Posts from the “1980s” Category

Lebohang Kganye: Ke Lefa Laka – Her-story (2012-2013)

Posted on May 3, 2019

South African artist Lebohang Kganye was just 20 years old when her mother died in 2010. A couple of years later, Kganye was looking through family photo albums in their Johannesburg home and realised that many of the clothes her mother wore in the pictures were still in her wardrobe.

Kganye became intrigued. Most of the snapshots were made before she was born in 1990, at her grandmother’s house and on the lawn. Up until then, Kganye explains, the photos and albums were never really all that significant. “I’d go to my grandmother’s house and we’d look at the photos every now and then, and laugh about how they’d aged, the different periods they had gone through,” she says. “We had never gone over individual photos, the history, and the narrative of each.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Africa, Art, Huck, Photography, Women

Ming Smith: A Tribute to Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery

Posted on May 3, 2019

Ming Smith. Grace Jones at Studio 54, 1978, archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches

Ming Smith. Sun Ra Space II, New York City, NY, 1978, archival pigment print, 40 x 60 inches

In 1974, at the age of 23, Linda Goode Bryant opened Just Above Midtown (JAM), a non-profit New York arts organization dedicated to showing the work of artists of color in the heart of 57th Street, then the capital of the art world. Rent was a astonishing $300 per month, the 70% discount a testament to Goode Bryant’s negotiating prowess.

Like Goode Bryant, JAM was a revolution unto itself, with the intention to burn the art world down to the ground. JAM pioneered the works of now-renowned Black artists including Dawoud Bey, Norman Lewis, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Lorna Simposon, and Ming Smith — all of whom are being show at Frieze New York (May 2-5) as part of a special tribute to Linda Goode Bryant’s JAM Gallery from the 1970s.

The 2019 Frieze Stand Prize was awarded to Jenkins Johnson Gallery for their presentation of the work of photographer Ming Smith, whose contributions to the medium have recently come into clear focus. Hailing from Columbus, Ohio and educated at Howard University, Smith moved to New York in 1973 to live as an artist. To support herself, Smith joined the ranks of Grace Jones, Bethann Hardison, B. Smith, Sherry Bronfman, and Toukie Smith as the first generation of Black women to break the color barrier in the fashion and beauty industries,

“People would tell me, ‘You should be a model,’ but I never really thought about it. But when I came to New York I needed to make money, and then it was like $100 an hour,” Smith recalls. “I wasn’t really interested in modeling, but the money was good. Being a Black woman, I never saw that as an obstacle. I just knew I had to go.”

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Ming Smith, James Baldwin, archival pigment print, 20 x 24 inches

Ming Smith, Curiosities, Brooklyn, NY, 1976, archival pigment print, 30 x 40 inches

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

Richard Corman: Basquiat – A Portrait

Posted on May 3, 2019

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 57 Great Jones Street, New York, June 1984 © Richard Corman

In June 1984, Jean-Michel Basquiat was flying high in his downtown studio at 57 Great Jones Street. He had just come off his first solo exhibition at Marry Boone and featured in the MoMA’s inaugural re-opening show, an international survey of the most important painters and sculptors of the moment.

Enter the then 30-year-old photographer Richard Corman, who had completed a two-year apprenticeship with Richard Avedon. On assignment for L’Uomo Vogue, Corman would spend an hour with Basquiat creating a series of incisive portraits of the artist as a young icon, just published in a new, limited edition book titled BASQUIAT: A PORTRAIT,

This was Corman’s first encounter with Basquiat, who started leasing the studio from Andy Warhol in 1983. “I hope it works out,” Warhol says in his diaries on August 26. “Jean Michel is trying to get on a regular painting schedule. If he doesn’t and he can‘t pay his rent it’ll be so hard to evict him. It’s always hard to get people out.”

Spoken like a true Factory owner.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 57 Great Jones Street, New York, June 1984 © Richard Corman

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Gavin Watson: Oh What Fun We Had!

Posted on May 1, 2019

By the time Gavin Watson had left school at the age of 16, he had already amassed more than 10,000 photographs of his friends, taken at a council estate in High Wycombe, during the time the second generation of British skinheads were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Watson first encounted the Two-tone movement – which fuses ska, punk, and new wave – when he was 14, when he caught Madness on TV in 1979. 40 years on, Watson has come full circle with his new book Oh! What Fun We Had (Damiani), which launches at Donlon Books tonight and features never-before-seen photographs chronicling the rough-hewn kids who transformed skinhead culture into a global phenomenon.

