Posts from the “1990s” Category

Constantine Manos: American Color/Florida Pictures

Posted on December 8, 2017

Photo: Miami Beach © Costa Manos/Magnum Photos

A member of Magnum Photos since 1963, Constantine Manos was a serious black and white photojournalist until 1992, when he decided to begin shooting a project called American Colorr. In search of a new kind of photograph – one that was as extraordinary as it was surreal – Manos headed down to Florida, where the light, the colour, and the people are out of this world.

“The people are a new breed,” Manos observes. “It’s a dynamic cross-section of America, from the very right to the very poor. Because of the climate, a lot of people who can’t afford a home live and sleep wherever they can. They are mixed in with the big condos and high-rise towers, the waterfront homes and yachts.”

Manos likes to visit fairs, beaches, and outdoor events in search of a new kind of photograph. “I look for specific kinds of images,” he reveals. “I’m not just satisfied with what things look like; I choose to shoot a combination of people and place that doesn’t try to explain anything but asks questions and presents problems to the viewer.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Photo: Miami Beach © Costa Manos/Magnum Photos

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Depeche Mode: Monument

Posted on December 5, 2017

Photo: Depeche Mode: Monument. Courtesy of Akashic Book

In 1980, a four young men hailing from the British town of Basildon decided to start a band. They named it ‘Composition of Sound’, a very formal way of describing one of the defining factors of their 37-year career, and quickly adopted, ‘Depeche Mode’ (translation: ‘Fashion News’) after spotting it on the cover of a French magazine.

Their music, like their name, was cutting edge. Coming into their own just as synthesiser music was making waves, Depeche Mode received offers from major labels but decided to sign with Mute Records, a London-based independent that was emerging as the sound of the times. Daniel Miller, the label’s founder, started Mute in 1978 to release his own one-man electro-punk project The Normal, and the label subsequently signed a roster of artists that approached synth music with a DIY punk attitude.

By the mid-80s, Depeche Mode had become an international phenomenon, and one of the places their music made the most impact was with the youth living inside the Eastern bloc. Although their records had been banned by official channels, some Western radio and TV still reached fans, and Depeche Mode became musical heroes for a new generation.

As a teenager growing up in East Germany, Dennis Burmeister was slowly becoming the band’s number one fan, after having a lightbulb moment listening to “Pipeline” on the radio around 1983 or 84, then seeing a video for “A Question of Time” in 86. He began amassing a collection that would grow to more than 10,000 pieces – the most extensive archive of Depeche Mode memorabilia in the world.

Burmeister got started by swapping tapes with friends before he was finally able to buy hard copies after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Over the years, his role began to grow as he recognised the importance of being not only a collector but a historian. By the early 00s, he had become a consummate insider, working as webmaster of the Toast Hawaii label, founded by Depeche Mode member Andy Fletcher.

In 2008, Burmerister met Sacha Lewis, a fellow Depeche Mode historian who was working on a documentary film. They quickly hit it off and saw the perfect opportunity to pool their talents and resources into creating a book, Depeche Mode: Monument. Featuring more than one thousand objects from Burmeister’s archive, Monument is a detailed chronology of the band who – after 100 million album sales – still show no sign of stopping. Burmeister and Lewis told us what it takes to build a monument to the band.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Depeche Mode: Monument. Courtesy of Akashic Book

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Music

A Brief History of Thierry Mugler’s High-Voltage Fashion

Posted on November 13, 2017

Photo: Courtesy of Manfred Thierry Mugler on Instagram

The legendary house of Thierry Mugler occupies the space between fashion and myth, manned by a designer so visionary that no less than Beyoncé, David Bowie and Lady Gaga have called upon him to create couture so haute your body temperature rises just looking at pictures of it. In celebration of his iconoclastic career, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has announced plans for Thierry Mugler: Creatures of Haute Couture, slated to open in February 2019. It will be the first solo exhibition of the designer’s work.

