Posts from the “1970s” Category

Wall Writers: Graffiti in its Innocence

Posted on September 16, 2016

Photo: CORNBREAD declares he has retired, 1971. Photo used with permission of Philadelphia Inquirer, ©2014

Picture it: New York and Philadelphia, the late 1960s. A curious phenomenon takes hold as names begin to appear on the street, written on the walls. In the beginning, it’s just a couple of names, written over and over again. It’s a mystery, these names. Who are they and what do they mean? It doesn’t quite register with the general population but it hits home with kids. It’s fame of a most unusual kind. The fame of being known for what you do long before anyone knows who you are.

It slowly begins to grip the imagination of a few who are dedicated, and from these humble beginnings, a cultural revolution begins. Graffiti is one of the most basic human impulses. As soon as children know how to write their names, they’re keen to leave their mark. This offends many who find it indecorous, such is their longing to conform to other people’s rules. But then there are those who refuse to conform and insist on living on their own terms.

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UGA canvas featuring STITCH 1-n-ROCKY 184, circa 1973. Photo courtesy of Rocky 184.

ROCKY 184 and STITCH 1, circa 1972. Courtesy of ROCKY 184.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Brooklyn, Crave, Graffiti, Manhattan

Len Speier: Nearly Everybody

Posted on September 15, 2016

Photo: Nearly Everybody, vintage gelatin silver print. © Len Speier, courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.

“Lucky Man Speier,” they call him, and this is true. At the tender age of 88, native New Yorker Len Mitchell Speier is receiving his due with his first solo exhibition of photographs, Nearly Everybody, currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, now through October 29, 2016. Drawn from an archive that spans six decades, the show features 48 vintage photographs made in New York and Europe between the 1960s and ‘80s.

As with many things in his life, Nearly Everybody came about through the fortunes of fate. Following the success of her recent exhibition Bacalaitos & Fireworks at the gallery, Speier asked photographer Arlene Gottfried if she could introduce him to Daniel Cooney; Gottfried said it was okay to use her name so Speier did just that.

Cooney remembers, “The call came out of the blue. After we spoke, I Googled and not much popped up. I went up to visit him at his apartment and that was it. It was an amazing moment.”

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Photo: Fight Racism, White Street, NYC, 1969, vintage gelatin silver print. © Len Speier, courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York.

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

Godlis: History is Made at Night

Posted on September 14, 2016

Photo: The Ramones, CBBG, 1977. ©Godlis, courtesy of agnès b. galerie, New York.

“There are no secrets that time does not reveal,” Jean Racine wrote. With the benefit of hindsight, it has become evident that punks are true embodiment of the counterculture movement. They never sold out and they never said die. They just keep on keeping on, D.I.Y.

Photographer David Godlis arrived on the New York scene in 1976, camera in hand, carrying as much film as he could reasonably hold in the pockets of his black jeans without looking indiscreet. He usually shot without a flash, using the techniques of masters like Brassai, who had famously photographed Paris at night forty years prior and inspired Godlis’s masterful eye.

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Photo: Richard Hell, Bowery, 1977. ©Godlis, courtesy of agnès b. galerie, New York.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Fifty Years After

Posted on September 6, 2016

Photo: Mickalene Thomas Remember Me, 2006 c-print 49 1/2 x 59 x 1 3/4 inches (framed) Edition 4 of 5, with 2 APs.

The March on Washington took place on August 28, 1963, marking the twelfth anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till. Till was just 14 years old when he was lynched in Mississippi, an event so heinous that it became a pivotal catalyst for the next phase of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1963, less than five years before he would be assassinated the United States government, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the top of Lincoln Memorial and delivered a speech, a speech so powerful that you can hear it in your mind’s ear as you read his words: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

But where have we come in decades since this speech? We live in an era where extrajudicial executions are a daily operation at the hands of police departments around the country. Where these brutal murders are brazenly broadcast on television with complete disregard—or perhaps intention—to involve a permanent state of PTSD in our countrymen and women. Where protests are called unpatriotic in as much as some in this country pledge allegiance to a flag that represents the politics of the Confederacy.

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

Hamidou Maiga

Posted on September 5, 2016

Photo: Untitled, 1973. © Hamidou Maiga, courtesy of Jack Bell Gallery.

Contemporary African art has come to the fore, giving us exquisite insights into the intricacies, nuances, and aesthetics of the oldest peoples on earth. But Africa is not a country; it is a continent as rich and diverse as the DNA of the peoples, who possess the greatest variety in the world. Its arts reflect this in whatever form they may take, providing poetic and philosophical vantage points by which we may consider a wide array of experiences.

Photography has been an integral part of the aesthetic landscape since its inception in the nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth-century we have seen portrait photographers such as Malick Sidibé amd Seydou Keita rise in prominence, such is the power of their work to capture the soul of Mali on silver gelatin paper.

Their success and influence has become a tremendous draw to other great portrait photographers working in other countries. MATE – Museo Mario Testino, Lima, Peru, is particularly attuned to the great photographers of our time. For the third edition of Maestros se la Fotografía, MATE presents Hamidou Maiga, on view now through October 2, 2016. The exhibition features a selection of 36 black-and-white photographs made by the 84 year-old artist made between 1962–1973.

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Photo: Untitled, 1973. © Hamidou Maiga, courtesy of Jack Bell Gallery.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography

Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant: Subway Art

Posted on August 29, 2016

Photo: “Midg” with yellow school bus, 1982. © Martha Cooper

During the early 1970s, graffiti made it way to the trains of New York, spreading across the city like a virus and capturing the imagination of a new generation of artists in every borough. Sneaking into the yards and walking through the tunnels in the dead of night, graffiti writers were on a mission like no one had seen before—or has seen since. Fame. Recognition. Renown. In the city that never sleeps, Kings were crowned.