“What’s crazy to me is I took so many pictures,” Watson says on the phone from his London studio. “I couldn’t afford to do it. No one ever paid me to do it. No one ever saw the pictures. I just took them for no real reason, except that I enjoyed taking them.”

Watson’s images have stood the test of time, and reflect the truth of skinheads – one which contradicts the mainstream media’s conflation of the subculture with the National Front. Here, the photographer talks us through his new book, transporting us back to a time when a group of marginalised youth became a threat to Thatcherite Britain because they refused to kowtow to the status quo.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

Builder Levy: Humanity in the Streets

Posted on April 30, 2019

Malcolm X Speaking, Labor union/civil rights rally in support of the New York City school boycott, Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1964 © Builder Levy

Builder Levy enrolled in Brooklyn College in 1959 with the dream of becoming an Abstract Expressionist, but the work didn’t resonate the way he hoped it would. Photography, however, made perfect sense. “It allowed me to get more involved with life,” Levy says.

Growing up in Bath Beach, a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, Levy lived in a housing development built by Donald Trump’s father, Fred. Living through the Jim Crow 1950s, fraught with the spectres of McCarthy and the Cold War, Levy was sensitive to the struggle of people of colour and the working class, becoming politically aware and engaged at a young age.

“I started taking the camera with me to street demonstrations,’ Levy remembers, recognising the importance of amplifying the fight against oppression and injustice.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Medallion Lords, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, 1965 © Builder Levy

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer: Art & Queer Culture

Posted on April 17, 2019

Charles ‘ Teenie’ Harris, Group portrait of four cross-dressers posing in a club or a bar in front of a piano, including Michael ‘Bronze Adonis’ Fields, on left, and possibly ‘Beulah’ on right, 1955. Collection, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

“I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy.”

New York artist and activist Donna Gottschalk memorably penned those words on a placard during the first Gay Liberation event on June 28, 1970 – the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The moment was captured in a photograph by Diana Davies, and published in the back page of Ecstasy magazine Issue 2, becoming a touchstone of the new age.

It was a statement of bold confidence, a reclamation of self from a society that had been actively criminalising and pathologising homosexuality since the word appeared in English for the first time in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1892).

Born from a repressive, regressive regime, queer art became a channel into which people could connect and express themselves. It sparked a new bohemia, one that continues to grow and bloom, which inspired the revised, updated paperback edition of Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer’s epic survey Art & Queer Culture (Phaidon).

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Jamil Hellu; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (a.k.a. Faluda Islam) grew up in Pakistan. In Arabic poetry, a deer often symbolizes an effeminate young man. In Brazil, the word deer (‘veado’) is commonly used as slang to insult gay men, 2017. © the artist

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

Janette Beckman: Los Angeles in the Early 80s

Posted on April 11, 2019

Rivera Bad Girls, LA © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Back in the 1970s, while attending Central Saint Martins, Janette Beckman was living in a squat in Streatham, South London. After her upstairs neighbour moved to Los Angeles, Beckman too travelled to the city in search of some sun. There, she fell in love with the pop Americana she saw and took to photographing neon motel signs at night – an image Squeeze immortalised on their 1979 single, “Christmas Day”.

Hooked, Beckman returned to LA in 1981 on assignment for Melody Maker to photograph R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, the Brothers Johnson, and Patrick Rushen. But it wasn’t until summer 1983 that she went the distance. While staying in the Beverly Hills bungalow of the Go-Go’s manager Ginger Canzoneri, Beckman happened upon a story in the LA Weekly about the Hoyo Maravilla gang in East LA. “There weren’t any pictures,” Beckman says over a glass of wine in her Manhattan studio – and she was determined to get them.

Beckman spent the summer hanging out in El Hoyo Maravilla, a local park, and began hanging out with local gang members and their families. Then, at night, she’d hang out in Hollywood, catching punk shows at the Masque and the Whisky, fascinated by the dark style and sound of the scene.

In the wake of an exhibition of her work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Beckman shares her memories of the legendary LA underground.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

The Brothers Johnson © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Lux Interior, The Cramps, LA © Janette Beckman, Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Rick Castro: Fetish King

Posted on April 5, 2019

For Rick Castro, fetish is the ultimate manifestation of self; the very notion of perfection, if you will. The journey began one day in 1970, when the photographer – who has shot and interviewed Ron Athey, Alice Bag and Tony Ward for AnotherManmag.com – discovered a copy of A Clockwork Orange in his aunt’s secondhand bookstore when he was 12.

