Posts by Miss Rosen

The Best New Books on Contemporary African Art

Posted on July 27, 2017

Photo: Nana Kofi Acquah: Afro on purple. Silhouette of my daughter. Accra, Ghana. @africashowboy. From Everyday Africa: 30 Photographers Re-Picturing a Continent (Kehrer Verlag).

In recent years, contemporary African art has risen to the fore with some of the most original, creative, and inspiring visions of life today. Drawn from a vast swath of tribes and cultures across the continent that date back for hundreds and thousands of years and brought up to date for the new millennium, the arts of Africa defy all expectation—except that they remain on the cutting edge.

Crave has compiled the best new publications showcasing African art today, capturing the spirit of the peoples, reflecting on the issues at hand, and crafting innovative solutions to the challenges facing the nations rising out of the struggles incumbent 0n achieving independence from foreign imperialists.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Luke Willis Thompson: Autoportrait

Posted on July 26, 2017

Artwork: Luke Willis Thompson, autoportrait, (2017). Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery 2017. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and produced in partnership with Create. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

July 6, 2016, had begun as so many other nights had for 32-year-old Philando Castile, a nutrition services supervisor at J.J. Hill Montessori School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Castile had gone out for a haircut, then to dinner with his sister before picking up his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter. The family of three had gone food shopping and were heading home for the evening.

It was just after 9:00 p.m. when St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez spotted the white 1997 Oldsmobile on the road and radioed into a nearby squad car, saying, “The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose. I couldn’t get a good look at the passenger.”

At 9:05 p.m. CDT, Yanez ordered Castile to pull over and approached the car. Forty seconds later, he shot Castile seven times at point blank range in an extrajudicial killing witnessed by millions on Facebook Live.

Reynolds had the presence of mind to film the incident from start to finish, showing the world the truth: what happens when a black man legally carries a firearm in the United States. Yanez asked for his license and registration. Castile informed Yanez that the information was in his wallet, and that he was carrying a firearm. He reached for his wallet to show the documents requested and Yanez freaked out. He became convinced that Castile was going to pull his gun, despite Castile’s dying words: he was following the law.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

Posted on July 26, 2017

On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael stood before a crowd of 3,000 in a park in Greenwood, Mississippi, who had gathered to march in place of James Meredith, who had been wounded during his solitary “Walk Against Fear” in an effort to integrate the University of Mississippi.

Carmichael, who had been arrested after setting up camp, took to the stage with fire in his gut. “We’ve been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” the newly appointed chairman of the SNCC announced, “What we are going to start saying now is ‘Black Power!’”

With those words, Carmichael did more than change the paradigm for Civil Rights, he transformed the language of race itself. Up until that time, Americans had been using the word “Negro,” taken from the Spanish slave trade. It’s linguistic resemblance to the “N” word was all-too evident; the Spanish word for “Black” that was commonly used had been corrupted by English speakers and infested with pathological hatred, fear, and rage.

Carmichael embraced the word “Black” while simultaneously making the case that “Negro” was the oppressor’s term of diminution and disrespect. Malcolm X, who had had been killed a year earlier, was also a proponent for the word “Black.” By the decade’s end, Ebony was using it exclusively, helping to guide the group towards a self-chosen identity that the rest of the nation came to use.

Why does this matter? Because we think in words; the very terms we use to describe the world, and the connotations they hold, inform our beliefs and perceptions, whether we realize it or not. “Black Power” began in the very naming of the act. It was a means of transforming identity from one that was given to that which was claimed.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Betye Saar, Rainbow Mojo, 1972. Paul Michael diMeglio, New York.

Artwork: Emma Amos, Eva the Babysitter, 1973. Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Lee Gallery, NY.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Slava Mogutin: Bros & Brosephines

Posted on July 24, 2017

Photo: © Sloava Mogutin.

Photo: © Sloava Mogutin.

Born in Siberia, Slava Mogutin left his family and moved to Moscow at the age of 14. A third-generation writer and self-taught journalist, Mogutin worked for independent newspapers, publishers, and radio stations, where he was hailed as one of the foremost voices of the post-Perestroika news journalism and the only openly gay personality in the Russian media.

