Posts from the “1960s” Category

Roland L. Freeman: Portfolio

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Roland Freeman. Community Elders, Mississippi, 1975*

Now age 85, award-winning photographer Roland L. Freeman’s photography career began on August 28, 1963, when he borrowed a camera from a friend to photograph the March on Washington.

“I really wanted to say something about what was going on. I chose photography as my vehicle,” he says. The new exhibition, Roland L. Freeman: Portfolio, looks back at the artist’s extraordinary archive of work documenting Black America during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

Born in Baltimore and raised in rural Maryland, Freeman grew closely involved in the Civil Rights Movement after he unexpectedly joined his first march while taking his grandmother to buy a new dress for Mother’s Day.“There were protests held outside a Baltimore department store because Black women weren’t allowed to try on dresses,” Freeman remembers. “My grandmother said, ‘Give me one of those signs. I’m sick of this crap!’ That started it, and I’ve never looked back.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Roland Freeman. Hallway of Polk Home, Americus, GA, 1971*

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

Judy Chicago: The Flowering

Posted on July 23, 2021

*Boxing-ring advertisement, Artforum, 1971, Jack Glenn Gallery, Corona Del Mar, CA*

“I had a singular vision from very early on and for a long time I didn’t understand why I kept encountering so much resistance in the word,” legendary feminist artist, educator, and activist Judy Chicago tells Dazed. As a white, cis, middle-class, Jewish-American woman coming of age in the mid-twentieth century, Chicago was not content to allow society to dictate the trajectory of her life. She learned from an early age that the only way forward was to craft her own identity and path – a lesson that served her throughout her trailblazing career.

To call Chicago “prolific” would be an understatement; her output is monumental, her mediums as varied and all encompassing as womanhood itself, her style and subject matter a one-woman revolution in the history of art. Now, with her first-ever career retrospective opening on August 28 at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, Chicago brings together works from her groundbreaking projects including The Dinner Party (1974-1979), The Birth Project (1980–1985), PowerPlay (1982–1987), Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985–1993), and The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015–2019, which broke through the boundaries proscribed around gender in the contemporary art world.

Although Chicago is outspoken and fearless when it comes to challenging sexism and misogyny, she is no extrovert; public appearances are simply a necessary part of her work. It is in the studio alone with her work where she draws energy and builds strength, her dedication and determination necessary to play the long game. Her projects are like icebergs: massive in scope, though what the public sees is only the pinnacle of years of research and development.

Such could be said of The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago (Thames & Hudson), the extraordinary 416-page memoir that she penned while in social isolation. Releasing July 20, Chicago takes us on an intimate tour of her development as an artist, sharing the challenges, struggles, and triumphs to make space for women in the male dominated art world, which established false hierarchies that continue to this day. Refusing to play along, Chicago subverted the system from within, using her work to call out established notions of art, history, and gender, restoring the Divine Feminine to its rightful place in the pantheon.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Judy Chicago on a Doublehead bronze at the Shidoni Foundry, Santa Fe, NM, 1986 Photograph © Donald Woodman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY*

*Judy Chicago. Rainbow Pickett, 1965 (re-created 2004). Latex paint on canvas-covered plywood, 118.79 × 119.79 × 132 in Collection of David and Diane Waldman.*

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

A Visual Conversation Between Carrie Mae Weems and Diane Arbus

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Diane Arbus, Black boy, Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1965 © The Estate of Diane Arbus*

“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way,” Diane Arbus said — a truth that challenges us to acknowledge we are not fully in control of our lives or our destinies, but rather charged to navigate the world with the understanding there is always something that will escape our perception or comprehension. Such wisdom requires that we act with faith, yet remain receptive to what we may uncover along the way, for it is only in the unknown that possibility can be found.

Photography, being both incredibly precise and prone to all sorts of “accidents,” makes this abundantly clear; for all our intentions, there’s still space for new understandings to emerge. With the portrait, artists explore the landscapes of the physical and psychological worlds simultaneously.

For Diane Arbus and Carrie Mae Weems, the photograph is a space to consider communities largely misrepresented, marginalized, or erased from the history of Western art. Whether using documentary or staged photographs, Arbus and Weems create tender, thoughtful, and honest portraits that engage with complex issues of identity, gender, and race in contemporary American life.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup), from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Alan Moss: East St. Louis, 1968–1971

Posted on July 20, 2021

The year was 1968, a time of massive political and cultural change. After completing his second year of grad school in biochemistry, Alan Moss, then 24, attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an alternate delegate for Eugene McCarthy.

After witnessing the conflict between Vietnam War protestors and the National Guard, Moss had a change of heart. “I lost all interest in spending my time in a lab, shielded from the real world,” he recalls.

