dossier that his daughter, artist Sadie Barnette, finally secured after a four-year effort to obtain the files under the Freedom of Information Act. From these files, Barnette has crafted an incredible work, titled Dear 1968…, now on view at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery in Pennsylvania through October 13, 2017.

For Dear 1968, Barnette mines her father’s personal and political histories, using documents from the file, family photos, and drawings to reclaim Rodney’s humanity and reveal the U.S. government’s systemic abuse of power to oppress African-Americans operating well within their rights under the constitution.

Founded on October 16, 1966 in Oakland, CA, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was specifically created to protect American citizens from the abuses of the state. Under the protection of the Second Amendment, it created armed citizen patrols to openly monitor police officers and defend against rampant acts of police brutality.

“Our position was: If you don’t attack us, there won’t be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves,” Seale explained. But they didn’t stop there. Well versed in the letter of the law, the BPP established the Ten Point Platform and Program t hat called for freedom, full employment, reparations, housing, education, military exemption, end to police brutality and murder, freedom for the incarcerated, Constitutional rights during trial, and full self-determination.

The BPP filled a void and met a need, quickly mobilizing nationwide and setting up chapters in 68 cities within five years. Invariably, the United States government, which had long profited under the systems of slavery and Jim Crow, was incensed by this act of self determination and self preservation, and began a system of counter operations designed to take down what Hoover described as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

Detail from Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968), 2016, Two c-prints, 46×40 each.© Sadie Barnette. Courtesy of the artist

COINTELPRO had been operating illegally for years until the historic 1971 break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, which exposed the weapons of the government that had been using surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and ultimately murder to destabilize, discredit, criminalize and ultimately destroy the movement.

The break-in was organized by eight anti-war activists, including the late Haverford Professor of Physics and of Mathematics William Davidon. In response, Barnette has created a new work for the show titled “Untitled (Citizen’s Commission).”

“For this exhibition, I created a drawing that imagined a logo for the name the eight ‘burglars’ gave themselves—the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI,” said Barnette. “By giving themselves this official title, they imagined a world where the government is accountable to the people. They broke in because they rightly suspected that the FBI wasn’t simply gathering information, but was actively sabotaging their antiwar organizing. They weren’t fighting for privacy; they were fighting for the right to dissent.”

Barnette has been showing works from Dear 1968… throughout 2017, but they have taken on increasing significance following the actions in Charlottesville, where police officers were suspiciously absent from the right-wing protests and the current regime openly stood behind the KKK and Nazi movement. It would be naïve to think that COINTELPRO was a unique or ahistoric event, but it is not. It is simply the scheme that has been uncovered, while so many others operate under the cover of darkness and disinformation.

In bringing the story of her father’s persecution to light, Barnette reveals a truth: that some of the greatest terrorists we face as a nation are hiding in plain sight. Their paychecks are drawn from tax dollars and their missions against upstanding citizens of this nation are supported by the regime.

Karl Marx observed, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” — but he was wrong. The second, third, fourth, fifth, infinite repetition of the act is far from absurd. It is evidence of a malignant and despotic nature that is yet to be destroyed.

Detail from My Father’s FBI File, Project III, 2017. Laser prints, aerosol paint, rhinestones, mounted on plexiglas, 28 pages, each 10 1_2 x 8 3_4.© Sadie Barnette. Courtesy of the artist

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art

Tabitha Soren: Surface Tension

Posted on September 12, 2017

Though we may have the world at our fingertips, often the only thing we have to show for the minutes, hours, days gone by are a trail of greasy swipemarks left behind. Mindlessly, we wipe the evidence away and delve back in, sending and receiving photos, videos, and messages in a never-ending stream of digital consciousness.

We rarely consider, let alone see, how these actions change the way we perceive reality. Former television journalist Tabitha Soren took notice of this phenomenon one day while on a plane, reading the manuscript for her husband’s latest book on her iPad. When she turned off the machine, she noticed these grimy finger trails all across the surface. She instinctively whipped out her phone to snap a quick photograph, entranced by the marks of where she had “been”.

This single image became the catalyst for Surface Tension, a series of large-scale photographs that look at how we look, asking us to see beyond the appearance of things. Here, Soren saw an opportunity to reflect on the media we consume, transforming digital detritus into poetic, painterly images of images we might not otherwise see as art, such as America’s two greatest loves: cat videos and porn.

