Posts from the “Art” Category

Shikeith: Ceremonies

Posted on February 24, 2021

*Shikeith. “Prince” , 2019, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 30 x 36 in*

In order to survive in America, Black culture has made itself illegible from the prying eyes of the white gaze, using art as a tool of subversion and self-expression. Since emancipation, Black Art has been a force of resistance, independence, and innovation, catapulting Black American culture to global heights in music, style, speech, and dance.

Often imitated but never duplicated, Black Art is the foundation of popular culture, as well as a vital force in fine art now as the art world races to align itself with the right side of history after active exclusion from museums, galleries, books, and mainstream media. Black Art is currently having a moment, not only for this reason but because it offers a panoply of perspectives and paradigms operating outside the boundaries of Western cultural hegemony.

Consider the subject of Black male desire and the ways in which it has been laden with the stain of racism and homophobia for centuries, forcing the expression of fundamental human drives into secrecy. Photography, by virtue of its ability to render visible that which we may not have seen, can become a tool of liberation and freedom when placed in the proper hands.

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*Shikeith. “The Adoration (never knew love like this before)” , 2020, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 30 x 36in, Edition of 5*

*Shikeith. “O’ my body, make of me always a man who questions!” 2020, Archival Inkjet Print on Canson Infinity Platine, 50in x 60in, Edition of 5*

Categories: Art, Blind, Photography

Mariette Pathy Allen: Transformations

Posted on February 23, 2021

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Christine Jorgensen at Home, Near LA,” 1984.*

“I seem to operate on flukes,” says American photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, who began documenting the transgender community after finding herself drawn to a group in the dining room of her New Orleans hotel during Mardi Gras in 1978.

“I always felt there was something wrong with society’s rules that said men are supposed to be one way and women are supposed to be another,” Allen says. “I was always thinking about big issues like, ‘How do we determine who we are?’ Then I met these wonderful people and I felt like they were living the questions that I was asking myself.”

From that serendipitous encounter in the lobby, a bond was formed, one that empowered Allen to document trans communities in the United States, Cuba, Burma, Thailand, and Mexico. In the new exhibition, Transformations, Allen revisits portraits made between 1978 and 1989 when the trans and gender-variant community was still very much underground.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Vicky West Dancing the Cancan with My Daughters, Cori and Julia, Bridgehampton, NY,” 1982.*

*Mariette Pathy Allen. “Beth and Her Husband, Rita, Boston, MA,” 1983.*

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography, Women

Asmaa Walton: Black Art Library

Posted on February 23, 2021

We learn to read by looking at pictures. Our earliest books are filled with spellbinding images of the world, stories that teach us about who we are. But as we grow older we are taught to put such “childish” things aside despite the insights reading images can provide. In time, many grow turned off by books, due in no small part to the parochial texts foist upon us in school. Few rediscover the meditative pleasures of picture books; the high price point and niche subject matter rendering countless art books into obscurity every year. But with the creation of the Black Art Library, art educator Asmaa Walton is making illustrated books accessible to a generation raised on the internet.

Acknowledging her short attention span made it difficult to read long texts, Walton was drawn to the beautiful images that drew her in, keeping her focused and engaged with texts for longer periods of time. After sharing her Amazon wish list with close friends, Walton’s art book collection began to take shape. In December 2019, the Black Art Library emerged as Walton began to share some of her favourite books on Instagram.

“I always think about ways I can share the knowledge I have on Black Art and make it interesting,” Walton says. As the new HBO documentary,Black Art: In the Absence of Light, reveals, the art world has excluded Black artists from the canon for hundreds of years. For every Gordon Parks, Jacob Lawrence, or Romare Bearden, far too many others have gone unrecognised, their contributions relegated to a footnote or wholly erased from the conversation. It is only since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2016 US Presidential election that a Black Art Moment began to take shape as museums and galleries scrambled to fill the voids in their collections.

With the new exhibition, The Black Art Library, Walton fills an important void, sourcing landmark monographs, exhibition catalogues, and rare research materials that the public can peruse at their leisure in her hometown of Detroit. In a time of social isolation, the book can create an intimate connection with someone you may otherwise never meet. Here, Walton shares her thoughts on just a handful of the books included in the Black Art Library.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1960s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Photography

Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame

Posted on February 21, 2021

*Todd Webb, Untitled (44UN-7930-609), Trust Territory of Somaliland (Somalia), 1958, Two women walking on the beach, with a dog to their right.*

American photographer Todd Webb (1905-2000) didn’t get his start until later in life; after working as a banker, he lost everything in the 1929 crash and eked out a meager living West, first as first a gold prospector then a forest ranger. In 1934, he returned to his native Detroit to work for automobile manufacturer Chrysler, which donated a camera that Webb used on a trip to Panama.