For over two decades, Mugler was a reigning force in fashion, an enfant terrible who defied bourgeois sensibilities with his spectacular looks and magnificent, sometimes almost hour-long runway shows. “I have always been fascinated by the most beautiful animal on the Earth: the human being,” Mugler revealed on the occasion of the exhibition’s announcement. That fascination led him to create clothes which transformed the wearers into futuristic femme fatales, whose superpowers were seduction and self-assurance.

Still, chances are you haven’t heard a whole lot from the designer lately. In 2003, Clarins, the parent company that purchased the brand in 1997, shuttered the house after huge losses (it would later reopen under Nicola Formichetti, followed by David Koma, who currently creates its collections). Mugler himself completely disappeared from public view, reemerging four years later as Manfred – virtually unrecognisable having embraced bodybuilding and transformed himself into a 240-pound figure rivalling a Tom of Finland sketch. He told the New York Times in 2010 that he did not want to be recognised, explaining, “You don’t want to be reminded that you did this or you did that. It is disturbing.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Courtesy of Manfred Thierry Mugler on Instagram

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Dazed, Fashion

Albert Watson: KAOS

Posted on November 9, 2017

Photo: Road to Nowhere, Las Vegas, 2001 Edition 10 (72 x 42). Photography Albert Watson

Back in 1973, Scottish photographer Albert Watson got the call: Harper’s Bazaar wanted him to photograph the “Master of Suspense” for their holiday issue. The story was titled “Alfred Hitchcock cooks his own goose” and the assignment called for Watson to photograph the portly Brit presenting roast fowl on a serving dish. But Watson demurred and brought his own vision to bear – directing the legendary filmmaker in a series of photos depicting Hitchcock clasping an uncooked goose by the neck and throttling it with morbid elegance.

The photographs were pitch perfect and the world took note, launching Watson into the stratosphere of contemporary photography across every genre: portraiture, fashion, music, celebrity, still life, landscape, architecture, advertising, and fine art. Whether shooting Michael Jackson, Naomi Campbell, or Prince, King Tut’s artefacts, a Las Vegas dominatrix, or inmates at Angola State Prison – Watson deftly combines innovative thinking with a mastery of technique, making his work a visual symphony of rhythm, compositional harmony, and tonal melodies.

In celebration of his illustrious career, Taschen presents KAOS, an XXL collector’s edition of 1,200 signed and numbered copies that come in a clamshell box covered in faux chimpanzee fur – because, why not? Selections from the book are currently on view in an eponymous exhibition at Taschen Gallery, Los Angeles.

Watson’s ingenious approach, which includes a double exposure of Mick Jagger and a cheetah, and Michael Jackson dancing broken down into single frames, has set him apart from his contemporaries. With nearly 100 Vogue covers to his credit, Watson is still going strong at 75. What’s more, he prints all his photographs himself in his Tribeca studio. It is rare to see the hand of the artist in the photograph, but Watson understands that the process continues long after the shutter clicks. He speaks about how to master the art of photography.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Sade, London, 1992. Photography Albert Watson

Photo: Tupac Shakur, New York City, 1991. Photography Albert Watson

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

Gail Thacker: Between the Sun & the Moon

Posted on November 3, 2017

Photo: Self portrait 1995. Photography Gail Thacker.

In the late 1970s, Gail Thacker studied painting at Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, alongside Mark Morrisroe, Pat Hearn, George Condo, Jack Pierson, and Tabboo! The golden haze of the hippie movement had faded away and in its place punk became the call of the day. The DIY ethos enabled artists to create life and work on their own terms, forgoing the established trends in search of freedom and truth.

After graduating in 1981, Thacker headed south, living in the suburbs so that she could easily commute into New York. Though the art world was experiencing a vital renaissance as the downtown scene brought fresh life to the art world, the dark specter of Aids devastated a new generation of youth coming of age.

Morrisroe’s illness became a turning point in her life. When he became gravely ill, he gave Thacker a box with hundreds of sheets of Polaroid 665 film and asked her to use it. She incorporated the Polaroids into her practice, using them as a means to record the world in which she lived – but her photograph was not meant to merely document the world as it was. It became a means to reveal the alchemical properties of life itself.

