Posts from the “Art” Category

Sergio Purtell: Love’s Labour

Posted on August 10, 2020

In 1973, at the tender age of 18, Sergio Purtell fled his hometown of Santiago, Chile, for the United States. The decision came after General Augusto Pinochet and Admiral José Merino lead a coup d’état, killing the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende.

Once situated in his new home, Purtell began studying photography, going on to receive a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA from Yale. “Photography had the ability to sustain time itself – it was to be discovered not constructed,” Purtell says. “One could use one’s intuition to drive one’s motivation. Suddenly the world started to make sense to me.”

In the summer of 1979, Purtell decided to make a pilgrimage to Europe to discover the birthplace of Western art, an annual practice he would continue well into the mid-’80s. He purchased a Eurail pass to travel the continent at length, staying in seedy motels, visiting local cafes, beaches and bars, and amassing a glorious archive of his adventures, just published in the new book Love’s Labour (Stanley/Barker).

Read the Full Story at Huck

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

Ballads: Aperture Magazine #239

Posted on August 4, 2020

Liz Johnson Artur. PDA, East London, 2019.

In 1985, Nan Goldin unveiled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show featuring photographs taken in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s. First shown publicly at the Whitney Biennial, Goldin’s intimate portraits of her friends and lovers chronicled the No Wave art and music scene on the city’s Lower East Side. Published the following year by Aperture, the photographs offered a poignant look at the lives of sex workers, drug addicts, and trans people in the years after Stonewall.

“The photography took me travelling, in many different ways,” Goldin says in Ballads, the Summer 2020 issue of Aperture Magazine. “Most of the time, the relationships came first and then the pictures. Sometimes the pictures came first and then the relationship. The pictures became a way to introduce myself to someone or to become important in somebody’s life. I have often been able to show people how beautiful they are, when they don’t know it.”

More than three decades later, Goldin’s work continues to inspire a new generation of photographers to create their own visual diaries to love, loss, and community. Ballads features an exclusive interview with Goldin, along with a section of work dedicated to her influences, including August Sander, Peter Hujar, Larry Clark, and Claude Cahun. The issue also features work by contemporary artists Liz Johnson Artur, Daragh Soden, Abdul Kirchner, and Clifford Prince King.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Clifford Prince King, Untitled (Grapes), 2017. Courtesy the artist*

Categories: Art

Guillaume Ziccarelli – The Holy Third Gender: Kinnar Sadhu,

Posted on July 30, 2020

*Guillaume Ziccarelli. Shalu, Manisha, Rishika, 2020.*

*Guillaume Ziccarelli. Kinnar Alter, 2020.*

Every 12 years, the sacred Kumbh Mela festival takes place across four riverbank pilgrimage sites across India. In 2019, transgender Sadhus – holy, religious ascetics in the Hindu and Jain tradition – were allowed to participate in the festival for the very first time.

Although Hindu traditional myth looks favourably upon India’s trans individuals, British colonial rule outlawed homosexuality and, by extension, criminalised transgender people.

However, in a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2014, India became the very first nation to recognise trans as a third gender. Yet trans people in India still face discrimination, violence and abuse as the stain of Western imperialism lingers long after the country’s independence.

In the new exhibition, The Holy Third Gender: Kinnar Sadhu, French photographer and cinematographer Guillaume Ziccarelli travelled to Allahabad to document their controversial initiation into Kumbh Mela as spiritual leaders akin to saints.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Lola Flash: syzygy, the vision

Posted on July 29, 2020

*Lola Flash, Black Lives Matter, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.*

In 2008, artist Lola Flash was wrongfully arrested—in her words, “for walking while Black.” After that, her life spun out of control. Her teaching license was suspended, leaving Flash unemployed for six months. Forced to deplete her financial reserves, she went into debt for the first time in her life. Twelve years later, Flash is still paying for groceries purchased on her credit card.

