Posts from the “1960s” Category

CONTACT at Fahey/Klein Gallery

Posted on January 2, 2017

MONTGOMERY- MARCH 25: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. seen close from rear, speaking in front of 25,000 civil rights marchers, at conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in front of Alabama state capital building on March 25, 1965. In Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Stephen Somerstein/Getty Images)

For a photography aficionado, there is nothing quite so thrilling as looking at contact sheets. It is like reading a diary, delving into private realms that were not meant for public consumption. Like the old drafts of a novel or the prior recordings before the master tape, the contact sheet tells the story of how it happened—how we got to this place. It is a narrative all its own, one that few will ever know, unless the photographer blesses us with a view.

Then, what we see is magical: that heart-stopping, breathtaking moment like in the theater when an actor breaks the fourth wall. It is an acknowledgement of the very construction of it all: the recognition that everything we see has a history and a reality that we rarely ever know. The contact sheet seduces with what it reveals—all that has been hidden from our sight now appears.

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Contact Sheet featuring MONTGOMERY- MARCH 25: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. seen close from rear, speaking in front of 25,000 civil rights marchers, at conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in front of Alabama state capital building on March 25, 1965. In Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Stephen Somerstein/Getty Images)

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

Hollywood Royalty | Debbie Reynolds & Carrie Fisher

Posted on January 1, 2017

Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds, 1973

One of the greatest love stories of our time, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher will be laid to rest together, as they were never meant to be apart. Together, they defined the changing image of women for over 60 years, fiercely self reliant, in varying states of grace.

But it was Postcards from the Edge that hit the high water mark, most likely because books are my first true love. The fact that Carrie, who “hid in books” while growing up could then use them to reveal herself to the world with a wry, tender humor to process the pain she felt, and then turn around and write the screenplay so that no less than Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine could bring this story to life….

Whew. Aspirational, inspirational, pure liberation through art, beauty, and truth. I wrote a few words for CraveOnline for two women who bring tears of love and happiness to my eyes.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Books, Crave

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight

Posted on December 23, 2016

Portrait of Carmen Herrera in front of Blue Monday, 1975, acrylic on canvas, as installed in “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” (September 16, 2016—January 2, 2017), Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Photograph © Matthew Carasella (September 14, 2016).

At the tender age of 101, Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera is receiving her due with Lines of Sight, the first museum exhibition in New York City in nearly two decades. Currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, now through January 9, 2017, the exhibition focuses on the years between 1948 and 1978, when Herrera developed her groundbreaking style that revolutionized modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition features 50 masterworks including paintings, three-dimensional pieces, and works on paper that embody her signature hard-edged style, which she pioneered throughout the twentieth century. Following the Whitney, the show will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Oho (February 4-April 16 2017).

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

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art

Posted on December 22, 2016

Artwork: Amy Sherald, High Yella Masterpiece: We Ain’t No Cotton Pickin’ Negroes, 2011. Oil on canvas; 59 x 69 inches (149.86 x 175.26 cm). Collection of Keith Timmons, ESQ, CPA. Image courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. © Amy Sherald.

The American South: a land shrouded with myth and mystery, wrapped in layers of illusions and untold history. Novelist William Faulkner suggested that the South is not so much a “geographical place” as an “emotional idea,” furthering the disjunction between the reality and illusion that has permeated the South throughout its existence.

Place is the foundation upon which culture is built and from this culture comes ten thousand things that shape and influence the human experience, from the physical and the spiritual to the intellectual and the emotional realms. To understand the multifaceted nature of the South, it behooves us to take a more nuanced view, taking in the many elements that make the South its own complex and fascinating world.

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, currently on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, through January 8, 2017, does just this, approaching the subject from the perspective of its aesthetic progeny. The exhibition presents the work of 60 contemporary artists including Romare Bearden, Sanford Biggers, William Christenberry, Thornton Dial, Sam Durant, William Eggleston, Jessica Ingram, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Misrach Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Fahmu Pecou, Burk Uzzle, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

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Rachel Boillot, 38765 Panther Burn, MS from the series Post Script, 2014. Archival pigment print, edition 2/12; 20 x 25 inches (50.8 x 63.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Rachel Boillot.

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

Helen Lundeberg: Classic Attitude

Posted on December 11, 2016

Artwork: Helen Lundeberg, Naiad, 1968. acrylic on canvas. 30 x 54 inches (76.2 x 137.2 cm). ©The Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation

American artist Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) moved from Chicago to Pasadena, at just four years old. Lundeberg became involved in the Southern California arts scene in the early 1930s, when she and her husband, painter Lorser Feitelson, co-founded Subjective Classicism, which later became known as Post Surrealism, the first focused American response to the famed European movement.

In 1936, Lundeberg became just one of three women artists from the region to make public art for the WPA. She began her painting career as a social realist, creating large-scale murals including a 8 x 241 foot painting titled History of Transportation in Inglewood, before finding herself drawn to geometric abstraction and Hard Edge painting during the 1950s.

