Posts from the “1970s” Category

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

Posted on January 15, 2019

Photo: James Baldwin, writer, Harlem, New York, 1945. hotography by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation, Courtesy David Zwirner

The work of James Baldwin (1924–1987) speaks not only to his time, but that of our own – calling out abuses of power while painting a heartfelt portrait of those they harm. Yet in becoming a public figure, Baldwin’s fame became a double-edged sword, amplifying the impact of his ideas while simultaneously draining him of his creative resources.

In a new exhibition God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, writer, and curator Hilton Als explores Baldwin’s life as both inspiration and cautionary tale. Featuring the work of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Richard Avedon, Beauford Delaney, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, Anthony Barboza, Kara Walker, and James Welling, the exhibition also includes a wealth of archival materials including a vinyl recording of Baldwin singing, Precious Lord, Take My Hand – which Als first heard inside the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine during Baldwin’s funeral.

Here, speaking to AnOther, Als reflects on his relationship with Baldwin, one that came about as Als began his journey just as Baldwin was concluding his.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

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

A Guide to Judy Chicago’s Most Boundary Shifting Works

Posted on December 18, 2018

“Heaven is for White Men Only” (1973). Courtesy of Judy Chicago.

Judy Chicago has spent the better part of her career using confrontation and provocation to blow the roof off this place. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939, the artist announced her new name with a sign posted inside her 1970 exhibition at California State College, Fullerton, that stated: “Judy Gerowitz (her first husband’s name) hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago.”

The new surname signalled a change had come, one fuelled by the fires of liberation and self-determination. For the past 50 years, Chicago has been on the front lines for over half a century, calling out sexism, misogyny, and the abuses of the patriarchy – while honouring women who have forged a path through history against the odds.

Now, at the age of 79, Chicago is enjoying a renaissance, beginning with Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making at the Brooklyn Museum – a return to her most infamous work, a lightning rod for controversy sure as the day is long. Most recently, Chicago opened two shows in Miami in conjunction with Art Week, including a new exploration of Atmospheres and A Reckoning, a major survey spanning four decades. Here we look back at some Chicago’s most controversial works.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Pink Atmosphere, 1971, Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, 2018. Judy Chicago’s Atmosphere

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

EVA.C Introduces “Kane”

Posted on December 12, 2018

From “Kane” by Emma Capps and Anna Howard

Anna Howard first discovered a single series of amateur S&M photographs made during the 1970s through an American porn dealer while doing research for 77 Broadway Market, the shop she owns with Conor Donlon.

“What spoke to me was the ambiguous power play, and how easily I found myself empathising with each of the different women,” Howard reveals. “They proposed a real visual riddle too; I couldn’t place them – the floral dresses, rope play, in a setting that looks like an air raid shelter.”

Howard showed the photographs, which bore the mysterious name “Kane,” to Emma Capps, her colleague at Donlon Books. “We’d talked for ages about doing some kind of project together, and when we came across this collection of photographs, it suddenly felt like: Oh, this is it,” Capps says.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

From “Kane” by Emma Capps and Anna Howard

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Photography, Women

Jamie Reid: XXXXX – Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit.

Posted on December 12, 2018

Anarchy In The UK, 1976 © Jamie Reid.

For half a century, Jamie Reid has done it his way, on his own terms, refusing to kowtow to the establishment and its pompous self-regard. Under his careful eye, art becomes a vehicle for anarchy, subversion, and resistance against the powers that be.

Now, for the first time in his career, Reid is the subject of a major retrospective: XXXXX: Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit. The show brings together collage, drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film, and installation work made over half a century. So why now? “I haven’t been asked before,” Reid says, before casually adding that he did not begin selling his work until a decade ago.

Most famous for sticking a safety pin through the Queen’s nose, desecrating the Union Jack, and crafting the ransom note letter styling of the Sex Pistols’ graphics, Reid has been a pivotal figure in the establishment of punk. His work helped shape the movement into not only a form of music, fashion and art, but into a philosophy predicated on the notion that capitalism is the biggest scam going today.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Be Aware, Fight Back, 1994. Courtesy John Marchant Gallery. © Jamie Reid

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

Chris Stein: Point of View – Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene

Posted on December 11, 2018

Legs McNeil, Anya Philips, and Debbie on the Staten Island ferry. More Punk magazine outtakes, 1976. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

Brooklyn’s own Chris Stein took up photography in 1968, at the age of 18, and began to amass a body of work documenting New York life as the punk scene came into existence. In 1973, he met and began working with Debbie Harry, and together they founded Blondie. From this rarified position, Stein had the best view in the house, the consummate insider in the quintessential outsider scene.