“I saw the slippery slope happen personally,” said Flash. As a Black, genderfluid, lesbian artist, she understands the necessity of code switching for survival. Fortunately, a friend’s father represented her pro bono, and the judge dismissed the case and expunged it from her record as though the nightmare never took place.

“African Americans have been wrongly arrested for as long as I can remember,” Flash said. Now 61, Flash has been on the front lines of activism since the 1980s, when she came to prominence as a member of ACT UP, appearing in the 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” poster campaign. Around that time, she also developed her signature cross-color photography style to challenge stereotypes about race, gender, and sexuality in a life-or-death fight against the U.S. government during the AIDS epidemic.

Thirty years later, Flash is ready for battle once again with “syzygy, the vision,” an ongoing self-portrait series where the artist transforms herself into a representation of every Black person subjected to the horrors of racism, sexism, and homophobia. The series takes its name from an astronomical term for where the sun, earth, moon, and/or planets align to create an eclipse. Flash adopts this straight-line configuration to contemplate the pasts, presents, and futures of Black people across time and space.

Read the Full Story at Artsy

*Lola Flash, I Pray, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.*

Categories: Art, Artsy, Photography

Ken Light: Midnight La Frontera

Posted on July 29, 2020

*Ken Light. 6/1/1985 San Ysidro, California.*

In the late 1970s, photojournalist Ken Light began documenting agricultural workers across the United States. “The more I travelled, the more I began to see undocumented workers,” he says of the project, which would eventually become With These Hands (Pilgrim Press, 1986). “Many were living in the fields for fear of being apprehended.”

“At the time, a lot of newspapers in California were writing stories about the ‘Brown Invasion’ because the immigration numbers were incredible. I realised this is one of the great stories of the 20th century, one that would change the demographics of America.”

Between 1983-1987, Light travelled alongside US Border Patrol over three to four days from 4 pm to 7 am as they combed the Otay Mesa searching formigrants making their way into the country. His gripping photographs have been gathered in the new book, Midnight La Frontera (TBW Books).

While most photographers would shoot at dusk then leave before night fell, Light chose to shoot the border at night. Working under pitch-black conditions, he preset his Hasselblad camera to focus in the immediate foreground, the only illumination made the moment his flash went off.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Ken Light. 6/2/1985 San Ysidro, California.*

*Ken Light. 3/29/1986 San Ysidro, California.*

Categories: Art

Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957

Posted on July 28, 2020

‘Untitled, New York, New York, 1957,’ from the book Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime. © Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation

*Untitled, Illinois, 1957 © Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation*

In the fight for Black liberation, African-American photographer, filmmaker, author and composer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) transformed storytelling into activism. “Finally, after a long search to find weapons to fight off the oppression of my adolescence, I found two powerful ones, the camera and the pen,” Parks wrote in 1997’s Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective. He avowed, “Racism is still around, but I am not about to let it destroy me.”

This was a lesson in survival gleaned in his youth. Born on Fort Scott, Kans., Parks weathered a childhood marked by abject poverty during one of the most violent eras of homegrown terrorism: Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,440 lynchings occurred in the United States. At 11, Parks nearly met the same fate when three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River knowing he could not swim.

Parks rarely shared his harrowing history with those closest to him; instead he channeled his experiences into his art—including work that examined the role of the criminal-justice system in Black American life.

Read the Full Story at TIME

*Drug search, Chicago, Illinois, 1957 © Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation*

*Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1957 © Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.*

Categories: Art, Photography, TIME

Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley in Conversation

Posted on July 27, 2020

*Untitled (Sosa with Orange Hula Hoop), 2019. Photography by Tyler Mitchell.*

The American photographers Tyler Mitchell and Ryan McGinley have risen to global acclaim for their dream-like imagery of youth and possibility. Their photographs are mesmerising meditations on a utopian state of bliss, offering the understanding that liberation from all that constrains us is not only possible but a fundamental necessity of existence. It is a viewpoint that led both artists to prominence at the outset of their careers: in 2018, Mitchell, then 23, was the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of American Vogue; 15 years earlier, McGinley, then 25, became the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The July 28 publication of I Can Make You Feel Good, Mitchell’s debut monograph, is an intimate and powerful vision of Black utopia, bathed in the rich sun-soaked light which has become the photographer’s signature. It stands alongside The Kids Are Alright (2002), McGinley’s first handmade book, which captured the exploits of the artists, skaters, and graffiti writers populating New York’s downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, in an ongoing conversation about the power of beauty, freedom, and truth.