Using the press as his platform, Mogutin openly challenged the taboos against homosexuality in his native land, becoming the target for two highly publicised criminal vases that charged him with “malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence.”

In 1994, Mogutin attempted to officially register the first same-sex marriage in Russia with his then-partner, American artist Robert Filippini, making headlines around the world and fuelling persecution by authorities. A year later, at the age of 21, he was forced to flee and became the first Russian to be granted political asylum in the United States on the grounds of homophobic persecution.

His arrival in New York launched a new chapter of his life centred in the visual arts. Using photography, Mogutin continued to challenge the status quo, introducing radical narratives that peeled back the veneer of polite society and respectability politics. With the 2006 publication of his first monograph, Lost Boys (powerHouse Books) Mogutin achieved global recognition for photographs that blurred the boundaries between sex and style, fusing the genres of nudes, portraiture, documentary, fetish, porn, fashion, and fine art into images that were as provocative as they were profound.

Mogutin is an unstoppable force. On August 1, he will release Bros & Brosephines (powerHouse Books), a collection of 240 photographs from 17 professional and personal series made between 2000-2015. While some of the images were made on big-budget sets, others were done relying on the kindness of friends and strangers. As diverse as the styles and subjects are, the one thing they share in common is their commitment to the avant-garde.

Mogutin gives us an exclusive look at the book and speaks about how art is the perfect catalyst for creativity and play, as well as a means to taking a stance and speaking truth to power.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Photo: © Sloava Mogutin.

Photo: © Sloava Mogutin.

Categories: Art, Bronx, Dazed, Photography

Keith Haring: Posters

Posted on July 20, 2017

Artwork: Keith Haring (1958-1990). Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death, Fight Aids Act Up, New York, USA, 1989. Offset lithograph, 61,1 x 109,5 cm. © Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring (1958-1990) was more than a Pop artist—he was a populist. He made his name in 1980 when he went underground, descending to the subterranean level that New Yorkers know all too well: the subway platform. It was here that Haring set to work, creating a series of white chalk drawings on black paper that had been placed over unrented advertising spaces.

These works, known collectively as Subway Drawings, were an instant hit among people from all walks of life. Because they were made in chalk, rather than marker and spray paint, and depicted recognizable figures rather than hard-to-read graffiti tags, they instantly caught on with people who found the Wild Style of the times simply too taxing to their nervous system.

He softened the punch that graffiti aimed at one and all, and in doing so he was well-received by the art world and the mainstream. But Haring was no punk; he had a message and a style all his one, one that he quickly honed into an industry. In 1982, he began producing posters, one of the most democratic forms of visual culture at the time with its ability to use the systems of mechanical reproduction to distribute reproductions at an affordable price.

Haring seized these opportunities to spread the word, to use the highly popular mode of poster art to reach the broadest audience possible. Of the approximately 100 posters he made during his life, less than 20% were for his shows; instead he focused his efforts on collaborating with like-minded organizations and companies to bring their message to life in a way that was emblematic of the 1980s: bold graphics, bright colors, and good vibes.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: Keith Haring (1958-1990). Montreux 1983, 17ème Festival du Jazz, Juillet 8-24, 1983. Silk-screen print, 100 x 70 cm © Keith Haring Foundation.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

Posted on July 19, 2017

Photo: Dennis Hopper, Selma, Alabama (Full Employment), 1965, Gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard, 6 2/5 x 9 4/5 inches. Courtesy of The Hopper Art Trust and Kohn Gallery.

Dennis Hopper (1949-2010) is best known to the world as an actor and director whose films sharpened the cutting edge, whether appearing in Rebel Without a Cause (1954), Easy Rider (1969), or Blue Velvet (1986). Hopper didn’t play by the rules that Hollywood wrote, and quickly earned the reputation of being “difficult.” Finding himself ostracized by a studio system that loved to sell rebellion but couldn’t tolerate it within its own ranks, Hopper turned to photography.

His first wife Brooke Howard gave him a Nikon, and he began documenting the world in which he lived—and he lived hard. He attended the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery March in 1955, hanging out with outlaw biker gangs, art stars, musicians, and actors. He created the cover art for the Ike & Tina Turner classic “River Deep – Mountain High,” released in 1966, and was described as an up-and-coming photographer by Terry Sothern in Better Homes and Gardens (of all places).