His new book, Point of View: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli New York), is a visual diary of daily life during the 1970s, the rawest decade of them all. Stein takes us all the way back to his days as a student at SVA, and gives us a guided tour of a young artist coming of age in a city that was equal parts decadent and derelict, and home to characters like none before or since, be it William Burroughs, David Bowie, Divine, Andy Warhol, or the Ramones.

Much like the people who have departed the earth, Point of View is filled with iconic landmarks of the city that have since disappeared like the Fillmore East, the Women’s House of Detention, Times Square strip clubs, graffiti-covered trains, abandoned cars on the street, and the World Trade Center. They say you can’t go home again, so what’s a True Yorker to do?

Put it down in photographs and stories, so we can always remember the way we were, word to Babs. We have assembled here some of Stein’s choice photographs and stories from the book for a trip back to a time not so long ago that is so very far away.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Snuky Tate, Fab 5 Freddy, and kid punk band the Brattles, 1981. The Brattles opened for the Clash at their New York City show at Bonds on Times Square. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

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

Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time

Posted on December 7, 2018

Eugene Richards, Grandmother, Brooklyn, New York, 1993. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

More than half a century ago: the New Journalism came of age — a style of reportage so wholly unlike what came before that made it clear the seeming “objectivity” espoused by the Western eye was blind to its own innate biases. Rather than continue to presuppose one could be disinterested in covering subjects like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, many journalists took a stand, opting to explore the complex truths of human life during the final half of the twentieth century — including their own.

Like W. Eugene Smith before him, photographer Eugene Richards (b. 1944) used the photo essay as a means to engage with his subjects through the profound transformation that comes when human beings not only connect, but are seen, heard, understood, and able to share their lives in a holistic way.

Throughout the course of his career, Richards has focused on the essential experiences of life that are daily fodder for headlines including birth, death, poverty, prejudice, war, and terrorism. But through Richards’s lens, we come to understand just how little we know — and how deeply reliant we are upon those who do the reporting in our stead.

In Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time, now on view at the International Center of Photography through January 6, 2019, we are given a stunning trip through Richards’s life in photography. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue distributed by Yale University Press serve to remind us that we are responsible for evaluating not only the content but also the quality and caliber of the source itself. It is not enough to be talented and to have mastered technique; one must stand for something, and in doing so, use their skills in the service of the greater good.

Here, Richards shares his extraordinary journey, that includes a healthy dose of skepticism about the photograph itself.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Eugene Richards, Snow globe of the city as it once was, New York, New York, 2001. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

Eugene Richards, Wonder Bread, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1975.
Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

Marisa Scheinfeld: The Borscht Belt

Posted on November 25, 2018

Postcard, The Concord Hotel, Kiamesha Lake, NY, Undated.

The Borscht Belt, otherwise known as the Jewish Alps, was America’s premier getaway during the 20th century. Established in response to abject displays of anti-Semitism nationwide, the Borscht Belt consisted of resort hotels bungalow colonies, summer camps, and boarding houses nestled into the Catskill Mountains of New York state.

At its height, the Borscht Belt was the height of a glamour all it’s own — an all-inclusive vacation replete with indoor and outdoor pools, golf, tennis, skiing, ice-skating, dance, and live entertainment from no less than Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Billy Crystal, and Rodney Dangerfield. While many Jewish-Americans born before the ’80s know the area well, the 1987 film Dirty Dancing became the cultural touchstone for all who had never lived it for themselves.

But like the Rust Belt, the Borscht Belt has disappeared, lost to the massive socioeconomic shifts that have taken place in recent years. For photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, the shift quite literally hit home.

Read the Full story at Huck Online

Lobby, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort and Hotel, Liberty, New York. © Marisa Scheinfeld

Poker chips and cards, Grossinger’s Catskill Resort and Hotel, Liberty, New York. © Marisa Scheinfeld

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

Judy Chicago: Atmospheres

Posted on November 19, 2018

Smoke Holes #2, 1969, 2018. Courtesy Nina Johnson and the artist

Fifty years ago, Judy Chicago set the world aflame, unleashing Atmospheres into the air we breathe and igniting a passion for pyrotechnics that continues to this very day. Yesterday, Miami gallery Nina Johnson opened an exhibition of never-before-seen photo prints documenting this prescient series of landscape installations and performances made staged between 1968–1974, concurrent to Chicago’s major survey, A Reckoning at The Institute of Contemporary Art.

“It is not unusual for it to take decades for people to understand my work,” Chicago explains. It is not at all surprising, considering the ways in which Atmospheres bridges the divides between the timeless and the temporal by making art an action, rather than an object, to behold – as the ultimate expression of the sacred feminine principles of Mother Earth.

