Posts from the “1960s” Category

Jonas Mekas: A Dance with Fred Astaire

Posted on October 4, 2017

Jonas MekasPhotography John Lennon. Photo courtesy of Anthology Editions

At 94-years-old, Jonas Mekas is undergoing a literary renaissance. The esteemed filmmaker, poet, and artist is publishing five books of work, most notably A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions), a visual autobiography comprised of anecdotes and drawn from Mekas’ life after his arrival in New York in 1949.

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas was a teen when the Russian Army invaded his homeland. As he and his brother, Adolfas, attempted to flee in 1944, they were captured and forced to spend eight months in Elmshorn, a Nazi labour camp. When the war ended, they became Displaced Persons living in refugee camps, until finally able to emigrate to America, settling in Brooklyn.

Once in town, Mekas planted new roots, from which the tree of life has grown firm, with many branches bearing countless fruits. At his deepest core, is a love for cinema, its revolutionary forms, and a profound respect for the avant-garde. Together with his brother, Mekas launched Film Culture magazine, which ran from 1954 to 1996. His commitment to community went far and wide, enabling him to serve a need and fill a void.

Mekas became the first film critic for the Village Voice, founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which has since evolved into Anthology Film Archives, located in the heart of the East Village. Along the way, he met and collaborated with some of the greatest figures of the times, from Andy Warhol to Salvador Dalí, John Lennon to Jacqueline Onassis.

As you weave your way through his work, the words of Plato reveal themselves time and again: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” His is a singular life unlike any other, one filled with passion, determination, and innovation. His stories inspire, enlighten, and entertain with equal parts charm, courage, and originality. Mekas takes us on a stroll down memory lane, sharing the knowledge and wisdom garnered from a lifetime dedicated to art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

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

Jane Friedman: How to Find Artists That Can Change the World

Posted on October 3, 2017

Photo: Mark Sink, Grace Jones, ca 1988

Artwork: Arturo Vega, “Supermarket Sign(Steak Sale)”, 1973. Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches

Located in the heart of New York’s East Village, Howl! Happening was established in memory of artist Arturo Vega, who designed the iconic Ramones logo. Vega, a Mexican national, fled his native land in 1968 when the government rounded up 148 of the country’s most notable artists and intellectuals, putting their lives at risk. Vega fled to New York where he had prominent connections, like Jane Friedman – the woman made rock’n’roll journalism a legitimate business.

New York native Jane Friedman grew up on Broadway, as her father handled public relations for legendary shows along the Great White Way. Friedman followed in her father’s footsteps, and along the way, she realised her talents would be best served by supporting the greatest artists of the time. She went on to craft a new lane in the media, representing artists like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, as well as doing PR for the famed musical Hair. She was also Patti Smith’s manager throughout her career.

Friedman has been a behind-the-scenes fixture in downtown New York, working with artists and musicians to ensure their success and legacy. When Vega, one of her dearest friends died in 2013, Friedman set up Howl! Arts, a non-profit organisation that preserves the culture of the East Village and the Lower East Side in a rapidly gentrifying city that has effectively erased so much of the New York’s fabled past.

Taking its name from Allen Ginsberg’s famed 1955 poem, Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project is the cornerstone of the organisation. A gallery, performance space, and archive located around the corner from where CBGBs once stood, Howl! Happening has been home to a series of phenomenal shows including exhibitions by Patricia Field, Lydia Lunch, Taboo!, PUNK Magazine’s 40th Anniversary, and The East Village Eye – as well as on-going events and performances that showcase the very best of the community, which continues to thrive despite the exponential explosion in the cost of living.

This month, Howl! presents Love Among the Ruins: 56 Bleecker Gallery Street and the late 80s New York, a group exhibition that looks back at the famed East Village gallery and performance space that served as a vital intersection of music, fashion, art, and nightlife during one of the most vital and devastating period of New York history. Featuring works by nearly 100 artists including David LaChapelle, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dondi White, Stephen Sprouse, and George Condo, to name just a few, the exhibition is on view through October 7, 2017.