“It shocked me and made my young wheels turn,” Castro says from his Los Angeles home. “I was trying to put it all into context. The idea of glamourised violence and scary dystopia – it seemed to ring true. I started to see that is going to be the future – and it was. We’ve surpassed it.”

And in doing so, we have embraced fetish in a broader sense. Castro explains, “For me it’s all-encompassing. The 21st century is all about fetish. On the positive side, it is the appreciation on a larger scale of things that would not have gotten a lot of respect in the past, but on the negative side it’s that cult of personality that I think is a waste of time and lead to the banality of America if not the world.”

Words of wisdom from ‘The Fetish King,’ a title Castro has fully embraced, and given to the title to a three-decade survey of his black and white BDSM photographs, opening April 6 at the Tom of Finland Foundation in his native Los Angeles.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

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

Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies

Posted on April 4, 2019

Heal-a-zation, Swathe a la Blob Ba, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1981. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

In 1974, American artist Steven F. Arnold traveled to Spain at the behest of Salvador Dalí, who was opening the Dalí Theatre and Museum in Catalonia that September and had embraced Arnold as his protégé.

The legendary surrealist, known to tire of people in a matter of minutes, was utterly enchanted with the 31-year-old artist and dubbed him the “prince” of his Court of Miracles – his eccentric, eclectic coterie that included Donyale Luna, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Ultra Violet, and Amanda Lear, as well as Arnold’s dear friends Pandora and Kaisik Wong.

“They made a scene,” says Vishnu Dass, Director of the Steven Arnold Museum and Archive. “In Spain, Dalí was occupied with getting press. He would have them dress and take them to public events as his entourage for the months leading up to the museum. There are newspaper clippings from Spanish newspapers that talk about riots with Dali’s transvestites.”

Their cosmic connection was just one of the extraordinary relationships Arnold had throughout his life. “I call Steven a Queer Mystic,” Dass says. “His ultimate goal was to create a space where he himself and all those he loved could exist in a place that wasn’t binary or judging.”

As an artist who never pursued fame, status, or wealth, Arnold was an integral figure in the American counterculture for 30 years, a true influencer whose legacy is being reexamined now, 25 years after his untimely death from complications due to Aids. In advance of an exhibition of his work at Fahey/Klein Gallery during The Photography Show presented by AIPAD – which opens today – Dass takes us on a magical journey through Arnold’s life and art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Dressed for Dali, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1987. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

Lighting the Path, Silver Gelatin Photograph, 1985. copyright The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives

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

Guzman: Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814

Posted on March 29, 2019

Sombre church bells sound as Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 begins. An eerie, unsettled feeling unfolds as Jackson recites the “Pledge” her voice layered to suggest a group who are bound together on this journey as one: “We are a nation with no geographic boundaries, bound together through our beliefs. We are like-minded individuals, sharing a common vision, pushing toward a world rid of colour-lines.”

Then she dropped “Rhythm Nation” and the world would never be the same. On her fourth studio album, Jackson transformed from pop star into an icon.

Forever defiant and entirely her own, Jackson refused to give the record label what they wanted, a sequel to Control. But she had bigger things on her mind, and used her art to make a political statement about issues of race, bigotry, gun violence, poverty, drug abuse, illiteracy, and ignorance.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Music, Photography

Suzanne Donaldson: Inside the Final Years of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Studio

Posted on March 29, 2019

Back in 1986, at the very beginning of her career, Suzanne Donaldson was working in the art department at Vanity Fair. Just 24 years old, her dream was to be a photo editor, and she was thrilled to learn of an opening in the photo department under Elisabeth Biondi.

“My boss didn’t want me to go,” Donaldson recalls. “She very snarkily said, ‘With your interest in photography, I don’t know why you don’t go work for Mapplethorpe, Horst, or Avedon?’”

The forces of fate must have heard the crack, for not long thereafter Donaldson learned that Robert Mapplethorpe was looking for someone to manage his Manhattan studio.

“I was lucky enough to have an interview with him,” she says. “It was an epic time in New York. It was the beginning of the AIDS crisis. He was diagnosed at that point. Everybody was wary of toilet seats, shaking somebody’s hand, kissing them — it wasn’t known how it was contracted.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography