Posts from the “1980s” Category

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And

Posted on August 4, 2021

*Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire celebrates with her friends, 1980–83/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

At the age of 45, Lorraine O’Grady emerged as an artist fully formed when she made her first public appearance as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” in 1980 at Just Above Midtown, the center of New York’s Black avant-garde run by revolutionary gallerist Linda Goode Bryant. Dressed in a handmade gown comprised of 180 pairs of white gloves, a sparkling tiara, and beauty queen sash, O’Grady entered the gallery bearing flowers and a cat-o’-nine-tails whip.

The flowers were for the audience, the whip she saved for herself in a performance that decried the respectability politics that consumed the Black American middle class desperately striving to find some semblance of protection from the horrors of systemic racism. But O’Grady, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, knew such ideas were illusions at best. As she whipped herself, she spoke verse, her poem ending in a firm declaration: “Black Art Must Take More Risks!”

O’Grady wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t afraid – even if it meant her work would go without proper recognition for more than 40 years. Now 86, the artist is finally being given her proper due with her first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled Both/And and which just ended, and the publication of two collections of her work from Duke University and Dancing Foxes Press.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

*Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two), 1983/2009. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, NY © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography

Posted on August 1, 2021

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000350 EndHTML:0000004663 StartFragment:0000002943 EndFragment:0000004627 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/sararosen/Documents/%20SR%20/JOURNALISM/BLIND/%202021/JUNE%202021/BARKLEY%20HENDRICKS/Exploring%20Barkley%20L.%20Hendricks%E2%80%99%20Little%20Known%20Photography%20Practice%20:%20Miss%20Rosen%20for%20Blind.doc

An American original, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) established himself as one of the foremost painters of Black life. His luminous portraits capture the hypnotic energy and effervescent attitude of a people whose style and flair has been often imitated but never duplicated. Coming of age during the Black Power movement, Hendricks recognized the resounding absence of Blackness from the canon of Western art and sought to redress it by creating a pantheon of life-size portraits of friends, relatives, and strangers he met on the street.

Using the techniques of Old Masters, Hendricks would go on to create portraits with more bounce to the ounce than the average masterpiece. Never one to fear going against the grain, Hendricks crafted his own lane, working in figurative art at a time when abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art dominated the contemporary art world. A year before his death Hendricks told the Brooklyn Rail, “I didn’t care what was being done by other artists or what was happening around me. I was dealing with what I wanted to do. Period.”

While setting the art world ablaze with his paintings, Hendricks also worked as a photographer, strapping the “mechanical sketchbook” to his neck before leaving home and using the camera to record sources of inspiration. The new book Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography (published by Skira), offers an extraordinary look into the artist’s little known photography practice, providing a vital look at the ways in which picture making informed his work.

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Polaroid x Keith Haring

Posted on July 27, 2021

*© Keith Haring Foundation. Licensed by Artestar, New York*

Keith Haring first made his name under the streets of New York in the early 1980s when he hit the train stations with a piece of white chalk in hand, crafting luminous love letters to the city in the space where advertising traditionally went. Using the subway platforms as a “laboratory,” Haring developed a simple yet evocative iconography replete with flying saucers, barking dogs, and most famously the “Radiant Baby.” In a landscape filled with graffiti masterpieces, Haring’s work caught the eye of the citizenry and art world alike.

Haring, who understood branding long before it became de rigueur, quickly shot to the top with projects including the Public Art Fund’s One Times Square Spectacolor billboard series, collaborations with choreographer Bill T. Jones, as well as fashion designers Willi Smith and Vivienne Westwood. His work was also shown at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. Through it all Haring maintained his commitment to making art for the people, creating the first major work at the now-famed Houston Bowery Wall and the Crack is Wack mural in Harlem — for which he was arrested on charges of vandalism in 1986.

A true egalitarian who believed in the power of art, Haring made sure his work was accessible to all — employing the very ethos of photography by creating an object that could be reproduced infinite times and therefore rendered affordable. In April 1986, he opened the Pop Shop in the heart of Soho, making t-shirts, posters, stickers, buttons, and other ephemera featuring his work — a move for which he was first criticized then later copied en masse.

“I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price,”Haring explained. “My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

Categories: 1980s, Art, Blind, Photography

Stanley Stellar: Artifacts at the End of a Decade

Posted on July 26, 2021

*Stanley Stellar. “Brian Michaels in a cowboy hat with a friend, West Side Highway NYC” (1981).*

On May 18 1981, the New York Native, the only gay newspaper in the city, published the first story on a new disease later identified as AIDS. After hearing rumours of a “gay cancer,” the paper’s medical writer Lawrence D. Mass contacted the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC claimed that word of a deadly threat descending upon the gay community largely unfounded – a pernicious start to what would become a longstanding pattern of malignant neglect by the federal government.