Atmospheres first found expression on the streets of Pasadena, California, where Chicago lived and worked, several years after graduating with an MFA from UCLA. “Using a colour system I had developed for emotive purposes, I did a series of dimensional domes, in which the colour was trapped inside the transparent shapes,” Chicago recalls.

Then, working with other artists, she built a large colour wheel to cover klieg lights and lined the street with billowing fog machines. “When the fog began to fill the street, the colour wheels turned, and I saw the entrapped colour inside my domes liberated in the air. I thought to myself, ‘’I am going to use coloured smokes’, not realising that I was getting ready to liberate myself from the constraints of minimalism – and patriarchy.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Immolation, 1972; from Women and Smoke, 2018. Courtesy Nina Johnson and the artist

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Adrian Boot: Bass Culture 70/50

Posted on November 14, 2018

Sound System – DJ’s at Notting Hill Carnival – 1979

“I didn’t start life as a photographer,” Adrian Boot says with a laugh. “I stayed at university as long as I could – as everyone else did in those days – and then I went to Jamaica to teach physics for about three years. I took up photography as a hobby, and ran into people like Bob Marley and Burning Spear.”

Boot got his first paying gig when the Rolling Stones were in town to record Goats Head Soup at Dynamic Sounds Studios, through his friend Michael Thomas. When Boot returned to the UK, he collaborated with Thomas once again on the 1977 book Jamaica: Babylon on a Thin Wire, now in its fourth printing.

The book was a powerful document of Jamaica in the early ’70s, showing the emergence of reggae music within the larger landscape of politics, violence, and poverty. Suddenly the media took notice, and editors from NME, The Melody Maker, Sounds, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice were on the phone, giving Boot assignments to shoot the emerging reggae scene in the UK.

“I decided to delay going back into teaching and have a sabbatical just taking photographs — and I am still having that sabbatical,” Boot says. “Now I am 72. I have been doing it for a lifetime, and I always expected it to fade out but it didn’t. Then I started to work for Island Records, and then Bob Marley came along and started to have success. The rest is history.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

Posted on November 14, 2018

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is a bigger star in death than he was in life. His paintings sell for sums he could have only dreamt of, and his images are licensed and reproduced all over the globe. His ascension to the pantheon of genius reveals that Warhol knew America better than we know ourselves.

Warhol transformed pop culture into high art, subverting both in the process. He took Walter Benjamin’s essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to its logical conclusion, making art out of the very act of repetition itself. In doing so, he planted the seeds for everything from celebrity worship, reality TV, personal branding, and meme culture.

Warhol set himself apart with his trademark silver wig and classic uniform—a white Brooks Brothers oxford cloth button-down, unwashed navy Levis, and a black leather Perfecto jacket—and assumed the position of an oracle. In public, he was a man of few words, saving it all for the spectacle he would unleash in his art, photography, films, books, magazines, record covers, and happenings.

“Andy is connected with quintessentially American things—he didn’t look towards Europe, and that’s why it feels contemporary,” Christopher Makos, a Warhol friend and collaborator, told VICE. “Whether it’s Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley, Coca-Cola or Campbell’s Soup, Andy always has a built-in PR machine going for him. He doesn’t even have to be around.”

More than three decades after his death at the age of 58, Warhol’s legacy is being celebrated in a major museum exhibition, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again , the first American retrospective since 1989. Senior Curator Donna De Salvo organized more than 350 of the most influential works that illustrate Warhol’s ability to bridge the paradoxes of American life, like fame and privacy, democracy and elitism, innovation and conformity, and truth and propaganda.

The traveling show, with an accompanying catalogue from Yale University Press, just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where it’s on view through the end of March, before heading to San Francisco and Chicago in 2019. In anticipation, VICE tracked down a handful of Warhol’s friends and collaborators to find out what Andy Warhol was really like.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

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

Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay

Posted on November 6, 2018

At the tender age of eight, Anthony Friedkin discovered what would become the two greatest passions of his life: photography and surfing. Growing up in Los Angeles, Friedkin enjoyed weekends and summers at the family beach house in Malibu, where he developed an unquenchable love for the ocean.

In 1970, at the age of 21, Friedkin began The Surfing Essay, a visual diary of his life as a member of California’s celebrated surf scene – a project that has continued for more than 45 years. After a near-death accident two years ago, Friedkin decided to organise the work into an exhibition and book.

Now, a selection of 50 hand-printed black and white photographs will be on show at Anthony Friedkin: The Surfing Essay, opening November 8 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York. The consummate insider, Friedkin delved beneath the Hollywood stereotype of the blonde, bronzed Adonis to reveal the extremely individualistic athletes who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of the perfect wave. Here, he shares his journey of discovery, celebration, and triumph over circumstance.

Read the Fill Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Photography