Soren, who got her start appearing in the Beastie Boys’ landmark 1987 music video, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party),” rose to fame as an anchor for MTV News, following Bill Clinton on the 1992 Presidential campaign trail, and interviewing controversial figures from Yasser Arafat to Anita Hill. After reaching the pinnacle of success, she decided to go behind the lens. Below, she speaks with us about the life on the other side of the camera.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Categories: Art, Dazed, Photography

Mark Rothko: The Color Field Paintings

Posted on September 9, 2017

Untitled, 1956

“I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else,” Mark Rothko told Selden Rodman for Conversations with Artists, published in 1961. “I am interested in only expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on…”

His intense, apocalyptic vision of humanity may have been formed in his youngest years, as a child born in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903. Growing up in an anti-religious family of Jewish origin in the final years of the Tsarist regime, Rothko (ne Markus Rothkowitz) left his native land at the age of 10 and emigrated to the United States.

Like his father before him, Rothko was a Marxist, passionate about workers’ rights. He received a scholarship to Yale, which he entered 1921. He found the bougie atmosphere of the Ivy League to be both elitist and racist, eventually dropping out at the end of his sophomore year.

He moved to New York in 1923, and decided to take up art after visiting the Art Students League. The 1920s were a major decade for Modern art, as Dada, Cubism, Supermatism, and Surrealism had liberated the artist from the confines of Western art that had them hemmed up with aesthetic and ideological concerns that had dominated the form since the Renaissance.

No. 14 (Untitled), 1955

Free from the strictures of representation and narrative, Rothko went his own way, forsaking both the traditions of painting as well as his family’s expectations that he pursue a more lucrative career. In 1940, he adopted the name “Mark Rothko” in an attempt to avoid the rabid anti-Jewish sentiment that had sprouted across Europe and throughout America.

As an artist, Rothko came into his own as he discovered the inherent power of pure aesthetics to stimulate emotions and mediate feeling. He intuitively understood the necessity of mythology and the way in which it worked to tap into the ever-flowing undercurrents of the collective unconscious. It was here, in this ethereal netherworld, that Rothko’s paintings began to manifest and achieve their goals.

The month, Rothko returns the for once again with Rothko: The Color Field Paintings, a sumptuous new monograph from Chronicle, along with Mark Rothko: Reflection, an exhibition of 11 masterpieces on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, September 24, 2017–July 1, 2018.

The glory of Rothko’s work is how timeless they are, how they both capture the ethos of the era in which they were made and transcend that specificity, so that they are eternally new and fresh, as much as radical now as they were then. It may be that this is due to the fact that no matter how much derivative work they inspired, nothing but nothing even comes close. The imitators pale and fade away in the presence of Rothko’s genius.

Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on orange), 1955

The human dimensionality of the work becomes a portal that transports us to another realm that exists both inside and outside ourselves. The works are as exhilarating as they are stilling, vibrant paths to the center of that which exists beyond words, the ineffable, ephemeral essence of God.

“The classic works, or sectionals, are Rothko’s signature works, and are well known for the deep feelings they evoke and their ability to articulate the language of the sublime,” his son Christopher Rothko writes in the foreword of Rothko: The Color Field Paintings.

He continues: “These works touch us because they know exactly ‘where we live.’ They speak to us, imparting a message akin to ‘this is what it feels like to feel this way.’ They are essentially the painted expression of what it is to be human and alive, filled with joy and sorrow, aspiration and despair, fears and hopes, and fears about our hopes…. My father had summoned his full voice—bold, impassioned, and confident, and, if occasionally bombastic, never strident or shouted.”

The paintings are operatic in nature and symphonic in sensation, transcending the visual realm, delving below the depths of the surface of things, which we truly understand when we use our eyes to perceive, rather than simply see.

All artwork: © Mark Rothko

Categories: Art

Jeanine Michna-Bales: Through Darkness to Light – Photographs Along the Underground Railroad

Posted on September 6, 2017

Stopover. Frogmore Plantation, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, 2014

Last Fall, I found myself sitting alone in a private coach driving along a quiet road through Fort Myers, Florida. It was late in the evening, and the sky had gone dark. There were no buildings, no traffic, and very few street lights as the coach drove along through the backwoods and deep thickets of the town. I gazed out the window and was suddenly a vision called from somewhere deep within the land overcame me. I shuddered but couldn’t unsee the invisible traces of history.

I keep these things to myself. Most people are not trying to hear messages without “evidence,” and even then… Shadowboxing with lies is a losing proposition and I quit that game. I simply see who said what now, flag, and keep it moving.