The advent of AIDS marked the end of a brief but shining chapter of LGBTQ+ history that began with the Stonewall uprising in 1969. As a new generation came of age during the Gay Liberation Movement, they transformed the street of New York into a garden of earthly delights, reveling in the bountiful pleasures of existence itself. No longer driven into the shadows, forced to deny their true selves, the community could openly partake in sex, love, friendship, and camaraderie.

Although the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) would not extend Constitutional rights to the LGBTQ+ community until 2003, change was in the air. After 20 years of pathologising homosexuality as a form of mental illness, the American Psychiatry Association removed it from the DSM-II in 1973 – the very same year that SCOTUS modified its definition of “obscenity” to finally legalise the depiction of male frontal nudity.

While established artists like Andy Warhol began experimenting with homoerotic photography in his series Sex Parts and Torsos, he struggled to call a spade a space, writing in The Andy Warhol Diaries: “I shouldn’t call them nudes. It should be something more artistic. Like ‘Landscapes’.” But a new crop of emerging artists including Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), Peter Hujar (1934-1987), Alvin Baltrop (1947-2004), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), and Peter Berlin were more inclined to embrace the spirit of the times, centring LGBTQ+ life in their work.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Stanley Stellar. “Grand Torino, Hudson River Waterfront, NYC” (1979).*

*Stanley Stellar. “Gay Pride Day on Christopher Street, NYC” (1983).*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, 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

Erwin Olaf: Strange Beaurt

Posted on July 23, 2021

*“Palm Springs”, American Dream, Self-Portrait with Alex I, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

eality — like nature — is a wild, savage, and beautiful force, a truth so grand as to be sublime that we can never truly fathom it, though we most certainly may try. Art, in its most exalted form, transports us into an ineffable realm, a space where understanding lays beyond the word itself. “We all know that Art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso famously said. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

These sentiments speak to the work of Dutch photographer and multimedia artist Erwin Olaf, whose carefully staged images occupy the liminal space between fact and fiction. In the new exhibitions “New Series: April Fool and In the Forest” and “Strange Beauty“, on view in Munich, Germany along with a catalogue, Olaf revisits his archive, looking back over his 40-year career that explores meditative aspects of human emotion, motivation, and thought as well as pressing social and political issues facing women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.

“I always have to be a little bit angry otherwise I don’t work,” Olaf says with a frankness that underlies the heart of a true revolutionary. A rebellion is driven by love, and a desire to tear down false truths propped up by our current world. “I always get the question, ‘Is it real or unreal?’ With photography, why are we thinking we are looking at reality? Olaf asks.

“For me, the camera is an instrument to register my imagination and to translate the things in my mind into an image. When we see a painting, we accept that it is from the mind and the spirit of the painter. It’s the same with music, literature, and film. You can go to the cinema in the afternoon, watch a movie, and cry your heart out when you know it’s totally artificial. But when it’s photography, it should be part of the ‘real world.’ I don’t think so.”

Read the Full Story at Blind

*“Palm Springs”, The Kite, 2018 © Erwin Olaf*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History

Posted on July 20, 2021

*Vaginal Davis and Joan Jett Blakk at SPEW 2. Photo by Mark Freitas*

From the very start, queer identity has been a central proponent of punk culture, starting with the name itself being jailhouse slang to describe the man on the receiving end of anal sex. By the time punk culture was named in the mid to late 1970s, it was an amorphous space of freedom, where gender and sexuality were fluid.

“In the beginning, punk rock was exceptionally gender diverse,” says Walter Crasshole, who edited the recent book, Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History (PM Press) along with Liam Warfield and Yony Leyser. “There were a number of LGBTQ+ protagonists in the punk scene, some who made that very clear and it was part of their identities, like Jayne County.”

But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that queercore emerged as a potent force, rising from the horrors of the AIDS epidemic, the neoliberal policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the reactionary, hyper-masculine orthodoxy of the hardcore scene.