Through the great fortune of a mistake, Thacker discovered that the negatives could be manipulated through the unintended but inevitable experience of decay. She adapted her process to explore the balance between creation (life) and destruction (death) in art, transforming her work into a metaphor for existence itself: the risk and reward cycle of possibility – loss or win.

Using herself and friends as subjects, Thacker has created works that evoke the unconventional spirit of Old New York – where life itself could become a work of art. Each work Thacker creates is a singular moment that embodies the ephemeral and the eternal in equal part. The photograph, as object, is as fragile and resilient as life itself: marked, torn, taped, collaged, and altered by the passage of time.

Thacker’s work has been gathered for Between the Sun & the Moon, opening today at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, and running through December 22. A book of the same name will be published by QCC Art Gallery Press. Thacker speaks with us about how to navigate the porous boundaries between life and art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Sarah & Katrina 2007. Photography Gail Thacker

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

Brian “B+” Cross: Ghostnotes – Music of the Unplayed

Posted on November 2, 2017

Jay Electronica, Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt. August 2011 / Nas, Los Angeles, California, US. November 2010. Photography Brian “B+” Cross

From left to right, Beni B, Chief Xcel, and Lyrics Born at Records, downtown Sacramento, California, US. May 1995. This is the cover of “Endtroducing” by DJ Shadow. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, US. August 1998 / Grand Wizard Theodore, Manhattan, New York, US. February 1996. Theodore is the first person to ever scratch a record. His hands started a revolution in music. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

Life moves in circles, though we may not notice until the revolution is complete. In 1996, DJ Shadow released Endtroducing…, his debut studio album on Mo’ Wax Recordings, with curious photo on the cover. It showed two guys inside a record store: one in profile, the other’s face blurred – neither were DJ Shadow.

It was a scene from everyday life, the very thing you’d recognize as a fellow hip hop head. It stood out for it unpretentiousness, it’s lack of glamour and glitz. Just as hip hop was going pop, Endtroducing… was taking it back to the earliest days of the art form when the DJ was king and crate digging was everything.

Five years later, an editor at C Photography in Spain reached out to Brian “B+” Cross, the photographer who created this seminal image. They wanted to feature it in their annual. Cross agreed – then sent along more images turning their request into a 15-page spread. When it was published, David Hamrick put a Post-It note on the page. Then, in 2015, when he was the director of the University of Texas Press, he reached out to Cross to see if he had more work, thinking it could make an excellent book.

The inevitable does not need a plan; it simply arrives. Cross had been working on Ghostnotes, a collection of photographs made throughout his career, for nearly two decades. The book was conceived as a mixtape, a visual corollary to the sounds of the African diaspora that flow through hip hop, uniting generations of people from all walks of life in the rhythms of the drums, the heartbeat of the art form.

Weaving together threads the combine documentary and portrait photography, Cross guides us through a musical landscape, crafting a composition as brilliantly conceived as a work by Miles Davis. Conceptualized with “A” and “B” sides, Ghostnotes takes us on a journey around the world, brilliantly synthesizing hip hop, Jamaican dub, Brazilian samba, Ethiopian jazz, Cuban timba, and Colombian cumbia. The book features portraits of everyone from The Notorious B.I.G., Eazy-E, and Kendrick Lamar to George Clinton, Brian Wilson, and the Watts Prophets, among so many more. Cross speaks with us about his journey bringing Ghostnotes to life.

Read the Full Story at Miss Rosen

The Notorious B.I.G., Beverly Hills, California, US. April 1995. Biggie was murdered outside this building three weeks later, and there is still no plaque or monument to commemorate his death. Photography Brian “B+” Cross

Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, US. February 14th, 2006. J Dilla’s funeral. Photography Brian “B+” Cross.

Categories: 1990s, Africa, Art, Books, Bronx, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

Posted on October 19, 2017

Invariably a day will come where I put “How Soon Is Now” and get into my feelings. The highs, the lows, the fighting the air blows, I’m absolutely consumed with a maudlin mania that overcomes and nestles me in its clasp. One time is never enough. Play it again, Sam.