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Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943-2016

Posted on November 22, 2016

Photo: Humberto Sandoval, Still from Sr. Tereshkova, 1975, sepia tone photograph on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

“One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom,” American actor Vincent Price (1911-1993). Best known for his distinctive voice, a somber and thrilling timber, and his performances in horror films, Price was also an aficionado of the arts, a collector and historian who donated 90 pieces from his personal collection to establish the first “art teaching collection” housed at a community college—East Los Angeles College, to be exact—in 1957. In recognition of his gift, the college renamed the art gallery the Vincent Price Museum.

Over the past 50 years, the collection has grown to include 9,000 objects and showcased more than 100 exhibitions designed to serve the community of some 35,000 students who enroll each year. Five months ago, Pilar Tompkins Rivas took up the mantle as Director of the Museum, and decided to create an exhibition that would speak to the history of the community over the past eight decades.

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

Make Art Not War

Posted on November 1, 2016

“Harriet Tubman lives!,” artist unknown, n.d. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” Pablo Picasso observed, drawing attention to the fundamental cycle of existence: from nothing, something; from something, nothing—ad infinitum.

People, being creatures of habit as much as will, often find themselves leaning heavily towards one side or the other. We gravitate towards what is familiar, either to our character or to our experience, inclined to preserve that comforts of the known, trying to avoid the inevitable turn that must come. We may fight it within ourselves, longing to escape fate, or we may find ourselves in conflict with society and the power structure that initiates change.

Invariably, we struggle with the nature of life, this eternal cycle of creation and destruction that causes so much misery and strife—until we can come to terms with this duality and make peace with it. For some, this peace comes with integrating opposition into the creative process: this is the art of protest.

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Artwork: Reproduction of a poster by Jose Gomez Fresquet, printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, 1967. Courtesy of the CWLU Herstory Project. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Bronx, Crave

Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity

Posted on October 31, 2016

© Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/ Singapore; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; David Zwirner, New York, © Yayoi Kusama.

“I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland,’ Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama declares. At the age of 87, Kusama is one of the most famous living artists on earth, becoming known the world over for her mindblowing installations of the infinite.

With the polka dot as the basis for her work, Kusama has taken the most finite form and rendered it limitless. She explains, “A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement… Polka-dots are a way to infinity.”

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Women

The Peter Tosh Museum Opens on the Legend’s 72nd Birthday

Posted on October 25, 2016

Photo: Peter Tosh © GAB Archive/Redferns.

Nearly thirty years after his tragic death, reggae legend Peter Tosh is being honored with a museum in his native Jamaica. The Peter Tosh Museum opened in Kingston on October 19, on what would have been his 72nd birthday, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his solo album Legalize It.

The museum features a collection of artifacts and memorabilia from Tosh, including his legendary custom-built guitar, which was shaped like an M16 assault rifle, and his beloved unicycle, which was his preferred means for transportation.

Born Winston Hubert McIntosh in the rural parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica, in 1944, Peter Tosh moved to the notorious slum Trench Town at the age of 16. He first picked up a guitar after watching a man play, memorizing everything his fingers were doing and playing it back to the man.

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peter-tosh-legalize-it-cover

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Music

Humanism + Dynamite = The Soviet Photomontages of Aleksandr Zhitomirsky

Posted on October 21, 2016

Aleksandr Zhitomirsky. On the Military Wavelength, 1968. Ne boltai! Collection. © Vladimir Zhitomirsky.

If only we could see ourselves the way others see us. Would we be able to tolerate it? The gap between self image and public perception can be quite a divide that becomes insurmountable when the ego feels threatened by anything less than flattering may come to the light. We may do everything in our power to deny what others see, including gaslight, discredit, and ad hominem attacks.

Nevertheless, self image is destined to reach an end; nothing lasts forever, including our most desperate dreams. It is here, in the passage of time, that a new vision emerges composed all those who have been paying attention all along. In the case of individuals, this usually has limited scope: most people fly under the radar and traces of their life vanish in death. But for nations, this is an entirely different affair. Despite best efforts to the contrary, dirty laundry continues to be aired.

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

Azucar! The Life of Celia Cruz Comes to Netflix in an Epic Series

Posted on October 20, 2016

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The Queen of Salsa, the incomparable Celia Cruz (1925-2003) is now the subject of Celia, an epic television series now airing on Netflix showcasing the Cuban singer’s incredible life. Featuring 80 episodes, each 45 minutes in length, the series, which originally aired in 2015 in Colombia on RCN Television and in the United States on Telemundo, tells the story of Cruz’s rise to fame in Spanish, with English subtitles.

Celia stars Puerto Rican actress and Miami Beach resident Jeimy Osorio as the legendary entertainer with fellow Boricua actor Modesto Lacén cast as her husband, Pedro Knight. Directed by Victor Mallarino and Liliana Bocanegra, and scripted by Andrés Salgado, Celia tells the story of the singer’s rise to fame, beginning in pre-revolution Havana, when Salsa music was a white man’s game.

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celia-album

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Crave, Latin America, Music