Upon his return, Webb joined the Detroit Camera Club, where he met lifelong friendHarry Callahan, who he would go on to live with when he moved to New York in 1945 to become a professional photographer. Well enmeshed in the city’s booming postwar cultural scene, Webb’s career took off. In 1955 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to create a portrait of the United States while walking coast to coast — the same year Robert Frank made The Americans.

In 1958, the United Nations commissioned Webb to travel across eight countries in Africa over the course of five months to document the industry, technology, and modernization at the dawn of the African Independence Movement. The photographs, long lost, have just been unearthed in the new book and exhibition, Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame.

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Todd Webb. Untitled (44UN-8014-463), Tanganyika (Tanzania), 1958, Tanganyika police officer and man next to a wall near the Indian Ocean coastline.

Categories: Africa, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Good Pictures A History of Popular Photography

Posted on February 18, 2021

*“Woolworth Tower in Clouds, New York City,” 1928. © Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.*

Humanity takes solace in the notion that the “good” is an objective fact, a model of excellence that transcends subjective bias and cultural conditioning. But what if that which we esteem is simply an extension of popular thought? This question is at the heart of art historian Kim Beil’s new book, Good Pictures A History of Popular Photography (Stanford University Press), which traces the history of photography through 50 widespread trends across the United States between spanning 1989 to 2019.

Organized into six chronological sections, Good Pictures explores the role instructional primers played in helping aspiring photographers learn “how to make good pictures.” Beil examines the rise of approaches that have dominated a particular moment in time, such as soft focus, Hollywood Glamour, motion blur, lens flare, and fish-eye — and examines how the industry itself helps to commodify the notion of “good” in order to reinforce, rather than challenge, the prevailing social, political, and cultural ideologies.

Throughout Good Pictures, Beil teases out a distinctively, but perhaps not exclusively, American trait: the commodification of style and the manufacture of groupthink. We see this in the way in which photographic styles are recycled in an endless loop — emerging, disappearing, and then returning at a later time.

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*“Untitled [Still Life with Fruit],” 1860 © Roger Fenton Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Gift of Howard Gilman, 2005.*

*“The Mountain Nymph of Sweet Liberty,” 1866 © Juliet Margaret Cameron Source: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital Image courtesy of Getty’s Open Content Program.*

Categories: Art, Blind, Books, Photography

Leni Sinclair: Motor City Underground

Posted on February 17, 2021

*Leni Sinclair. Detroit Youth Association B&W, photograph, undated.*

In 1959, Leni Sinclair, then 19, fled her native East Germany for the United States, settling in Detroit to study at Wayne State University where she became interested in politics. She joined Students for a Democratic Society very early on, becoming one of two members citywide participating in the New Left movement that would soon take the nation by storm.

In 1964, she met poet and jazz critic John Sinclair, who would become her husband and collaborator in the creation of the Detroit Artists Workshop – a network of communal houses, print shop, and performance space, where Leni photographed jazz legends like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, as well as proto-punk band MC5.

“We were living outside the system, starting to create something for ourselves, and not the predominant culture, which was too stiff,” Sinclair says with a laugh. “We wanted to have a place without restrictions. That to me was more radical than anything I had experienced in my life.”

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*Leni Sinclair. Public display of poem by Medgar Evers.*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Exhibitions, Photography

Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole

Posted on February 17, 2021

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1963. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a singular figure in the 20th century, transcending every boundary erected against Black America to become one of the greatest artists of our times. The self-taught photographer, who barely escaped lynching as a child and ended up homeless as a young teen, used the injustice levelled against him as fuel to chart his own path through the mainstream in order to tell stories of Black America from the inside.

As the first Black photographer working for LIFE magazine, Parks’ photographs of segregation in the South, pictures made in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, scenes of crime in major cities in the 1950s, and documentation of the Civil Rights Movement have become some of the most indelible images of mid-century America.

The new exhibition, Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole, offers an intimate portrait of the complex realities for Black Americans between 1942 and the 1970s. The exhibition opens with an essay by New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb, drawing parallels between the lives of George Floyd and Gordon Parks, both of whom moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in search of a better life.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Untitled, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.*

*Untitled (Malcolm X) Harlem, New York, 1963. Copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.*

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop

Posted on February 14, 2021

*Shawn Walker (b. 1940), Easter Sunday, Harlem (125th Street), 1972. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Shawn Walker*

In the fall of 1963 — the final year of Jim Crow America — two Harlem-based groups of Black photographers came together to create the Kamoinge Workshop, which has since become the world’s longest-running photography collective. Taken from the Gikuyu language of Kenya, meaning “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge provided a space for both professional photographers including Roy DeCarava, Adger Cowans, and Louis H. Draper to nurture emerging talents drawn from the community at a time when Black artists were systemically excluded from the fine art world.