Friedman speaks with us about what it takes to cultivate a community of artists that can change the world, while staying true to your roots, and shares images from the ongoing show.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Straight to Hell flyer

Photo: Mark Sink, Keith Haring, ca 1988

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Painting, Photography, Women

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985

Posted on September 28, 2017

Photo: Sandra Eleta (Panamanian, b. 1942), Edita (la del plumero), Panamá (Edita (the one with the duster), Panama), 1978-1979. Black and white photograph. 30 × 30 in. (76.2 × 76.2 cm)Courtesy of the artist. Artwork © the artist

“I don’t give a shit what the world thinks. I was born a bitch, I was born a painter, I was born fucked. But I was happy in my way. You did not understand what I am. I am love. I am pleasure, I am essence, I am an idiot, I am an alcoholic, I am tenacious. I am; simply I am,” Frida Kahlo wrote in a letter to her husband, artist Diego Rivera.

The Mexican artist, who faithfully painted self-portraits throughout the course of her life, has become not only one the most famous artists in the world, but is very often the only Latin American women artist most people know by name. The invisibility of her comrades can be attributed to the power structures within the art world that disregarded the major contributions that women from 20 countries have been making to the art world throughout the twentieth century.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, a new exhibition on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, is a major step towards setting the record straight with more than 260 works by 116 women artists now on view through December 31, 2017. Curated by Dr. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Dr. Andrea Giunta, Radical Women is a watershed moment in the art world, illustrating the power of intersectionality in the new millennium.

Six years in the making, Radical Women brings together women from across Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the United States, showcasing the works of pioneers making art on their own terms, including Brazilian art star Lygia Pape, who had a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year; visionary Venezuelan Pop artist Marisol, who died at the age of 83 in 2016; and the gender-bending self-portraiture of Cuban American performance artist Ana Mendieta, whose husband was found not guilty of her murder in 1985.

The exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue of the same name, published by Prestel, is a brilliant introduction to both the artists and the issues they face as women in the Latin American diaspora, providing their own take on feminism, patriarchy, gender, sexuality, identity, and art history. We spotlight six artists you should know, who have inherited the mantle from the indomitable Frida Kahlo.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: “Marcha gay (Gay pride march)”, 1984. Gelatin silver print. 11 × 14 in. (27.9 × 35.6 cm) Courtesy of Yolanda Andrade.

Photo: Paz Errázuriz (Chilean, b. 1944), La Palmera, from the series La manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple), 1987. Digital archival pigment print on Canson platinum paper. 19 5/8 × 23 1/2 in. (49.8 × 59.7 cm)Courtesy of the artist and Galeria AFA, Santiago. Artwork © the artist.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography, Women

Kerry James Marshall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Untitled (Curtain Girl), 2016, acrylic on PVC panel, 76 x 61 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Extreme blackness plus grace equals power,” Kerry James Marshall observed, revealing an essential truth of the nature of the world. From a purely aesthetic sense, black is a color and it is something more. It is both the complete absence or absorption of light. It takes in all colors of the visible spectrum becoming the amalgamation all that we know, becoming the alpha and the omega: from where we begin and to where we return.

In this way, Africa as the birthplace of humanity makes perfect sense: from blackness all colors of wo/mankind have been birthed. Black is one of the first colors used by artists painting in the caves of Europe, those prehistoric beings who intuitively understood that essential power of the hue rested in both its immediate impact and its longevity.

With homo sapiens dating back nearly 200,000 years in Africa, in the grand scheme of history it is only in recent times that some have chosen to vilify blackness. Europeans became obsessed with framing it in a negative light, crafting the idea of race as a justification for a campaign of global imperialism that systematically pillaged, enslaved, and decimated peoples of a darker hue across Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

From this we have inherited trauma rooted in profound psychosis that posits us in a position to spread truth to power. Giving voice to that which has been silenced, giving sight to that which has been distorted or erases, giving sanctuary to that which has been targeted for destruction: this is our shared responsibility. Each of us brings talents and gifts, wisdom and understanding, experiences and insights that fill in the blanks, fitting together like a puzzle of billions of pieces that reveal the image of God.