But when I came across Jeanine Michna-Bales’ photographs, Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, the vision came tumbling back. The photographs, published in a book from Princeton Architectural Press, are currently on view at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum in Bonner Springs, Kansas, and will be traveling around the nation through 2020.

Resting Place. Church Hill, Mississippi, 2015

On the Way to the Hicklin House Station. San Jacinto, Indiana, 2013

Fifteen years ago, Michna-Bales received the message and began to see, imagining in her mind’s eye what the journey along the Underground Railroad looked like to those who made the trip. She began to do the work, researching the details of the routes, scouting locations by day, and then, finally photographing them at night.

For the project, she traced a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana through the cypress swamps of Mississippi, across the plains of Indiana, and north to Canada, traveling nearly 1,400 miles to freedom. Michna-Bales shows us the American countryside as was then, as it is now, and in doing so, she reveals that time itself is an illusion. As William Faulkner understood, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”

Michna-Bales’ photographs are haunting elegies to the horrors that hide in plain sight, histories of trauma and exploitation that only the spiritually corrupt can ignore and the intellectually dishonest can diminish or deny. Her work operates on several levels at the same time. In the darkness there is cover, but there is also constant threat, where innocence and serenity lies alongside four centuries of brutality and genocide. There is heroism and bravery, courage and nobility—as well as the very real awareness that the greatest threat to this nation is homegrown, that the real terrorists pledge allegiance to the flag and will do its bidding without conscience or soul.

Moonlight Over the Mississippi. Tensas Parish, Louisiana, 2014

Look for the Gray Barn Out Back. Joshua Eliason Jr. barnyards and farmhouse, with a tunnel leading underneath the road to another station, Centerville, Indiana, 2013

Michna-Bales’ photographs are the embodiment of W.E.B. DuBois’ double consciousness: of you can only see a lyrical landscape, you do not know the truth about America. If you cannot feel the curious combination of fear and valor, you might be out of touch with the history of the nation and the debt it has yet to pay.

Through Darkness to Light is one of the most searing bodies of work made in recent years, eloquent in its ability to capture all that no longer has body or voice but blows through the air far and wide, always present even if you refuse to look.

I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now I was free.
There was such a glory over everything,
the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields,
and I felt like I was in heaven.
—Harriet Tubman

Within Reach. Crossing the St. Clair River to Canada just south of Port Huron, Michigan, 2014

All photos © Jeanine Michna-Bales.

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Marvin E. Newman: The XXL Collector’s Edition

Posted on September 4, 2017

Photo: Coney Island, 1953. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Photo: Wall Street, 1958. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Now in his 89th year, American photographer Marvin E. Newman is receiving his due as one of the finest street photographers of the twentieth century. His self-titled monograph, just released as a XXL Collector’s Edition from Taschen showcases his vibrant collection of cityscapes made in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles—as well as in the Heartland of the nation and the outskirts of Alaska between the years 1950 and 1983.

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Newman studied photography and sculpture at Brooklyn College with Walter Rosenblum. He joined the Photo League in 1948 before moving to Chicago the following year to study with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design. “They taught you to keep your mind open and go further, and always respond to what you are making,” Newman remembered.

It was here in Chicago that Newman began to shoot in color film, doing so at a time long before the medium was recognized. His comfort with color is evident throughout his work, as it becomes a harmonizing force and a whirlwind of energy and emotion as much as light itself.

After obtaining his degree in 1952, Newman returned to New York, which was undergoing a major change in the years immediately following the war. At the same time, the artist’s eye as developing and transforming his experience of life. He observed, “I was beginning to see the world in photographic terms. You start to see everything as a rectangle of some sort and see things that you feel are just made to be photographed.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Photo: Broadway, 1954. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Photo: Broadway, 1954. © Marvin. E Newman 2017 Howard Greenberg Gallery / Courtesy of TASCHEN.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Claudia Andujar: Tomorrow Must Not Be Like Yesterday

Posted on September 1, 2017

Claudia Andujar, Urihi-a, 1974 [2016], Inkjet print, 90 x 134 cm
Claudia Andujar / Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil

The Yanomami of Brazil live deep inside the rainforests of the Amazon. They have lived for thousands of years on their own, free from the imperialist forces that have punished the globe. But invariably, it was only a matter of time before they were invaded too.

They survived the slave-hunting expeditions of the Spanish and Portuguese made between 1630 and 1720 that decimated other complex tribes living along the river, continuing to inhabit some 9.6 million hectares, in what has become the largest forested indigenous lands in the world.

