Posts from the “1980s” Category

It’s All True: The East Village Eye Show

Posted on September 19, 2016

Artwork: May 1979. Courtesy of The East Village Eye/Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project.

Picture It: The East Village, May 1979. A new scene is emerging within the burned-out buildings and abandoned lots. It had been a decade since Daniel Patrick Moynihan urged then-President Richard Nixon to adopt the devastating policy of “benign neglect,” effectively cutting off major cities from federal, state, and local services in response to the race riots of the 1960s. At the same time, the Nixon White House initiated a phony war on drugs, as the cover story for flooding African-American and Latino neighborhoods with heroin.

Yet, despite the United States’ government’s best efforts to destroy its own citizens, like the phoenix they rose from the ashes and gave birth to the greatest cultural movements of the late twentieth century. Up in the Bronx, Hip Hop was born. Over in Washington Heights, graffiti took hold. And down in the East Village, punk rock emerged. It’s very telling that when people were pushed to the edge, they came back stronger than ever before.

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Artwork: June 1980 Courtesy of The East Village Eye/Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project.

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

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

Toty Ruggeri: Diamond Dogs

Posted on September 6, 2016

Photo: ©Toty Ruggeri, courtesy of Yard Press.d Dogs,

Picture it: Naples, Italy, 1984: the city had been unhinged by a massive earthquake that struck four years earlier, creating a massive divide between the rich and the poor. The government had allocated $20 of the $40 billion earmarked for reconstruction to create a new class of millionaires, while another $10 billion went into the pockets of the Camorra and the politicians on the take, giving the Mafia entrance into the construction industry. Only one quarter of the funds were used to reconstruction.

The results were to be expected. Naples, already plagued by the wars between Mafia gangs, a high rate of youth unemployment, ineffective local government, a decaying urban infrastructure, and a trashed public image, was caught in between chaos and despair, but from the darkness new hope emerged.

That hope took the form of Diamond Dogs, a subterranean getaway from all that was going wrong. From the years 1984 through 1989, Diamond Dogs where artists, musicians, writers, poets, actors, and directors could converge, fomenting a cultural rebirth of Naples in its time of greatest need. Photographer Toty Ruggeri was among the crowd with his camera in hand, capturing the scene as it unfolded.

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Photo: ©Toty Ruggeri, courtesy of Yard Press.

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

Art AIDS America

Posted on September 2, 2016

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There is something terrifying about the speed at which people forget a genocide that swept the globe and wiped away a generation. Perhaps it is the nature of trauma itself; once the emergency lets up, the mind just wants to forget. You want to move on, you want to breathe, you want to live—because so many no longer do and there’s no way to make sense of it. Why him? Why her? Why not me? These questions cannot be answered in the moment. We simply need to be.

In 1981, the public reports began to hit the United States. A new disease was ravaging immune systems, causing violent, early deaths—but what was it? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control did not have a name; they referred to it by the various manifestations the virus took in those grueling early days. The CDC thought they were clever in calling it “the 4H disease,” since the syndrome was most commonly observed in heroin users, male homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. But that failed miserably. Not only was it stigmatizing already marginalized groups but it was steeped in ignorance.

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Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, 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

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

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

Michael Gross: Focus

Posted on August 3, 2016

Michael Gross has had his finger on the pulse of high society, documenting their luxurious lifestyles for more than three decades. With a chair in the front row of the fashion shows for a decade, Gross delved into the corners of the world that few had known with his seminal book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (William Morrow, 1995), exposing the underbelly of the industry at the height of the supermodel craze.

The book had been Richard Avedon’s idea. Gross had a column in The New York Times and was writing long form pieces for New York magazine, including a cover story detailing the historic rivalry between Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Gross had been thinking of expanding the story into a book but Avedon, who had been a major source, thought no one cared about ancient beef between Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland. Instead, he suggested a book on the modeling industry, which no one had ever done before.

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

Books | Ridinghouse Presents Linder

Posted on July 30, 2016

Linder Against Interpretation, 2012 Duratrans on lightbox 168.8 x 125.8 cm | 66 1/2 x 49 1/2 ins Edition of 3 plus 1 AP

Linder Sterling makes some of the most extraordinary photomontages the world has ever seen, creating a delectable body of work exploring representations of female sexuality. Equal parts cheeky and chic, Linder puts the sexy back in soft focus centerfolds, while giggling all the way to the bank. By taking pre-existing soft-focus pornography and combining it with flora, fauna, food items (really anything of the sort that conveys the desire to acquire, to have and to hold), Linder reminds us that the image of women is very much a construction for consumption itself. What’s endlessly charming is the simple fact that Linder simultaneously indulges our consumption of this construction while simultaneously deconstructing it. In celebration of a career that spans four decades, the artist has released a sumptuous monograph with 270 pages of pure pleasure. Linder (Ridinghouse) features numerous series made throughout her career, along with a series of interviews that gives insight into mind behind the work.

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