“But I tell you the truth,” Luke wrote (4:24). “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.” And so it was for Hopper, who showed his work around the globe, that his first major photography retrospective in Los Angeles only occurred after his death. Yet this is where our story begins, for it was at the exhibition preview at the Museum of Contemporary Art that Julian Schnabel introduced Petra Gilroy Hertz, author of his book of Polaroids, to Hopper’s daughter, Marin.

In an interview with The Telegraph in 2012, Marin indicated she did not feel the museum had done Hopper justice. She decided to partner with the Hopper family to create another exhibition and was invited to the family home in Venice Beach. It was here, in the garage, when luck struck and an additional five boxes containing 429 prints that Hopper had exhibited at the Fort Worth Museum in 1970, were rediscovered.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Dennis Hopper, Ike and Tina Turner, 1965, Gelatin silver print mounted on cardboard, 6 2/5 x 9 4/5 inches. Courtesy of The Hopper Art Trust and Kohn Gallery.

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Sanne De Wilde: The Island of the Colorblind

Posted on July 18, 2017

Photo: Jaynard (achromatope) climbs a tree in the garden, to pick fruits and play. I took the picture while he was climbing back down. The sun comes peeking through the branches; bright light makes him keep his eyes closed. Sadly local people are often not growing their own food. But the trees around them naturally grow coconuts, breadfruit, bananas and leaves used to chew the betelnuts. © Sanne De Wilde.

Photo: On the way back from a picknick to one of the uninhabited small islands around Pingelap with the colorblind Pingelapese and all the children of the one school of the island. The bay is now protected, islanders are no longer allowed to fish for turtles. Because of the infrared colors the scene looks very romantic, at the same time there’s the visual connotation of the boats full of refugees setting off for a better future. © Sanne De Wilde.

More than a thousand years ago, peoples of an unknown origin arrived in Pingelap, one of the 80 atolls scattered through the Pacific Ocean around Pohnpei, in Micronesia. Over a period of eight centuries, the flourished under an elaborate system of hereditary kings, oral culture, and mythology that kept the population of nearly 1,000 thriving.

Then, in 1775, everything changed. Typhoon Lengkiekie swept across Pingelap decimating the island nation. Of the estimated 20 survivors was the king. Of great fortune to the tribe was their extreme fertility. Within a few decades, the population was approaching 100, but with this came the continuation of a genetic condition of the king. He carried the achromatospia-gen; he was colorblind—and soon, so were many people on the tiny atoll.

In Pingelap, an estimated 5% of the population of 700 are colorblind, whereas the figures are closer to an estimated 1 in 30,000 anywhere else on earth. The phenomenon was first documented by neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who set up a clinic in a one-room island dispensary, where islanders described their colorless world in terms of light and shadow, pattern and tone, transforming their history into the book The Island of the Colorblind (A.A. Knopf, 1997).

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Photo: Jaynard (achromatope) plays with a disco-light-torch I brought from Belgium. I asked him what he saw. He answered ‘colors’ and kept staring into the light. © Sanne De Wilde

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Godlis: Miami Beach, 1974

Posted on July 15, 2017

Best known for his photographs of the burgeoning punk scene down on the Bowery made in between 1976-1979, Godlis created his historic images of downtown New York in the same spirit of Brassaï’s Paris at Night. It was just two years earlier that Godlis created the photographs in Miami Beach that he describes as “the first time I took really good pictures that didn’t look like anyone else.”

Godlis took up photography in 1972. A year later he began studying at Imageworks Photography in East Cambridge, where he discovered the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Robert Frank. But it wasn’t until he went down to Miami Beach that he found his eye, perhaps due to the fact that he was returning to a pivotal place from his formative years.

In the 1950s, his grandfather retired and moved to Miami Beach, purchased a multi-apartment complex and began renting out units. He kept a few apartments for the family so they would have somewhere to stay for free. Godlis remembers his mother would take him for a visit during the winter and they wouldn’t return to New York until the weather changed. He went every winter as a child until he was in high school. When Godlis returned to Miami Beach in 1974 at the age of 22, it felt like a homecoming. For the first time since he took up photography, he was able to relax and let the pictures happen.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1970s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Rex Ray: We Are All Made of Light

Posted on July 15, 2017

Rex Ray. Platismatia No.2 (detail), 2010, pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper, 42” x 62”, published by Gallery 16 Editions.