In 1955, Swiss photographer Claudia Andujar arrived in Brazil, unable to speak Portuguese but able to communicate with her pictures. She quickly began traveling into the interior, making contact with native groups. In 1971, she reached the Yanomami, and experience that changed her life.

She became an advocate and an activist, using her photography to communicate with the outside world, to tell the story of the Yanomami and their challenges in the face of imperialist policies threatens to destroy their way of life. Her photographs have been collected in Tomorrow Must Not Be Like Today, just released from Kerber.

In the book there is a curious sequence of portraits, called Maracados, where subjects were placards bearing numbers. Andujar explains, “The Yanomami do not use names. They have large families, and so everyone is referred to by their family relationship: father, mother, brother, and so on. We created health cards, and I took their pictures. We hung signs around their necks to be able to identify each of them on the health cards.”

But there was something more, something deeper and more haunting that speaks to the photographer’s personal investment in this truth. Andujar, who was born in 1931, recounts her childhood in Transylvania, when the Nazis invaded in 1944, “No one survived from my fathers side,” she reveals. “In the camps, numbers were tattooed on their arms. These were the marcados para morrer [marked to died]. What I was trying to do with the Yanomami was to mark them to live, to survive.”

For her efforts, the Brazilian government had her removed from the land in 1978, in order to prevent her advocating for Yanomami rights to the free world. It wasn’t until 1992 that the Yanomami’s right to their ancestral territories was recognized by the government.

Through it all, Andujar has continued along her path, working to bring the plight of the Yanomami to the public eye. She explains her mission as one that not only protects the people, but the planet as well, a poignant issue raised during a time where climate change is proving to be a global level extinction event.

“For at least the last 50 years, the Brazilian government, especially during the military dictatorship, has wanted to occupy the Amazonas region, cutting down trees to exploit the soil, the wood, and it is the same today. The government also discusses liberalizing mining, which would be a disaster,” she reveals.

“My work, my photography, addresses the problem. And I certainly strongly believe that you have to maintain a balance. You cannot develop a country at all costs. The biggest problem in the Yanomami territory is currently the invasion of their land, the extraction of minerals and gold, and I am opposed to felling trees to use the land for agriculture,” Andujar adds. “I am very concerned about all of this, and I pay a lot of attention to what the Yanomami say. They say we are approaching the end of the world. My work is all about how to prevent the end of the world.”

Godspeed.

Claudia Andujar, Metrópole, 1974 [2016], Inkjet print, 100 x 150 cm
Claudia Andujar / Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, Brazil

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Olivia Locher: I Fought the Law

Posted on August 31, 2017

Photo: In Texas it is illegal for children to have unusual haircuts. Photography Olivia Locher, published by Chronicle Books 2017

“Hey, do you know it’s illegal to have an ice cream cone in your back pocket in Alabama?” The question, posed by a friend during a photoshoot, kept echoing in Olivia Locher’s mind for months. Eventually, she hit up the Internet to check it out for herself, only to discover that this law, made during the nineteenth century, extended to the states of Kentucky and Georgia as well. Word on the street had it that thieves pulled this stunt in order to lure horses away, then plead innocent by claiming, “I didn’t steal him. He followed me!”

Ahh, those crafty Southerners – what will they think of next? Locher launched an investigation, delving into the criminal codes across the United States, digging up the dirt for I Fought the Law: Photographs by Olivia Locher of the Strangest Laws from Each of the 50 States, a new book releasing from Chronicle on September 5, which will also be exhibited at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, from September 14 through October 21, 2017.

Although many people would like to believe that laws are written to uphold moral, ethical principles, this is patently untrue. In many cases, they are written to reflect the biases of those who once wielded the power to write the rules. The USA, being a nation dedicated to states’ rights, has any number of bizarre, quirky, obscure laws on the books that few know about – as well as a host of urban legends that have captivated the public’s imagination.

For I Fought the Law, Locher compiled her favourite flagrant criminal codes and staged a series of charming photo shoots that embrace peculiar peccadillos from Arizona’s law against having more than two dildos in the house to Ohio, where it was once illegal to disrobe in front of a portrait of a man. Locher speaks with us about creating a tongue-in-chic portrait of the American outlaw.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85, A Sourcebook

Posted on August 31, 2017

Faith Ringgold (American, born 1930). For the Women’s House, 1971. Oil on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm). Courtesy of Rose M. Singer Center, Rikers Island Correctional Center. © 2017 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

If you say “97%,” folks that know will nod their heads. Numbers don’t lie, even when politicians are hard at work to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, systematically disenfranchising powerful voting blocks across the country.