But… such a picture may never appear but that’s no reason to do what we must, for it is in our individual efforts that we light the spark of inspiration and fuel the flames of action. American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama) leads by example, dedicating his life to the creation of a body of work that restores black to its rightful place.

His recent touring exhibition Mastry has claimed the space that it deserves, in the highest echelons of wealth, power, and history: the realm of fine art. In conjunction with the exhibitions, Phaidon has just released Kerry James Marshall, the most comprehensive book published on the artist.

The book is a tour-de-force, providing a comprehensive look at Marshall’s singular career and the ways in which he has used painting as a site for the writing of history. Marshall’s life itself traces the course of America over the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with the artist’s formative years deep in the heart of Dixie under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

In 1963, his family joined the final wave of the Great Migration, moving to South Central Los Angeles, just in time to experience the horrors of the Watts riots in 1965. “By the time the riots got to where we were, it was like a carnival,” Marshall tells Charles Gaines in the book. “The violence that took place was confusing to me.… I started to see that the responsibility for my needs shifted to me as opposed to a collective. I try never to approach a thing as if I’m one hundred percent certain about what it is or what the proper response to it is supposed to be.”

Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20 x 16 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, photo: Matthew Fried, © MCA Chicago

With a perspective rooted in openness and self-reliance, Marshall set forth on a journey rooted in discovery. His purpose began to take shape in 1980, when he painted A Portrait of the Artists as a Shadow of His Former Self, a work that recalls the influence of the great African American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946). But here, Marshall began his exploration of the power of black, of the color that would come to be a signature element in his work.

He told Gaines, “This was when it started to look like there was something that could be done with the black figure, that it could be used to explore ideas that are not only relevant to picture making by itself but also to convey some of those ideas that I’d been developing about where black people fit in. Before then, apart from the self-portraits, which I’d do as an exercise, I was still doing still lifes and paintings of inanimate objects in order to figure out how to paint…. [The issue of race] really came into focus with that one painting.”

With his focus honed and his skills at the ready Marshall set forth to create a body of work depicting the African American experience in all of its complexities, a profound portrait of a people that embraces the heroism of daily life, while also underscoring the culture and its relationship to the individual.

“To recognize the diversity of Blackness (to use Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s militantly colloquial spelling) would be to recognize that there is such a place as the interzone that poet Elizabeth Alexander once termed The Black Interior – primarily a psychic space where flocks of self-actualized black subjectivites freely roam about, walkabout and roust about, “Greg Tate writes in the book.

“If you happen to own the Black Interior that belongs to Kerry James Marshall and you dare to take up the ambitious mission of rendering the interiors of the Black Whole – that loud, proud, obsidian realm saturated with oscillating frequencies, swooping modalities, spiky plateaus, swampy valleys, funky declensions, cosmic ascents, elaborate head rooms, and wickedly salty tall-tales – you have already reckoned with apprehending the liminality of American Blackness: the half hidden/half revealed qualities of that Free Bloack Thang that Duke Ellignotn believed imbued all truly black expression with a lofty and iridescent aura of transluesency, “Tate explained.

And, indeed, that one magnificent sentence is as much as masterpiece as the paintings it describes, so perfectly modulated in its nuances that the complexities of its content simply dissolve before your very eyes. It is what it is, as the classic African-American proverb recognizes.

And what it is restores balance to the earth, the soul and the spirit, the present moment and the history books. The mastry of Kerry James Marshall is a vision to behold, a marvel of necessity, desire, and self determination that leads by example and keeps the promise that possibility, when realized, is God made manifest on earth.