Classified 1A (eminently draftable), Moss had one last chance to defer: teach in a distressed school system. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to accompany his girlfriend entering a Masters program there. Although Missouri required a teaching certificate, Illinois did not, so Moss secured a position in East St. Louis, located just on the other side of the Mississippi River.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Huck, Photography

Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973

Posted on July 19, 2021

*Leni Sinclair. Black Panthers Meeting, Year Unknown.*

Born Magdalene Arndt in 1940, Leni Sinclair grew up in East Germany listening to jazz artists like Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald on Radio Luxemburg. At age 19, Sinclair moved to Detroit to study at Wayne State University. She quickly became involved with the radical political and cultural scene, becoming one of the two members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the city.

In 1964, she met poet John Sinclair, and married him the following year. Together they set up the Detroit Artists Workshop, a network of communal houses, performance space, and print shop that became the center for the Detroit music scene, attracting the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, all of whom Sinclair photographed.

Police began targeting the Detroit Artists Workshop, raiding it in 1965 and 1967, and arresting John Sinclair on marijuana charges. Undeterred, the Sinclairs soldiered on, practicing the peace, love, and free vibes of hippie culture before such a thing existed. Throughout it all, they remained dedicated to art, music, and activism, going so far as to establish the White Panther Party to support the work of the Black Panther Party before the term “ally” gained clout.

With the publication of Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963–1973 (MOCAD and Foggy Notion Books), Sinclair looks back at her extraordinary work documenting the art, music and political scenes of late 1960s Detroit. The book opens at the March on Washington of 1963 and chronicles performances and artists’ events at the Detroit Artists Workshop, early concerts with the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges in the Grande Ballroom, anti-war protests, the Detroit Uprising and the Black Panthers, and Sinclair’s ongoing documentation of Sun Ra, and other luminaries in jazz, blues and rock and roll.

Here Sinclair looks back at a life on the edge, when radical culture transformed the face of the mainstream forevermore.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

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

In the Gallery with Bene Taschen

Posted on July 5, 2021

*Arlene Gottfried. Striped Woman at Studio 54, NY, 1979.*

“Art was always a part of my life,” says gallerist Bene Taschen, the son of world-renowned German book publisher Benedikt Taschen. “Growing up [in Cologne], I was surrounded by photographers and met great artists working with my father, like Helmut Newton. It was a blessing to have this as a part of my daily life. It was inspiring to be surrounded by art in any form.”

In 2011, an unexpected twist of fate provided Taschen with the opportunity to strike out on his own. He learned that a German exhibition planned for his friend, American photographer Gregory Bojorquez, had been cancelled. “That made me frustrated, so I decided to organise the exhibition myself,” says Taschen. “I didn’t have much gallery experience, but I had a passion for photography and a desire to create a good show that would excite and inspire people who saw it.”

Titled Streets of LA, the exhibition, which was first exhibited in Berlin in September 2011, then Cologne in November 2011, celebrated the people of Bojorquez’s hometown through the lens of an insider: a vantage point that Taschen finds profoundly compelling as a gallerist. “Curating is a very personal experience, and I’m always trying to create something that expresses how I feel and makes me happy,” he says. “The selection of images can tell a story of the artist and their work, but it has to look good together on the wall. I may choose works for different reasons but it has to be visually convincing when it is hung. You can’t just throw 35 photographs in the room and call it an exhibition.”

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, Photography

Sandra S. Phillips: American Geography – Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present

Posted on June 23, 2021

*George Chasing Wildfires, Eureka, Nevada, 2012 by Lucas Foglia*

Though the phrase “Manifest Destiny” smacks of influencer-speak, it’s more accurately a warning of what will befall opportunists whose ambitions and entitlement are grounded in delusion rather than reality. In Biblical terms, we reap what we sow – a principle all too clear when examining the destruction of the American landscape, the nation’s unchecked greed, and the worsening climate crisis.

For the new book, American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present (Radius Books), Sandra S. Phillips, Curator Emerita at the San Francisco Museum of Art, embarked on a 10-year journey to examine the history of land use in the United States. Featuring the work of Dawoud Bey,William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dorothea Lange, and Stephen Shore, among others, the book explores the role photography has played in shaping our ideas about conservation, expansion, and exploitation of the environment.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Indian Summer, from the series Four Seasons, 2006 by Wendy Red Star*

*“Hiding Place,” Cambridge, MA, from the series The Underground Railroad, 2010 by Amani Willet*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg

Posted on June 21, 2021

*French actress Brigitte Bardot and actor, singer, songwriter and author Serge Gainsbourg on the set of “Speciale Bardot”. (Photo by Henri Bureau/Sygma/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)*

As the Summer of Love came to a close, Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg embarked on a brief but passionate affair that would transform their lives. In one brief shining moment they became a modern day incarnation of Bonnie and Clyde— devoted wholly to one another, throwing caution to the wind.