And – I’m not even a Smith’s fan. Coming up, I found them morose. But as time goes by, I can’t front. Where so many other bands faded away, The Smiths and Morrissey live on. In celebration, These Days, Los Angeles, presents, I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish: The Smiths & Morrissey Collection, now on view through October 22. The exhibition takes you back to the days when poster art was errythann.

The exhibition features a selection of vintage, 40 x 60 inch duotone posters made between 1985 and 1995 originally displayed in the UK and around Europe in train stations and record stores (Remember those? I’m sayinn). From the start, lead singer and co-songwriter Morrissey ran the show when it came to the band’s artwork, working alongside Rough Trade art coordinator Jo Slee.

At a time when everything was neon colors and punch pop graphics, Morrissey opted out and when vintage. Coming of age during the Pictures Generation, appropriation was de rigeur. Rather than take use of the band Morrissey chose images like Cecil Beaton’s famed photo of Truman Capote mid-jump, just as his career was taking off and the world was his oyster. It was evocative, if not provocative in part, a comment on popular culture and the spaces between high and low art. Stephen Zeigler of These Days shares his reflections on the power of the band here with us.

What was the inspiration for the show?

Stephen Zeigler: To be honest it was quite unplanned and came about very happenstance.

Do go on…

Stephen Zeigler: A good friend of ours is a huge fan of both The Smiths and Morrissey. He is a compulsive collector of all sorts of band merchandise (not just Smiths/Moz) and came to a point where he needed to downsize some of his collections. When he told us he would be selling off the Smiths and Morrissey posters, we thought it would be a great opportunity for the rabid Los Angeles Smiths/Moz community to be able to view the collection in it’s entirety before it was pieced out.

Everything is for sale and been selling quite well. We have had buyers from across the country purchase pieces. We even had an awesome couple drive over 400 miles from Oakland to see the exhibition and purchase a piece.

The Smiths are the perfect definition of a cult band. How would you describe their appeal?

Stephen Zeigler: Wow, that’s such a tough question and something I have been thinking about a lot during the shows run. I don’t think it can really be stated definitively but I think that Morrissey’s lyrics are intensely personal and yet the melancholy, anger, and emotions are universal and can mean something different to everyone.

I think for the average listener who grew up in the 1980s their music was always present and brings people back to certain points in their lives, and for the devoted super fans it’s deeply personal. I have spoken to visitors who tell me that Morrissey and The Smiths saved their lives, showed them another life besides gangbanging, or they were going through a rough time in their lives (even to the point of suicide) when they heard a song or lyric that showed them they weren’t alone in their emotions.

I love how music has the power to reach people who are on the brink. I’m very intrigued by the fact they continue to be so popular now, as so few groups from that era have such a prominent presence in the culture today. Why is it about their work that makes their appeal transcend time?

Stephen Zeigler: I think The Smiths are one of those unique bands, like The Clash, The Jam, The Specials, or Public Enemy who come from a specific era and time but are able to speak to an audience who may not have even been born yet when the band was together.

Specifically to The Smiths it was really a perfect storm of Morrissey’s voice and lyrics and Johnny Marr’s innovative guitar playing.

Morrissey said, the artwork needed to “take images that were the opposite of glamour and to pump enough heart and desire into them to show ordinariness as an instrument of power—or, possibly, glamour.” Could you expand on how these images do just this?

Stephen Zeigler: The Smiths have always been sort of down played in their appearance. Coming from working class Manchester where pretentiousness can get you an ass beating, the band embraced the common, hence the name “The Smiths.” With the artwork, they took images from many common looking British elements and personalities and the act of repurposing them as record covers or blowing them up as huge stage backdrops, in itself gives the images an importance never before imagined.

I’ve always loved the visuals they used for their campaigns. Could you speak of what the works have in common and how it defines their aesthetic?

Stephen Zeigler: Morrissey selected still images from little known or remembered mid-century films and photos of authors and artists that influenced him. The images were then stripped down and taken out of their original context to become a visual poetry of their own.