Recognizing the community no longer provided the support they needed to survive, a group of disaffected queer punks, artists, and musicians, including G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce, began to develop their own scene, laying the groundwork for what would become first known as ‘homocore’, then take on the more inclusive name ‘queercore’ in the early ‘90s.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Deke Nihilson at Homocore Chicago. Photo by Mark Freitas*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Huck, Music, Photography

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

Hazel Hankin: Never Before Seen Photos of NYC in the 1970s &’80s

Posted on July 19, 2021

*Hazel Hankin. Skate dancers at Park Circle Roller Disco, Brooklyn, NY, 1978.*

*Hazel Hankin. Busy street scene, Lower East Side, 1976.*

Growing up in Midwood, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, Hazel Hankin led a sheltered life until she started going into Manhattan as a teenager. “The wider world of New York City opened up to me. It was gritty and a little scary, but also a place of energy, excitement and possibilities. It was a time of great social and political ferment,” Hazel says, rattling off an impressive list of liberation movements, anti-imperialist activism and radical feminist consciousness-raising groups that transformed her worldview.

As the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords fought for human rights, Hazel was keenly aware that the importance of justice extended to something as basic as housing. “New York was affordable,” she remembers. “You could live on a modest income, and there were jobs to be had if and when you needed one. If you were an artist, an activist, or just a young person trying things out, you could get an apartment, make a little money, and do just that.”

After graduating high school at age 16, Hazel enrolled at university the Pratt Institute in NYC but had to drop out after problems at home caused undue stress. “I rented an apartment with my friend Michele — who tells people now that we ran away from home together at 18,” Hazel says with a laugh, looking back fondly on her years living near the Flatbush entrance to Prospect Park.

Determined to continue her studies, Hazel got an office job working days and enrolled in Brooklyn College, where she studied painting and photography, taking courses at night. At that time, the contemporary art world excluded photography from its ranks, a practice that would continue for the next two decades. Largely unprofessionalised, photography drew artists like Hazel, who gravitated to the fluidity of form and could move seamlessly between portrait, documentary, photojournalism, and street photography over the course of a single afternoon.

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Hazel Hankin. Two boys, Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1977.*

*Hazel Hankin. Neighborhood salsa band performance, Lower East Side, 1976.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, i-D, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Beau McCall: Rewind – Memories on Repeat

Posted on July 13, 2021

“Philadelphia is conservative, and I have never really been conservative because I’m a visual person,” says African American artist and Philly native Beau McCall. Known as “The Button Man” for his wearable art that transforms the universal fastener into sparkling gems that address issues of race, economics, social justice, and pop culture, McCall’s aesthetic sensibilities placed him in a league all his own from a young age.

Growing up, McCall’s sense of style evolved in tandem with his musical tastes – from hippie to punk to funk with effortless grace. Determined to forge his own identity, he used music and fashion to express himself, donning platforms, skinny pants, and midriff tops, with dreams of dressing like a rock star.

“If I went out shopping and saw something I couldn’t afford, I would go home and try to make something similar like the pants that FloJo used to wear with one leg,” he recalls. “I did that in seventh grade. I walked through the neighbourhood a couple of times and they thought I was crazy. I was in an individual. I never wanted to play follow the leader. I just wanted to have my own identity.”

After coming our in his teens, McCall found what would become his chosen family, a group of likeminded folks who shared his penchant for glamour and artistry – Joey, Tony, Trey, Tracy, James, Sifuddin, Moi Renee, Charles, Bianca, and Antoine AKA Dee Dee Somemore. “We all lived in the same neighborhood, bumped into each other casually, and gravitated to each other, knowing we were coming to terms with our sexuality,” he says. “When I started hanging with my gay friends, it was Diana Ross, Donna Summer, all the disco queens – so my visuals changed again and I started dabbling in drag. I was still expressing myself artistically.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

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

Paul McDonough: Headed West

Posted on July 8, 2021

*Paul McDonough. Lake Elsinore, California, 1982.*

From an early age, American photographer Paul A. McDonough displayed a natural gift for making art, a talent he shared with childhood friend, noted photographer Tod Papageorge. Although trained as painter, McDonough became restless in the studio and wanted to get out in the world. “Photography not only let him do that, it encouraged his need to roam,” says Yona McDonough, the photographer’s wife.

After dreaming of moving to New York City, McDonough finally arrived in 1967. “It was every bit as wonderful and exhilarating as he’d imagined,” says Yona. “Paul said that the constant activity, flowing, ebbing, bubbling over, was like a kind of endlessly unfolding theatre and all he had to do was walk and wait – it would all come to him.”

A true flâneur, McDonough would walk the streets of New York for six hours or more, meeting up with Garry Winogrand and Papageorge before continuing his journey. Inspired by the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Eugène Atget and Bill Brandt, McDonough understood that he could create art anywhere he ventured.

Read the Full Story at Huck

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