Posts from the “1980s” Category

Arlene Gottfried: Bacalaitos & Fireworks

Posted on March 21, 2016

Photo: Puerto Rican Day Parade. ©Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

Arlene Gottfried is a New York original. Hailing from Brooklyn, Ms. Gottfried moved from Coney Island to Crown Heights when she was just ten years old, living in the area during the 1960s, as white flight and Civil Rights changed the face of the neighborhood. In the 1970s, Gottfried lived in the Village while studying photography at F.I.T. After her father had died, the family moved to the Lower East Side. Back then, it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, rich in traditions native to the island, which, when combined with local influence, produced its very own style: Nuyorican.

Nuyorican is rhythms, horns, strings, and winds—or it is simply spoken word filling the air. Best exemplified by Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poet’s Café, it is a state of mind in the place to be. Nuyorican is a street vendor selling fried codfish fritters and fireworks on July 4, announcing his wares as he made his way up and down the street shouting: “Bacalaitos y Fireworks!”

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Communion. ©Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

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

Builder Levy: Appalachia USA

Posted on February 22, 2016

Photo: Builder Levy. Sisters, Osage, Scotts Run, Monongalia, West Virginia, 1970. Gold-toned gelatin silver print.

Appalachia that stretches across the eastern United States, running from New York down to northern Mississippi. The former hunting grounds of the Cherokee and other indigenous groups, Appalachia became home to colonists seeking to escape oppressive British rule. Later, it was marked by the routes and hideouts of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Growing into a center of abolitionism, more than a quarter million southern mountaineers joined the Union army during the Civil War.

But it was after the war that things began to change, as Appalachia was recognized as a distinctive cultural region in the late nineteenth century. Large-scale logging and coal mining firms brought industry to the region, taking advantage of the abundant natural resources of the land. Miners were recruited from southern prison conscript labor, local subsistence farms, African American communities in the south, and even towns and villages throughout Europe.

Despite the profits made by the mining and logging companies, the people of Appalachia have long struggled with poverty, as health care and educational facilities failed to meet the communities’ needs. At the same time, the region became a source of enduring myths and distortions about its inhabitants. As the media began focusing on sensationalized stories like moonshining and clan feuding, Appalachia became seen as America’s white ghetto, home to an uneducated and violent underclass.

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

Chris “Daze” Ellis: The City is My Muse

Posted on February 18, 2016

Chris “Daze” Ellis, The Odyssey, 2015, Oil and spray paint on canvas, Courtesy of the Artist

The New York City of Chris “Daze” Ellis’s world is a beautiful, hypnotic siren singing the softest of lullabies or just as quickly drop a beat and rhyme on top of it. She’s demanding, but she gives as good as she gets. She’s the queen befitting a king, and has found herself the subject of Chris “Daze” Ellis: The City is My Muse, on view at the Museum of New York, NY, now through May 1, 2016. Ellis observes, “This exhibition is a testament to my love affair with New York as my muse. It is an endless source of subject matter and an inspiration for many years. A muse is someone or something that captures your attention and imagination in a way that presents endless possibilities. New York is like that for me.”

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting

Exhibit | Warhol by the Book

Posted on February 17, 2016

Artwork: Andy Warhol (1928–1987). “So Sweet,” 1950s, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do,” Andy Warhol said. His dedication to the creation of beauty in both the glamorous and the commonplace forever changed the course of art, culture, and communication. He worked in both commercial and fine arts, always able to build a bridge between these two worlds and he used the book as a vehicle throughout his career. In celebration of his works, the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, presents Warhol by the Book, a four-decade retrospective on view now through May 5, 2016.

Featuring more than 130 objects dating back to his student days, the exhibition includes the only surviving project from the 1940s. It also features a remarkable collection of drawings, screen prints, photographs, self-published books, children’s books, photography books, text-based books, unique books, archival material; and his much-sought-after dust jacket designs. To call Warhol prolific would be an understatement. He simply was a one-man factory who aptly advised, “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

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

Timeless: The Photographs of Kamoinge

Posted on February 9, 2016

Boy on a Swing. New York, 1976. Beuford Smith.

In 1963, the Kamoinge Workshop produced their first portfolio of photographs taken by members who made up the group. The portfolio included a statement that read: “The Kamoinge Workshop represents fifteen black photographers whose creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about society and about themselves.” Accompanying that were the words of member Louis Draper, who elegantly wrote: “Hot breath steaming from black tenements, frustrated window panes reflecting the eyes of the sun, breathing musical songs of the living.”

A collective was born. The word Kamoinge is derived from the Gikuyu language of Kenya. Translated literally, it means “a group of people acting together.” This spirit of camaraderie and family suffused the development of the group, which included Roy DeCarava, Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, and Shawn Walker. Early meetings were held in DeCarava’s midtown Manhattan loft. The following year, they rented a gallery in Harlem on Strivers Row, where they held meetings and hosted exhibitions. When the gallery closed, they moved the meetings to other members’ homes in the city, keeping their bonds intact throughout the years.