97% is no lie. It is the truthiest truth. It is the word of African-American women made good. Perhaps better than just about any other group nationwide, black women know the nature of the status quo. Ever since Thomas Jefferson and his ilk raped children and adults alike, keeping and selling their own offspring as slaves, black women have born witness to horror and trauma that few dare name.

But the days of silencing and marginalizing have come to the end, as we enter a new age. No longer will we tolerate the whitewashing of history in the service of oppression, exploitation, and blood money. We wanted a revolution: today and tomorrow – until justice is served.

The Brooklyn Museum brings the heat, delving into a transformative period in American history. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, now on view through September 17, will be traveling around the country over the coming year,

You can see it for yourself at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (October 13, 2017 through January 14, 2018); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (February 17 – May 27, 2018); and at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (June 26 – September 30, 2018).

Should you be unable to see the show, or simply want more, something to have at home, you must pick up a copy of the Sourcebook, published by Duke University Press, as it goes beyond the traditional exhibition catalogue, becoming a singular artifact.

In this day of Google-this and Tweet-that, we tend to lose touch with the power of the printed object, of the way it can be held in the hand, perused in peace, without the jangling interruption of technology. It emits no blue light; it does not track your movements and record you activities; it does not interrupt you with push notifications, telephone calls, or text messages. It allows you to be with the writer’s voice alone, a singular audience of one, silent but for their words inside the sanctity of your mind.

The Sourcebook rounds up and republishes rare documents be iconic figures of the time, including Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. Many of the documents are reproduced in facsimile form, recreating the spirit of the period and its style.

Suddenly, it all comes rushing back — whether you were there or not. The printed page becomes a repository of soul and here you can finally be set free. Liberated from the endless scroll that is designed to zap you of the force required to organize, a Sourcebook restores to you the power you need to keep the revolution going, 360 degrees.

The lessons of the past are all the more poignant today; it’s not that we forgot, it’s that PTSD is real. The counterattack was as brutal as it was gloved, hidden in plain sight through the genocidal practices of benign neglect, crack, AIDS, and the prison industrial complex. The counterrevolutionaries stay organized, working against Nature and Truth, trying to roll back the clock as though such a thing were possible.

The Sourcebook is an exquisite tool: it is a necessity. It is art weaponized and an act of love to the self. Far be it for me to say more than Get yours today.

Jan van Raay (American, born 1942). Faith Ringgold (right) and Michele Wallace (middle) at Art Workers Coalition Protest, Whitney Museum, 1971. Digital C-print. Courtesy of Jan van Raay, Portland, OR, 305-37. © Jan van Raay

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s

Happy Birthday Helen Levitt

Posted on August 31, 2017

Photo: Helen Levitt, Untitled, New York City,1972

It was a coup, in every sense of the word. Helen Levitt was giving an interview. Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker was the lucky cat who received the invitation to Helen’s fifth-floor walk up apartment on 12th Street.

I had not yet met her, but we had spoken on the phone, and I could hear her Bensonhurst accent as she cut things down to size. The story was published in November 2001, and the city as still reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Center.

I, too, lived on 12th Street that year. I knew the horror of being close, but not too close, to it all, just outside the deepest circle of hell. It was visceral, on levels its impossible to articulate, particularly for any True Yorker who had lived through the government warfare under benign neglect, crack, and AIDS.

The interview was done in tandem with the release of “Crosstown,” Helen’s magnum opus that was just released from powerHouse. It was a picture of New York that insiders know: life on the street, perhaps the best thing about this town.

Gopnik sang her praises, calling her New York’s poet photographer laureate. And to be fair, he wasn’t wrong. I just fell down a Tumblr rabbit hole of her work. But, there was another Helen, the one I wish I got to know, the broad from Brooklyn, ya dig.

I can still hear her scratchy voice in my mind’s ear, as Gopnik broached the subject of 9/11. It sounded like he was looking for guidance and wisdom, something to help the readers of the magazine deal with the trauma that had devastated their daily lives. Who better than a lifelong New Yorker who had reached her nonagenarian year to offer a word of solace?

Gopnik asked Helen what she thought New Yorkers should do in the wake of the tragedy.

“I think yous should get the hell out,” Helen said, succinctly.

Happy Birthday Helen Levitt ~*~ thanks for the memories !

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Painting