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

The 5 Art Shows You Need to See This Fall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Photo; Dawoud Bey. A Boy in Front of the Loew’s 125th Street Movie Theater 1976, Printed by 1979. Gelatin Silver print 230 x 150. Featured in “States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era“

Philippe Halsman, A Paragon of Beauty, Dalí’s Moustache, 1953-54.
Vintage photomontage print. 35.3 x 23.5 cm. Philippe Halsman Archive, New York © Philippe Halsman Archive. From “Dali/Duchamp”

Fall is when everything begins, as the new season kicks into gear and people get in the swing of things. As your calendar fills up, there’s no better time to get away from it all and dip into a museum to catch an exhibition that will inspire the soul and inflame the mind. Crave spotlights five of the best new shows opening this season, each one a phenomenal collection of art and ideas.

States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era

The history of the United States is a multifaceted mosaic of experiences, tiled together around a fragile center that exploded in civil war in the nation’s first hundred years. In its second century, it was rocked over and over again by peoples determined to live into the rights guaranteed under the Constitution against those who would deny them. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the nation faced some of its greatest challenges, from the Civil Rights Movement, which spawned the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements, to the devastation of COINTELPRO and a government that willfully used illegal measures to destroy its people from within.

Looking back at what was and the promises of what might have been, Nottingham Contemporary, UK, presents States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era, a collections of 250 photographs by 16 American masters, now on view through November 26, 2017. Among the artists featured are Crave faves Diane Arbus, Dawoud Bey, Mark Cohen, Bruce Davidson, Louis Draper, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Jim Goldberg, Danny Lyon, Mary Ellen Mark, Stephen Shore, and Garry Winogrand.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

From Martin Wong: Human Instamatic

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, 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

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

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

Leonard Freed – This Is the Day: The March on Washington

Posted on August 28, 2017

…and still the chills come as the words reverberate in the ear, Martin Luther King Jr.’s voice as clear as the call of the clarion. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heart of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.

“I have a dream today!”

King first spoke these unforgettable words on August 28, 1963, at the historic March on Washington, where he stood at the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 people gathered at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to mount a peaceful protest demanding Civil Rights, justice, and equality for African Americans nearly one hundred years after slavery was abolished in the United States.

In tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of one of the proudest days in this country’s history, Getty Publications has just released This Is The Day: The March on Washington by Leonard Freed, with texts by Julian Bond, Michael Eric Dyson, and Paul Farber. Most of the seventy-five photographs featured here have never been published before, and taken as a whole they offer a compelling, powerful, and uplifting vision of the day itself—before, during, and after the march.

As Dyson writes, “The moral beauty of Freed’s photographs bathes the aesthetics that guides his flow of images. The folk here are neat, dignified, well-dressed—in a word, sharp, with all the surplus meaning the word summons, since black dress can never be divorced from political consequence…. Freed captures the simple dignity and the protocols of cool—the ethics of decorum—that characterizes large swaths of black life. And when his camera swings wide to include a vision of America too rarely noticed in the mainstream press at the time, and in some cases even now, he records almost mundanely, and hence rather heroically, the everydayness of the encounters between white and black. He allows the images to steep in the crucible for American race. One can almost catch the subliminal suggestion: This is what it should always be like.”

Indeed, the legacy of this historic day is that it offered to not only America but to the world a vision of the power that healing brings. We return again and again to the day, not only for what King verbalized for us but for what Freed’s images say. We see in these images the American ideal: all power to the people, and for that we reflect with a quiet reverence and hopeful spirit that the dream shall be fulfilled.

First Published in L’Oeil de la Photographie
on June 28, 2013

Categories: 1960s, Photography

An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections From the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017

Posted on August 21, 2017

Carol Summers (1925-2016), Kill for Peace, 1967, from ARTISTS AND WRITERS PROTEST AGAINST THE WAR IN VIET NAM, 1967. Screenprint and photo-screenprint with punctures on board, 23 3/8 × 19 1/4 in. (59.4 × 48.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Print Committee 2006.50.14 © Alexander Ethan Summers

“Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy,” Plato observed in Republic, revealing the underlying paradox of humanity: the will of the masses will eventually lead to oppression in one form or another.

The Founding Fathers of the United States knew this better than most, perhaps knowing themselves well enough to understand that he corrupt seek power and will do whatever it takes to gain the upper hand, whether that means scripting blatant hypocrisies into The Declaration of Independence or advocating for armed rebellion in the Second Amendment.