All photos courtesy of Stephen Zeigler, These Days.

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions

Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting

Posted on October 19, 2017

Artwork: Eye Body, Transformative Actions For The Camera, 1963. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann

You may remember Lady Gaga’s meat dress as something of a scene – but it doesn’t hold a candle to Meat Joy, the Carolee Schneemann happening from 1964 that inspired it. Where Gaga took an existing idea and transformed it into a publicity stunt, Schneemann invented something that had never been seen or done – and it nearly cost her life.

Picture a group of young men and women clad in their undergarments experiencing the pleasures of the flesh: of the carcasses of fish and chicken, along with sausages, touching their bare skin. Imagine being in the same room as they gathered on the floor to engage in an experience of sensuality the likes of which had never been realised before. Envision a man in the audience becoming so enraged he leaped from his seat, dragging Schneemann off to the side, and beginning to strangle her.

This happened during the Paris edition and went on until two bourgeois women jumped from their seats and fought off the attacker until he stopped. Then Schneemann got back into the happening and continued on with the knowledge that her explorations could unleash a cataclysmic storm. But Schneemann is an unstoppable force – she is freedom incarnate. Uninhibited and unafraid, she has been challenging the patriarchy by virtue of being true to herself.

Born in 1939 to a country doctor and a farm wife, Schneemann grew up close to nature, embracing the life and death cycle of the earth. When her father refused to support her decision to go to college, she won a full scholarship to study painting at Bard College, in New York, which she attended until she was expelled on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” Where others might have given up, Schneemann persevered, creating a body of work so singular and so challenging that to this day she has no equal in the field.

Her pioneering investigations into the female body, sexuality, and gender have tapped into archaic visual traditions and wrestled with social taboos, transforming Schneemann into a vessel of transgression and subversion in search of truth. In celebration, MoMA P.S. 1, New York, presents Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (October 22, 2017- March 11, 2018), the first comprehensive retrospective spanning her prolific six-decade career.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Prestel has released a catalogue of the same name, while the Artists Institute has published Carolee’s Issue 02, which illustrates the ways in which other artists, advertisers, and pop culture figures have drawn heavily from her work. Schneemann speaks with us about Meat Joy as well as her career as “both image and image maker.”

Read the Story at Dazed

Artwork: Meat Joy 1964, chromogenic color print. Photo by Al Giese. From performance at Judson Church, November 16-18, 1964 New York. Courtesy of C. Schneemann and P.P.O.W, New York

Artwork: Nude on Tracks,1962-1977. Courtesy of Carolee Schneemann.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting, Women

Jonas Mekas: A Dance with Fred Astaire

Posted on October 4, 2017

Jonas MekasPhotography John Lennon. Photo courtesy of Anthology Editions

At 94-years-old, Jonas Mekas is undergoing a literary renaissance. The esteemed filmmaker, poet, and artist is publishing five books of work, most notably A Dance with Fred Astaire (Anthology Editions), a visual autobiography comprised of anecdotes and drawn from Mekas’ life after his arrival in New York in 1949.

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas was a teen when the Russian Army invaded his homeland. As he and his brother, Adolfas, attempted to flee in 1944, they were captured and forced to spend eight months in Elmshorn, a Nazi labour camp. When the war ended, they became Displaced Persons living in refugee camps, until finally able to emigrate to America, settling in Brooklyn.

Once in town, Mekas planted new roots, from which the tree of life has grown firm, with many branches bearing countless fruits. At his deepest core, is a love for cinema, its revolutionary forms, and a profound respect for the avant-garde. Together with his brother, Mekas launched Film Culture magazine, which ran from 1954 to 1996. His commitment to community went far and wide, enabling him to serve a need and fill a void.

Mekas became the first film critic for the Village Voice, founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which has since evolved into Anthology Film Archives, located in the heart of the East Village. Along the way, he met and collaborated with some of the greatest figures of the times, from Andy Warhol to Salvador Dalí, John Lennon to Jacqueline Onassis.