But as quick as it came, it disappeared. Were it not for the photographs, there would be nothing left. Fortunately writers and artists share that same compulsion to document and to collect. As fate would have it, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant had both been documenting the same scene at the same time from distinctive vantage points.

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Photo: Blade, 1980. © Henry Chalfant

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Graffiti, Manhattan, Painting, Photography

Joe Conzo & DJ Disco Wiz on “The Get Down”

Posted on August 27, 2016

Photo ©Joe Conzo

Best known for a series of posh, over-the-top cinematic extravaganzas including Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, and The Great Gatsby, Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer Baz Luhrmann has turned his attention to the small screen with The Get Down, a twelve-episode Netflix series, which premiered on August 12, 2016. Originally budgeted at $7.5 million per episode, the show ended up costing at least $120 million, making it among the most expensive series in television history.

Set between 1977–79, The Get Down is a fictional account of life on the streets of the South Bronx as the twin stars of Hip Hop and disco crossed paths in ways no one could have ever imagined. Attracted to this pivotal moment in American culture, Luhrmann found himself an outsider with no firsthand knowledge of the scene so he brought Nas, Grandmaster Flash, Nelson George, and Kurtis Blow, among others, into the fold to produce and consult on the project. The production was troubled with a series of starts, stops, and stalls that lead to scripts being written, discarded, and revised to such an extent that, according to Variety, some writers had taken to calling the show “The Shut Down.” Variety went on to describe The Get Down as a cautionary tale for Hollywood, but Netflix indicated they had no regrets.

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DJ Disco Wiz, photo ©Jenny Risher.

Categories: 1970s, Books, Bronx, Crave, Music, Photography

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

Posted on August 24, 2016

Artwork: Kerry James Marshall, Untitled, 2009. Acrylic on PVC panel. 61 1/8 x 72 7/8 x 3 7/8 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L. Bradley, B.A. 1979.

Artist Kerry James Marshall’s life traces the course of American history over the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, Marshall spent his earliest years deep in the heart of Dixie where Jim Crow laws were enforced with a vengeance. In 1963, his family moved to South Central Los Angeles, where the Watts riots would pop off just two years later.

While the Civil Rights and Black Power movements took hold of national consciousness, Marshall focused his talents of the depiction of African American identity, experience, and consciousness. Deftly translating the unique space that Black America holds, Marshall is driven by passion to render what has been erased visible. In doing so, he sets the record straight, restoring to not only America but the to the world what had been taken from it.

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Kerry James Marshall, Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994. Denver Art Museum Collection: Funds from Polly and Mark Addison, the Alliance for Contemporary Art, Caroline Morgan, and Colorado Contemporary Collectors: Suzanne Farver, Linda and Ken Heller, Jan and Frederick Mayer, Beverly and Bernard Rosen, Annalee and Wagner Schorr, and anonymous donors. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.

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

“Made You Look” at The Photographers’ Gallery

Posted on August 10, 2016

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Sartorial style and splendor is synonymous with black culture. No matter where you go on this earth, rest assured the men and women of African descent have are freshly dressed, so much so others are quick to knock it off, as though copying was not a cardinal sin. Such are the perils of creativity: not everyone can be an originator or a pioneer. But for those who are, one thing is clear. The attention never stops. The heads will turn, the jaws will drop, and the tongues with clack because invariably style dominates.

The Photographers’ Gallery, London, understands this and present Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity now through September 25, 2016. Curated by Ekow Eshun, the exhibition features works from taken from artists working around the world over the course of the past century, Starting with a rare series of outdoor studio prints made in 1904 from the Larry Dunstam Archive, thought to be taken in Senegal. Taken more than a century ago, the young men are nattily dressed in the latest European clothes, belying a love for the three-piece suit and accessories.

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

William Eggleston Portraits

Posted on August 10, 2016

Photo: Untitled, 1974 (Karen Chatham, left, with the artist’s cousin Lesa Aldridge, in Memphis, Tennessee) by William Eggleston, 1974 Wilson Centre for Photography

American photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) is deeply attuned to the poetry of life, to the spaces in between the words that bridge mind, body, and soul. His photographs are alive with great swaths of color and mood, of atmosphere and feeling that goes beyond words. They are fragments spun in the web of time, captured by Eggleston with a precision that belies his mastery of the medium.

In celebration, the National Portrait Gallery, London, presents William Eggleston Portraits, the first comprehensive museum exhibition of his work, on view now through October 23, 2016. Showcasing over 100 works, the show features portraits of Eggleston’s friends, musicians, actors and rarely seen images of his family, revealing for the first time the identities of many of the sitters who had previously been anonymous.

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

Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers

Posted on August 9, 2016

Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe, Orchid, 1982, Dye Transfer. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers, Phaidon.

“Sell the public flowers… things that they can hang on their walls without being uptight,” Robert Mapplethorpe determined. His astute business sense was rivaled only by the subversive delight he took in imbuing the glory of nature with the darker side of life. It was in his pictures of flora that Mapplethorpe found a place contrast showcase the forces of beauty, sex, and death without leaving a trace.

Unlike his nudes and BDSM scenes, the only flesh exposed here are the tendrils cut off from their source of life, consigned to a slow death inside a vase. But for that moment the flowers are fresh and full of life, for that moment that contain all the promise of presence in the here and now, as their petals burst open and perfume fills the air, that is the moment Mapplethorpe captured for eternity.

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Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe, African Daisy, 1982, Dye Transfer. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers,

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Photography