Perhaps most telling above all was their insistence on protest, of “the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” which closes out the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Undoubtedly, they understood that the nation, founded on stolen land using stolen people, was a ticking time bomb, one that could easily blow up lest any group gain advantage over the other. The will of the people, such as it were, is not inherently “good”—nor moral. It is merely self-serving and invested in appearance politics above all.

Within this space, the act of protest is designed to call attention to that which it perceives as wrong, using the power of the people to make its point in the most public manner possible. As we have seen from recent events in Charlottesville, protest is not intrinsically honest or honorable; it is simply the will of the masses to stand in their beliefs, however valid or flawed.

Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds. Relocate Destroy, In Memory of Native Americans, In Memory of Jews, 1987 Pastel on paper Sheet: 22 × 29 13/16in. (55.9 × 75.7 cm). Gift of Dorothee Peiper-Riegraf and Hinrich Peiper 2007.91

But what protest does is let us know: those who will not be silenced and are compelled to have their words heard and their faces shown; that which we celebrate and that which we vilify are simply extensions of our own principles, character, and moral fiber.

In times of strife, artists often take to the frontlines, eager to use their skills in the service of the cause. As 2017 slogs along relentlessly, more and more artists, curators, galleries, museums, and organizations find themselves compelled to make a stand. To find a way to look to the lessons of the past to figure out solutions to the present day; to consider why we are doomed to repeat the wars of the past with new technological possibilities more horrific than ever before.

And, perhaps, inspired to energize and activate those who are simply overwhelmed, disinformed, or have lost their way. History recurs simply because the solutions we sought did not hold; they were simply tenuous measures used to placate the crisis at hand, and over the ensuing years easily wore thin. The solutions require a paradigm change, one that goes beyond shadowboxing with lies and debating disinformation. Solutions require truth, however gruesome it may be, about the corporate project that is the United States of America.

But first, before we ravage the deeply held dreams of the delusional, a little reflection on the past and the ways in which protest can be used to stand against legalized tyranny. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, presents An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections From the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017.

Guerrilla Girls (est. 1985), Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, 1987. Offset lithograph, 22 × 17 in. (55.9 × 43.2 cm). Purchase 2000.91 © Guerrilla Girls

The exhibition looks at the ways in which people have organized in resistance and refusal, strikes and boycotts, anti-war movements, equal rights actions, and to fight the AIDS crisis. The artworks selected span the gamut from posters, flyers, and photographs to ad campaigns, paintings, and screenprints.

Featuring works by artists including Richard Avedon, Larry Clark, Lous H. Draper, Larry Fink, Theaster Gates, Gran Fury, Guerilla Girls, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Toyo Miyatake, Gordon Parks, Ad Reinhardt, Faith Ringgold, Dread Scott, and Gary Simmons, among others—the exhibition is as much a study in politics as it is contemporary American art.

The more you look, the more you see how iconography informs our belief system and the ways in which propaganda can be used in the fight against exploitation. Simply put, it’s not enough to tell the truth. Reality is simply to terrifying, and most people would prefer to bury their heads in the sand than face the stark prospect of a revolution that is without beginning or end.

“All art is propaganda,” George Orwell deftly observed, leading by example with his novels, critical essays, and insights into the nature of wo/man as political animal. When taken as a whole, An Incomplete History of Protest offers more than just a look back at the past: it also shows us how to activate people by appealing to their emotions.

For above all, people react; action simply requires more effort than most are willing to put forth, but reaction—whew! Try to stop the avalanche once it starts. Art, in as much as it is perceived by the senses before it is understood by the mind, is one of the most primal, visceral paths to stir the heart. And so An Incomplete History of Protest reminds us: if you want to move the people, how you say it may be even more important than what you say—and there’s no use fighting it.

Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979), Untitled (Opening Image from Valediction), 1944. Gelatin silver print mounted on board, 9 7/16 × 7 5/16 in. (24 × 18.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2014.243 © Toyo Miyatake Studio

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