As you weave your way through his work, the words of Plato reveal themselves time and again: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” His is a singular life unlike any other, one filled with passion, determination, and innovation. His stories inspire, enlighten, and entertain with equal parts charm, courage, and originality. Mekas takes us on a stroll down memory lane, sharing the knowledge and wisdom garnered from a lifetime dedicated to art.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Photo: Courtesy of Anthology Editions

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan

Jane Friedman: How to Find Artists That Can Change the World

Posted on October 3, 2017

Photo: Mark Sink, Grace Jones, ca 1988

Artwork: Arturo Vega, “Supermarket Sign(Steak Sale)”, 1973. Acrylic on canvas 48 x 72 x 1 1/2 inches

Located in the heart of New York’s East Village, Howl! Happening was established in memory of artist Arturo Vega, who designed the iconic Ramones logo. Vega, a Mexican national, fled his native land in 1968 when the government rounded up 148 of the country’s most notable artists and intellectuals, putting their lives at risk. Vega fled to New York where he had prominent connections, like Jane Friedman – the woman made rock’n’roll journalism a legitimate business.

New York native Jane Friedman grew up on Broadway, as her father handled public relations for legendary shows along the Great White Way. Friedman followed in her father’s footsteps, and along the way, she realised her talents would be best served by supporting the greatest artists of the time. She went on to craft a new lane in the media, representing artists like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, as well as doing PR for the famed musical Hair. She was also Patti Smith’s manager throughout her career.

Friedman has been a behind-the-scenes fixture in downtown New York, working with artists and musicians to ensure their success and legacy. When Vega, one of her dearest friends died in 2013, Friedman set up Howl! Arts, a non-profit organisation that preserves the culture of the East Village and the Lower East Side in a rapidly gentrifying city that has effectively erased so much of the New York’s fabled past.

Taking its name from Allen Ginsberg’s famed 1955 poem, Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project is the cornerstone of the organisation. A gallery, performance space, and archive located around the corner from where CBGBs once stood, Howl! Happening has been home to a series of phenomenal shows including exhibitions by Patricia Field, Lydia Lunch, Taboo!, PUNK Magazine’s 40th Anniversary, and The East Village Eye – as well as on-going events and performances that showcase the very best of the community, which continues to thrive despite the exponential explosion in the cost of living.

This month, Howl! presents Love Among the Ruins: 56 Bleecker Gallery Street and the late 80s New York, a group exhibition that looks back at the famed East Village gallery and performance space that served as a vital intersection of music, fashion, art, and nightlife during one of the most vital and devastating period of New York history. Featuring works by nearly 100 artists including David LaChapelle, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dondi White, Stephen Sprouse, and George Condo, to name just a few, the exhibition is on view through October 7, 2017.

Friedman speaks with us about what it takes to cultivate a community of artists that can change the world, while staying true to your roots, and shares images from the ongoing show.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Straight to Hell flyer

Photo: Mark Sink, Keith Haring, ca 1988

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Painting, Photography, Women

Kerry James Marshall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Untitled (Curtain Girl), 2016, acrylic on PVC panel, 76 x 61 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Extreme blackness plus grace equals power,” Kerry James Marshall observed, revealing an essential truth of the nature of the world. From a purely aesthetic sense, black is a color and it is something more. It is both the complete absence or absorption of light. It takes in all colors of the visible spectrum becoming the amalgamation all that we know, becoming the alpha and the omega: from where we begin and to where we return.

In this way, Africa as the birthplace of humanity makes perfect sense: from blackness all colors of wo/mankind have been birthed. Black is one of the first colors used by artists painting in the caves of Europe, those prehistoric beings who intuitively understood that essential power of the hue rested in both its immediate impact and its longevity.