San Francisco in the early 1990 was covered by the shroud of death, as AIDS swept through the city, devastating a generation. Those who lived through the epidemic were forced to come to terms with the unthinkable: to carry on understanding the depths of the absence and the lives stolen from us.

Artist Rex Ray (1956–2015) exhibited a piece at the final show at Kiki Gallery titled “Waiting for a Fax from Yoko,” which featured an unplugged fax machine set on a podium. Outside the gallery, Clifford Hengst sang as Yoko Ono, accompanied by Ray’s guitar feedback—and together they performed until the police came to shut the whole thing down.

By the time of the performance, Ray had already been working as a graphic artist, trained before the advent of computer technology. He designed the first ACT UP! logo before they adopted the Gill Sans logo, “Silence = Death.” He abandoned the group when strangers arrived at the meetings talking about using bombs.

Although he work was not overtly political, he understood the stakes and the forces at work. But he refused to abandon the importance of beauty, a central element no matter what he did. His style, which embraced the influences of the Arts and Crafts movement, Fluxus, Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, organic and hard-edged abstraction, pattern and textile design, and Op Art gave his work mass appeal, landing him commissions to design album covers for David Bowie, U2, Björk, Radiohead, and R.E.M., and collaborations Apple, Dreamworks and Swatch, among many others.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Rex Ray. Wall of Sound (detail).

From REX RAY: We Are All Made of Light by Gallery 16.

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Crave

A Tribute to Gianni Versace on the 20th Anniversary of His Death

Posted on July 15, 2017

Designer Gianni Versace at home. (Photo by David Lees/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

On the morning of Tuesday, July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace, the adored Italian fashion designer, was returning home after taking a walk down Ocean Drive in Miami Beach to pick up his morning papers. It was a task he usually had an assistant do, but he had been in high spirits after a week of haute couture fashion shows in Rome for the biannual Alta Moda Alta Rome.

Just as he as unlocking the wrought iron gates outside Villa Casa Casuarina, his Mediterranean Revival style mansion, a young white man approached Versace and shot him twice in the back of the head at point blank range. The killer fled the scene in a vehicle that looked like a taxi and dumped his clothes in a nearby garage.

Police arrived quickly to the scene but it was too late. Versace, just 50 years old, was dead.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1990s, Crave, Fashion

How the Blackout of 1977 Helped Hip Hop Blow Up

Posted on July 13, 2017

At dawn, the Manhattan skyline shows no lights due to a power blackout, New York, New York, July 14, 1977. The photo was taken from Jersey City, New Jersey. (Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)

On the evening of July 13, 1977, DJ Disco Wiz and his partner Casanova Fly (later Grandmaster Caz) were in the park on Valentine and 183rd Street in the Bronx with their sound system set up for a battle with a local cat they had regularly been blowing off. But DJ Eddie wouldn’t take no for an answer, so they relented and gave him a chance to make a name for himself.

The city had been going through a ten-day heat wave with temperatures above 100. Wiz was concerned if their small portable fans would keep the amps cool, as they didn’t have internal cooling systems. Although it was hot and humid, people were having a good time. Around 9:30 p.m., Caz got on the turntables. Then the record slowly spun to a stop.

It wasn’t unusual for them to lose power in them middle of a park battle; they hooked their sound system up to the lamppost and had drained the electricity before. But this night, something was different as they watched the street lights go out in rapid succession. Then they realized all the lights in the buildings had gone dark. Suddenly, they heard a huge BANG. A bodega owner had just slammed the gate to his store shut.

As gates on the block began slamming down right and left, it dawned on everyone: Blackout! The crowd started yelling, “Hit the stores! Hit the stores!” Then they advanced on Wiz and Caz, thinking they could jack their sound system. But the DJs stayed strapped. Guns drawn, they pointed directly at the crowd, as Caz ordered, “Go that way, motherfuckers!”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1970s, Bronx, Crave, Music