Bardot was so famous she was known by her initials alone, and over the course of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, had become the reigning sex kitten of the silver screen. No less than celebrated feminist Simone de Beauvoir was infatuated with B.B.’s smoldering presence, inspiring her to pen the 1959 essay The Lolita Syndrome, declaring this “locomotive of women’s history” the first and most-liberated woman in post-war France.

After a series of marriages to film director Roger Vadim, who turned her into a star with the 1956 films Naughty Girl, Plucking the Daisy, and And God Created Woman, Bardot married actor Jacques Charrier, father of her only child, and then married Gunter Sachs in 1966 — but soon grew weary of the German millionaire playboy. At 33, B.B. was in her prime and hardly one to deny herself the pleasures of an affair.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

*Photo: Patrice Habans. Credit: Paris Match via Getty Images*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Jacques Marie Mage, Music

Chester Higgins: The Indelible Spirit

Posted on June 17, 2021

*Chester Higgins. Early morning coffee, Harlem, 1974.*

While working at The Campus Digest, the Tuskegee Institute student newspaper, in the late 1960s, Chester Higgins visited the studio of photographer P.H. Polk and was struck by his powerful portraits of Black Americans made in the 1930s.

“The countenance of the people in Polk’s pictures made me pause,” says Huggins, who hails from the small farming community of New Brockton, Alabama and recognized the archetypes immortalized in these works. “These pictures existed because Polk understood and appreciated the dignity and character of people.”

Knowing he couldn’t afford to commission Polk to do the same for the people of New Brockton, Higgins seized upon an idea and asked if he might borrow Polk’s camera to learn how to make photographs. “He studied me, then finally said, ‘If you’re fool enough to ask me that request, I’m going to be fool enough to help you.’”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Chester Higgins. Looking for Justice, Civil Rights Rally, Montgomery, Alabama, 1968.*

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

In the Gallery with: Brian Clamp

Posted on June 4, 2021

*© Peter Berlin, “Self Portrait as Urban Cowboy, “ c. 1970s, Hand-painted vintage gelatin silver print.*

The year 2000 marked a turning point for New York-based gallerist Brian Clamp. After turning 30 and receiving his MA in Critical Studies in Modern Art from Columbia University, he had reached a crossroads. “I had been working as director of Owen Gallery on the Upper East Side, and wanted to get more involved with contemporary art, photography, and working with living artists,” says Clamp. “I decided to take the plunge and start my own gallery, not fully realising what I was getting into.”

That fall, he opened ClampArt, and worked as a private dealer from his West 27th Street loft. An avid practitioner of photography, Clamp also spent time at The Camera Club of New York (now known as Baxter St), getting to know a number of photographers whose work he admired. Through these relationships, Clamp developed the foundations for the gallery program.

In early 2003, Clamp signed a lease for a commercial space on West 25th Street, just as Chelsea was becoming the center of the downtown art world. “I was able to get a ground floor space in Chelsea for my first gallery without any backing,” he says.

Read the Full Story at British Journal of Photography

*© The Estate of Peter Hujar, “Scrumbly Koldewyn and Tom Nieze, The Cockettes,” 1971, Vintage gelatin silver print, Courtesy Peter Hujar Archive.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, British Journal of Photography, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove

Posted on June 2, 2021

*Young Man Posing for Polaroid, 1959, Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Don Steeple*

ne of the very first gay beach towns in the United States, Cherry Grove on Fire Islandbecame a weekend and summer destination for the LGBTQ community in the years before the Stonewall riots, widely considered one of the most important events leading to the gay liberation movement. At a time when homosexuality was considered both a crime and a mental illness, Cherry Grove provided sanctuary from persecution, creating a space for the community to enjoy the pleasures of life on their own terms.

In the new exhibition, Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove, curators Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent of the Cherry Groves Archives Collection bring together 70 enlarged photographs and additional ephemera that offer a window into this extraordinary chapter of American history. Featuring images made at the beach, theater performances, art exhibitions, Duffy’s Hotel bar, the annual regatta, and end-of-season costume ball, where revelers could openly flout laws against cross-dressing, the exhibition celebrates the power of joy, love, and resilience just in time for Pride Month.

“Hate and homophobia often forced homosexuals to live in secret in order to protect their own safety and reputations,” says Clark. “Salvaging our gay history is critically important to validate the ways we existed. We honor our gay elders and gay ancestors by telling the truth about their joys and struggles along with acknowledging their leading contributions to our world.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*End of Season APCG Ball, Community House, Woman with Headdress, September 1954, Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley*

*One Hundred Club Party, 1949, Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley*

Categories: 1960s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions