Posts from the “1990s” Category

Cey Adams: Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap

Posted on August 20, 2021

*Photograph by Jamel Shabazz. Four young men posing. This image was made on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the famous Delancey Street & Orchard Street in 1980, a major shopping hub.*

“Like a kid that’s always dreaming about going to the NBA and then you get the call, I was dreaming of this project even before I knew I was going to work on it,” says artist Cey Adams, the founding creative director of Def Jam. Adams art directed the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, which is released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings today (20 August 2021).

Tracing hip hop’s evolution from 1979 to 2013, the anthology brings together nine CDs with 129 tracks and a 300-page illustrated book published to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Featuring photographs by Janette Beckman, Charlie Ahearn, Anthony Barboza, Adrian Boot, Jamel Shabazz, and Glen E. Friedman, it offers a panoramic history of a culture born on the streets of the Bronx, that has since become a multi-billion dollar global phenomenon.

The anthology’s creators eschew the notion of a canon and instead envision the project as a foundation upon which to build. “I was on a call with LL Cool J and Chuck D, and we talked about not only making this book, but our journey as a people,” says Adams, who got his start as a graffiti writer in the 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*MC Sha-Rock, The Valley, NYC, June 1980, photo by Charlie Ahearn*

*Female Rappers, Class of ’88, 1988, photo by Janette Beckman*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Graffiti, Huck, Music, Photography

Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake

Posted on August 15, 2021

*Hannah Wilke with Ponder-r-rosa 4, 1975*

Long before the selfie came into vogue, American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) understood the importance of harnessing the power of self-representation through photography. At the tender age of 14, the native New Yorker donned her mother’s mink stole, white pumps, and nothing else to pose for a self-portrait in front of a wall bearing her birth name, Arlene H. Butler — lest anyone not know exactly who she was.

“I become my art, my art becomes me…. My heart is hard to handle, my art is too,” Wilke wrote in a letter published in the 1975 book, Art: A Woman’s Sensibility(California Institute of the Arts). With the understanding that a woman laying claim to her own body was a transgressive act, Wilke rose to prominence doing just that. Working as a photographer, sculptor, video artist, and performance artist who turned the female gaze on herself, Wilke’s art acted as a Rorschach Test — admiration and criticism revealing more about the viewer than the art itself.

Emblematic of the revolutionary times in which she lived, Wilke emerged from the 1960s with a practice that reshaped the conversation about the relationship between feminism, art, and the role of women in society just as the Women’s Liberation Movement took off. She used her work to establish an iconography that centers the female body and pleasure at a time when such topics were taboo and largely excluded from the male-dominated provenance of art history.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Hannah Wilke: Intercourse with… audio installation cover, 1975*

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

Two Fingas & James T Kirk: The Junglist

Posted on August 11, 2021

Picture it: South London, 1994. Local writer Andrew Green and photographer Eddie Otchere adopt the pseudonyms Two Fingas and James T Kirk, respectively, and use their lived experiences as the departure point for Junglist, a fictional coming-of-age tale that follows the exploits of Meth, Biggie, Q, and Craig over a weekend set in the city’s burgeoning jungle scene. Moving at the speed of sound, the 20 year-olds completed the book in just two months, crafting a mesmerising pulp fiction novel that is equal parts music, poetry, and film.

As the lovechild of UK rave and sound system culture, jungle was the sound of the world at the edge of a new era about to reveal itself. Driven by breakbeats – the rhythms that Jamaican DJs like Kool Herc used when he invented hip hop in the early 1970s – microengineered to twist time into a sonic blaze, jungle drew from and remade techno, rave, electro, dancehall, dub, hip hop, and house into an Afrofuturistic sound. The burgeoning culture quickly took the city by storm, maintaining its own DIY feel via an interconnected web of nightclubs, white label pressings, and pirate radio shows.

“Jungle burst out of the underground and for a brief period (it) was everywhere – you couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio without hearing elements of it,” says Green. “Jungle was the first electronic music I connected with; it felt like it was just for me, my crew, and my peers. We were making the scene appear out of nowhere. At the time, there were no clubs in the centre of London that played music for Black audiences so you had to be on the outskirts to find clubs. It was a mission to go out.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Music

Rick Castro: Reformation

Posted on August 6, 2021

*Rick Castro. Portrait of De’ Ephrim Manuel 2015.*

Vincent van Gogh observed, “Art is to console those who are broken by life” — a sentiment befitting the struggles of the current moment, as people attempt to establish an approximation of normalcy while the pandemic continues to rage. For photographer Rick Castro — better known as “The Fetish King” — art has provided sustenance and stability during this devastating time that hit him hard when Los Angeles went into lockdown in March 2020.

As businesses shuttered, people panic-shopped and store shelves were left bare; searching for some semblance of understanding, Rick began perusing the web from the safety of his East Hollywood home. “I would go on the newly formed COVID map, and there were cases surrounding me,” Rick says. “I felt like I was living in that Vincent Price movie, The Last Man on Earth, which became I Am Legend. I felt like that was going to be our destination — the final result.”

For many, 2020 was a period of collapse, of endings both literal and figurative. “I had no work,” recalls Rick, who had been organising a career retrospective at a Chinatown gallery that soon closed permanently. “In a week, everything I was working on that year came to an end. I applied for assistance and got turned down for most things; the few I got kept me going, but there was a time where I felt like I was going to lose my home.”

Feeling trapped, Rick knew he needed to escape. He headed to a little cabin that his father built in the late 1960s on a 2.5-acre property in the high desert of San Bernardino County. “It was in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “It was very bare-bones: no air conditioning and no central heat. There was no wifi. I had to use my cell phone as a modem, but that ran out way too quickly. I was really in seclusion, but I loved it. It gave me respite to relax and repair. I immersed myself in writing a daily journal on my blog that I called The Plague Diary: This Is How the World Will End.”

Read the Full Story at i-D

*Rick Castro. Apocalyptic Culture 2020.*

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, i-D, Photography

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

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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

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

T. Eric Monroe: Rare & Unseen Moments of 90s Hip Hop

Posted on July 13, 2021

*T. Eric Monroe. Erykah Badu, Power, 1997, NJ.*

Throughout the 1980s, corporate media called Hip Hop a “fad,” trying to dismiss a culture that made its way up from the streets and required no formal musical education — just beats, rhymes, and life. It wasn’t until 1989 that the Grammys introduced a rap category, but after a decade of snubs, artists had had enough. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, who had won the first-ever Best Rap Performance for “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” boycotted the show along with Salt-N-Pepa, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, and Public Enemy.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, Hip Hop was a distinctly underground phenomenon that made headlines as the subject of FBI attention and Senate hearings organized by Second Lady Tipper Gore. Although it would be years before white audiences transformed Black and Brown street culture into a billion-dollar global industry, Hip Hop was in its Golden Age.

Throughout the ‘90s, skater turned photographer T. Eric Monroe was on the scene, creating a massive archive of Hip Hop icons including Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Lil’ Kim, the Fugees, and The Roots. Featured in the 90’s HipHop Art Tour on New York’s Lower East Side and the three-volume set Rare & Unseen Moments of 90s Hip Hop, Monroe retraces his journey documenting the scene for record labels and magazines including The Source, XXL, Thrasher, and Transworld Skateboarding.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*T. Eric Monroe. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Barbershop Chair Stare, 1995, Harlem, NY.*

*T. Eric Monroe. Biggie Smalls, Hoodshock, 1996, Harlem, NY*

Categories: 1990s, Art, Blind, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Music, Photography