In 2004, founding member Anthony Barboza was selected President, and set out a course to create a photography book showcasing the group’s legacy. Together with fellow member Herb Robinson, Barboza has edited Timeless: The Photographs of Kamoinge (Schiffer). Featuring more than 280 photographs taken over fifty years, Timeless is an extraordinary collection of work that reminds us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Photo: Bridge on the Beach. Nassau, Bahamas, 2007. June DeLairre Truesdale.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Manhattan, Photography

Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows

Posted on December 21, 2015

Photo: Creator(s): Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, born 1947) Title/Date: Yokosuka Story #73, 1977 Culture: Japanese Medium: Gelatin silver print Dimensions: Image: 43.7 x 53.7 cm (17 3/16 x 21 1/8 in.) Sheet: 45.4 x 55.7 cm (17 7/8 x 21 15/16 in.) Accession No. 2009.96.3 Copyright: © Ishiuchi Miyako Object Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

This year marked the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 129,000 people and decimated the country of Japan. Although nearly half the people died on the first day, the other half clung to life in desperate shape, only to die from the effect of the burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries compounded by illness and malnutrition. The only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history, the bombings destroyed primarily civilian populations.

In the decades that followed, the bombings continued to have effect on subsequent generations born into the post-nuclear landscape. Self-taught photographer Ishiuchi Miyako was born two years after the war and stunned the Japanese photography establishment in the late 1970s with grainy, haunting, black-and-white images of Yokosuka—the city where Miyako spent her childhood and where the United States established an important naval base in 1945.

Working prodigiously over the next forty years, Miyako has created an incredible body of work that has been collected for “Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows”, now on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, through February 21, 2016, and is published in a book by the same name.

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Photo: Creator(s): Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, born 1947) Title/Date: Yokosuka Story #58, 1976 – 1977 Culture: Japanese Medium: Gelatin silver print Dimensions: Image: 45.5 x 55.8 cm (17 15/16 x 21 15/16 in.) Framed: 54.4 × 65.7 × 4.5 cm (21 7/16 × 25 7/8 × 1 ¾ in.) Accession No. EX.2015.7.76 Copyright: © Ishiuchi Miyako Object Credit: collection of Yokohama Museum of Art Repro Credit: Photo © Yokohama Museum of Art

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

Art Basel Miami Beach 2015 Edition

Posted on December 11, 2015

art_basel_miami_2015_lapostferia

Check Out
Art Basel Miami Beach 2015
Coverage at Crave Online

A few highlights from the week include:

Incas wallpaper panel, 1818, Joseph Dufour et Compagnie (founded Mâcon, France, 1801–23), manufacturer, Block-printed on handmade paper, Courtesy of Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz

“Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern”
Wolfsonia-Florida International University

© Lorna Simpson. Direct Gaze, 2014 (detail)

Top 5 Highlights at
Art Basel Miami Beach

Amarillismo by Wilson Diaz

Wilson Diaz: Amarillismo
at Instituto de Vision at Art Basel

© James Rieck. Flared Bell Bottoms, 2015.

Top 5 Highlights at
PULSE Contemporary Art Fair

Guy Richards Smit: Mountain of Skulls
Charlie James Gallery at PULSE

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

Jamel Shabazz: Tour of Duty on Rikers Island

Posted on December 1, 2015

Photo: Jamel Shabazz

Despite the surging growth of the prison industrial complex, very little is known of what goes on inside prisons and jails aside from what is shared with us by the people who have actually done time or worked in them. Photographer Jamel Shabazz worked as a Corrections Officer for the New York City Department of Corrections. He joined the force in 1983, just as the crack epidemic hit the streets, and worked inside the belly of the beast for 20 years. Shabazz spoke with Crave about the complexities of life inside the prison industrial complex.

Miss Rosen: Why do you think this subject is kept, for the larger part, out of the mainstream media? Why is it important to you to speak about your experience as an NYC corrections officer?

Jamel Shabazz I think that the mainstream media has been mute for far too long on this issue primarily because, the overwhelming majority of those who are incarcerated are young black and Hispanic males. It is a known fact that the prison industrial complex is a multi-billion dollar corporation and Wall Street investors have gained great returns in their ventures regarding prisons. In all actuality, numerous businesses and organizations have profited from mass incarceration. As a witness to this, I feel the need to offer a different perspective about the system, as all too often Correction Officers are viewed in a negative light.

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Photograph by Jamel Shabazz

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Photography

Girls on Film: Michele Quan X Guzman X Geoffrey Beene

Posted on December 1, 2015

Michele Quan, photo by Guzman

Fashion designer Geoffrey Beene was an American pioneer, challenging the industry at every turn. He had his own way of doing things, breaking and rewriting the rules. He created new seasons, Summer/Winter, and designed brilliantly crafted pieces accordingly. “Design is a revelation to me. It’s like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life,” Mr. Beene observed.

While his clothes reflected his intuitive understanding for women’s desire to be comfortable and glamorous at the same time, Mr. Beene also understood the power of the photograph to communicate this understanding to consumers. Mr. Beene observed, “Clothes should look as if a woman was born into them. It is a form of possession, this belonging to another.” And if the clothes belong to the woman, the photograph is the perfect invitation to the viewer to participate.