With homo sapiens dating back nearly 200,000 years in Africa, in the grand scheme of history it is only in recent times that some have chosen to vilify blackness. Europeans became obsessed with framing it in a negative light, crafting the idea of race as a justification for a campaign of global imperialism that systematically pillaged, enslaved, and decimated peoples of a darker hue across Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

From this we have inherited trauma rooted in profound psychosis that posits us in a position to spread truth to power. Giving voice to that which has been silenced, giving sight to that which has been distorted or erases, giving sanctuary to that which has been targeted for destruction: this is our shared responsibility. Each of us brings talents and gifts, wisdom and understanding, experiences and insights that fill in the blanks, fitting together like a puzzle of billions of pieces that reveal the image of God.

But… such a picture may never appear but that’s no reason to do what we must, for it is in our individual efforts that we light the spark of inspiration and fuel the flames of action. American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama) leads by example, dedicating his life to the creation of a body of work that restores black to its rightful place.

His recent touring exhibition Mastry has claimed the space that it deserves, in the highest echelons of wealth, power, and history: the realm of fine art. In conjunction with the exhibitions, Phaidon has just released Kerry James Marshall, the most comprehensive book published on the artist.

The book is a tour-de-force, providing a comprehensive look at Marshall’s singular career and the ways in which he has used painting as a site for the writing of history. Marshall’s life itself traces the course of America over the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with the artist’s formative years deep in the heart of Dixie under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

In 1963, his family joined the final wave of the Great Migration, moving to South Central Los Angeles, just in time to experience the horrors of the Watts riots in 1965. “By the time the riots got to where we were, it was like a carnival,” Marshall tells Charles Gaines in the book. “The violence that took place was confusing to me.… I started to see that the responsibility for my needs shifted to me as opposed to a collective. I try never to approach a thing as if I’m one hundred percent certain about what it is or what the proper response to it is supposed to be.”

Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20 x 16 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, photo: Matthew Fried, © MCA Chicago

With a perspective rooted in openness and self-reliance, Marshall set forth on a journey rooted in discovery. His purpose began to take shape in 1980, when he painted A Portrait of the Artists as a Shadow of His Former Self, a work that recalls the influence of the great African American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946). But here, Marshall began his exploration of the power of black, of the color that would come to be a signature element in his work.

He told Gaines, “This was when it started to look like there was something that could be done with the black figure, that it could be used to explore ideas that are not only relevant to picture making by itself but also to convey some of those ideas that I’d been developing about where black people fit in. Before then, apart from the self-portraits, which I’d do as an exercise, I was still doing still lifes and paintings of inanimate objects in order to figure out how to paint…. [The issue of race] really came into focus with that one painting.”

With his focus honed and his skills at the ready Marshall set forth to create a body of work depicting the African American experience in all of its complexities, a profound portrait of a people that embraces the heroism of daily life, while also underscoring the culture and its relationship to the individual.

“To recognize the diversity of Blackness (to use Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s militantly colloquial spelling) would be to recognize that there is such a place as the interzone that poet Elizabeth Alexander once termed The Black Interior – primarily a psychic space where flocks of self-actualized black subjectivites freely roam about, walkabout and roust about, “Greg Tate writes in the book.

“If you happen to own the Black Interior that belongs to Kerry James Marshall and you dare to take up the ambitious mission of rendering the interiors of the Black Whole – that loud, proud, obsidian realm saturated with oscillating frequencies, swooping modalities, spiky plateaus, swampy valleys, funky declensions, cosmic ascents, elaborate head rooms, and wickedly salty tall-tales – you have already reckoned with apprehending the liminality of American Blackness: the half hidden/half revealed qualities of that Free Bloack Thang that Duke Ellignotn believed imbued all truly black expression with a lofty and iridescent aura of transluesency, “Tate explained.

And, indeed, that one magnificent sentence is as much as masterpiece as the paintings it describes, so perfectly modulated in its nuances that the complexities of its content simply dissolve before your very eyes. It is what it is, as the classic African-American proverb recognizes.

And what it is restores balance to the earth, the soul and the spirit, the present moment and the history books. The mastry of Kerry James Marshall is a vision to behold, a marvel of necessity, desire, and self determination that leads by example and keeps the promise that possibility, when realized, is God made manifest on earth.

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