As an institution of authority, wealth, and prestige, the fine art world mirrored and maintained the exclusionary systems of power of the dominant culture it served. The work of Black artists and depictions of Black life rarely appeared within the hallowed halls of museums and galleries. It fell upon Black artists to create and sustain spaces to nurture their own styles and approaches to artmaking, without the structures of support afforded to countless white male artists.

Rather than adopt the American obsession with “rugged individualism,” the members of Kamoinge understood the power of the group. Every Sunday, DeCarava, Cowans, and Draper would gather alongside founding members James Ray Francis, Herman Howard, Earl James, Anthony Barboza, Calvin Mercer, Beuford Smith. Herb Randall, Albert Fennar, Shawn Walker, James Mannas, and later Ming Smith, for rousing conversations about art, photography, film, music, and literature as well as in-depth critiques of their work. “We all met at somebody’s home and became family,” Walker remembers.

Without institutional support, Kamoinge made a way for themselves — a path they forged for nearly 60 years to become the longest-running photography collective in history. Yet, because of the on-going practice of exclusion within the art world, their works are only now being given their proper due in the major touring museum exhibition, Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop.

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*Beuford Smith, Two Bass Hit, Lower East Side, 1972. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts © Beuford Smith/Césaire*

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Blind, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Donna Ferrato: Holy

Posted on February 12, 2021

American photographer Donna Ferrato is a force of nature, determined and unafraid to call out the injustice against women, break down taboos, and celebrate femininity in its many forms. In her new book Holy (powerHouse Books), Ferrato takes us on a journey in the fight for women’s liberation over the past half-century.

In the book, which is organised into sections honouring the Mother, the Daughter, and the Other, Ferrato reclaims the sacred while taking shots at the patriarchy – a position she adopted as a young girl. Ferrato remembers the confusion, frustration, and anger she felt taking catechism class in Catholic school. The Holy Trinity confounded her. “It didn’t make any sense that there was a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost,” she says.

Faced with erasure, Ferrato challenged authority, asking questions no one would or could explain. “It seems like mankind is too satisfied with getting some fairytale to explain the great mysteries in life. But I don’t want to accept any of that, and I want to give credit where credit is due. This is what Holy is about.”

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

Rose Hartman: Studio 54: Night Magic

Posted on February 10, 2021

*Bianca Jagger on a white horse that happened to be inside Studio 54 on her birthday in 1977. Rose Hartman / The Artists Company*

On April 26, 1977, hundreds of the world’s cultural elite had gathered outside 254 West 54th Street, desperate to get into the event of the year: opening night at Studio 54. Those in the know snuck in through the 55th Street side of the former CBS TV studio turned nightclub, while icons like Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty had no such luck. Failing to get the red carpet treatment, they left — missing out on all the fun.

In a scene out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, future TV host Robin Leach escorted preteen superstar Brooke Shields through a crowd that included grand dame Diana Vreeland, country music star Dolly Parton, fashion designer Halston, socialite Bianca Jagger, actress Margaux Hemingway, and pop star Cher.

The celebrated Alvin Ailey dancers, clad in costumes designed by Antonio Lopez, turned the party out with a live show. As Anthony Haden-Guest reported in his book, The Last Party, a doctor opened a massive bottle of Quaaludes, sharing the pills far and wide. After the hypnotic drugs kicked in, an orgy broke out. It was Sodom and Gomorrah in gold lame and peach chiffon, white suits and satin gowns.

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*Rose Hartman. Bethann Hardison, Daniela Morera & Stephen Burrows at Studio 54 party for Valentino, New York City – 1977*

Categories: 1970s, Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Rania Matar: On Either Side of the Window: Portraits During COVID-19

Posted on February 10, 2021

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic nearly a year ago, we have been forced to transform the ways in which we engage with the world. With the threat of infection literally lingering in the air, many have retreated into social isolation, a physically and psychologically challenging feat unto itself. With no end to the pandemic in sight, many have sought deeper connections with their daily practices to maintain some semblance of equilibrium in an increasingly uncertain world.

For Lebanese/Palestinian-American photographer Rania Matar, the pandemic created a radical shift in her personal and professional lives. As a portrait photographer, Matar’s work challenges xenophobic, Islamophobic notions of “them vs. us” that flooded the American media following the events of September 11. A natural extrovert possessed with the profound gift for creating warmth and intimacy with her subjects, Matar uses the camera to collapse barriers created by jingoistic propaganda and fearful ignorance, revealing the innate humanity that lies beneath the surface of things.

Awarded the 2018 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her series She, which will be published this June by Radius Books, Matar has spent the past few years traveling the globe making photographs that explore female adolescence and womanhood in the United State and the Middle East. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, Matar put her travels on pause and began to consider making art from a different vantage point.

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*Rania Matar (Lebanes-American, b. 1964) Minty, Kayla, Leyah, Layla, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2020*

Categories: Art, Blind, Exhibitions, Photography