From 1988–1995, Mr. Beene partnered with Guzman, the husband/wife photography team of Russell Peacock and Connie Hanson, to produce a series of photographs of Michele Quan modeling the clothes. As Guzman recalls, “Mr. Beene introduced us to Michele. She was a good choice for his designs during that period. Both were elegantly streamline! Mr. Beene always played with contrasts. He would juxtapose an androgynous jumpsuit with a provocative layer of sheer lace. He would mix refined fabrics with quotidian materials like cashmere with metallic lame. He was thinking about the approaching millennium (2000) and what women should wear. For the modern woman comfort and simplicity were essential. Michele represented the modern woman in that not to distant future. Her personality matched his objectives. Elegant yet understated, feminine but powerful.”

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Michele Quan, photo by Guzman

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Fashion, Photography, Women

Marcia Resnick: Punks, Poets & Provocateurs

Posted on November 23, 2015

John Belushi, photo by Marcia Resnick

Marcia Resnick was there, at the center of it all, in a burst of light and flame that set New York on edge with a new movement in art, music, literature and film. Her new book Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982 with text by Victor Bockris (Insight Editions) features photographs of the enfants terribles of the time, people like Johnny Thunders, James Brown, William S. Burroughs, John Waters, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, men who did it their way like my man Frank Sinatra said. Marcia Resnick shares her thoughts and her photos in a conversation here.

I love how you speak about creation of Re-visions as a way to demystify your past. Would you say the same is true of Punks, Poets & Provocateurs, or was the creation of the book driven by something else you wanted to explore about life?

Marcia Resnick: In Re-visions I was confronting myself as the subject which I understood least and most wanted to understand. The next subject in line for such consideration was the male species, specifically my relationship to men, especially my attraction to “Bad Boys.”

I like to think a portrait of the artist is always their subject: who they choose, the energy the two create, the frames they select—all of this is a story about the photographer themselves. When looking through Punks, Poets & Provocateurs I see a multi-faceted gem as filtered through the lens of the masculinity at a specific time and place. As a woman looking at men, what do you find most compelling about them? Is it something you see in yourself, something you aspire towards, or a mix of the two?

Definitely a mix of the two. As I said in the book “Bad Boys can be at once formidable and endearing. Being ‘bad’ also makes people attractive, especially to the opposite sex.” I think most people are intrigued by danger regardless of what their sex is. Living on the edge is dangerous and Punk Rock was the new alternative music. The writers and provocateurs I photographed also went against the grain, making considerable innovations in their respective artistic endeavors.

The Bad Boy archetype is an American ideal: the rebel driven by profound individualism—and maybe something else. In some ways it sums up the ethos of punk: fuck the system D.I.Y. style. Looking back, I’m a little shocked by how it doesn’t seem that long ago but it seems so very far away. What would you say made the era you were photographing so ripe for rebellion?

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s people could afford to live in NYC. Everyone was challenging what was expected of them because the counterculture was still ripe. Rock musicians and artists alike were graduating from art schools. Painters were making films. Writers were doing performance art. Sculptors were doing installations. Artists were acting in films, making music and generally collaborating with each other. People were also more sexually unconstrained. This climate ended when Aids and the atmosphere of paranoia began to stymie the nightlife.

Punks, Poets & Provocateurs is an incredible compendium of the scene, very potent and resonant with a sense of energy that has, in some ways, all but disappeared. Looking back at your photographs, what mist resonates with you after all these years? What do you see in your photographs that you can only see now, with the benefit of hindsight?

I realize how fortunate I was to experience NYC and life in general when I did. Though I embrace the extraordinary technological advances that have come in time, people today communicate through electronic media. Back then, the world seemed smaller, everyone knew who their friends were and people actually got together to talk and exchange ideas.

Divine, photo by Marcia Resnick

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

Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls

Posted on November 11, 2015

Photo: Andy Warhol, Camouflage Self- Portrait , 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, with a partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1994.12.1. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Artwork Andy Warhol, Camouflage Self- Portrait , 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, with a partial gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., 1994.12.1. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979. Gelatin silver print, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, N.Y. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

New York City in the 1970s and ‘80s was a deliciously decadent time and place where art, gender, and sexuality came together in a miasma of creative energies. As the gay rights movement ushered in a new era, a new sense of expression took hold as gender became an area ripe for exploration. The ideas of masculine, feminine, and androgynous began to capture the imagination of visual and performing artists. Musicians lead the way, as crossdressing came out of the closet and groups like the New York Dolls took advantage of it’s curious effect on their female fans. It was an era of gender fluidity and sexual freedom which held to a deep abiding sense of “anything goes” as bath houses and clubs like Plato’s Retreat flourished in the city.

Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe were two of the most significant artists in New York at this time. As portrait artists, both engaged with gender, identity, sexuality, beauty, performance, and disguise in their lives and their work, revealing the intricacies and nuances of the many-splendored personalities that populated the city then. Each artist focused on their subjects as a means to discovering their truth in a complex series of questions that directly and comfortably challenge the viewer.

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Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1975. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Founding Collection, Contribution Dia Center for the Arts, 2002.4.22. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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