On a Friday in July, McGinley met with Mitchell in his Brooklyn home to discuss the joys of coming of age as skaters, artists, and authors in the new millennium.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Untitled (Boys of Walthamstow) 2018. Photography by Tyler Mitchell.*

Categories: AnOther, Art, Books, Photography

Stanley Stellar: Night, Life

Posted on July 21, 2020

As a young gay boy growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Stanley Stellar always felt alone. “I didn’t have any friends,” he tells AnOther. “I would go up to the roof of my building, sitting there by myself, and thinking about the future. My greatest joys were looking at stacks of magazines. Images became my friends.”

After studying graphic design at Parsons in the early 1960s, Stellar began his career as an editorial art director designing magazines and coffee-table books. “I’m a child of all media,” he says. “Inside my head are all the images of the second half of the 20th century. I was very aware of what was being done and who was doing it, along with the history of photography. After seeing so many other people’s work I wanted to take my own pictures.”

In 1976, Stellar got his first professional camera and set forth on a mission to document Manhattan’s West Village, which was flourishing during the early years of the Gay Liberation Movement. “When I came out, the gay world was on the street. If you were a young gay man you had very few choices as to what to do, how to meet people, have sex or friends. I found Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street; for so many years that was the spot,” Stellar says.

“I was invited to gay men’s apartments and seeing what their lives were like. It made a real impression on me; I needed to record us in ways that were not necessarily commercial. Images of men in society meant GQ or porn magazines on 42nd Street – that was it. I wanted to do what I had not seen.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, AnOther, Art, Photography

Ivan McClellan: Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo

Posted on July 17, 2020

*Ivan McClellan. Steer Wrestler Daryl Eliot checking event times on the porch of the arena office.*

*Ivan McClellan. Two Pony Express riders discuss strategy underneath the bleachers.*

Hailing from Kansas City, Kansas, photographer Ivan McClellan grew up in a working-class neighbourhood that was a distinct mixture of urban and country.

“There were lowriders and gang members on our block and the street would get lit up at night by police helicopters,” McClellan remembers. But every summer, he and his sister would run around the two-hectare field that lay behind their house, eating blackberries and catching lightning bugs. “Some of our friends at school had cows and chickens and we’d see people trotting down the street on horses. I never thought of our upbringing as country, or the Black folks around us as cowboys.”

That all changed in 2015, when documentary filmmaker Charles Perryinvited McClellan to the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, the only touring African-American rodeo in the world. The event was named after Bill Pickett (1870-1932), a Black cowboy who got his start performing in turn-of-the-century Wild West shows and early Hollywood films. Pickett famously invented bulldogging (steer wrestling) and became the first Black person honoured by the National Rodeo Hall of Fame. Founded in 1984, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo brings its iconic celebration of Black cowboy culture to every corner of the country.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Ivan McClellan. Three Pony Express riders prepare for their event.*

*Ivan McCllellan. Bulldoggers chasing down a steer at a jackpot outside of town.*

Categories: Art

Andy Warhol Polaroids

Posted on July 17, 2020

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Ladies and Gentlemen (Easha McCleary), 1974. Unique polaroid print © 2020 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Hedges Projects

.As the Gay Liberation Movement got into full swing during the 1970s, Andy Warhol began to focus on the LGBTQ community in his art, creating two seminal bodies of work, Sex Parts and Torsos and Ladies & Gentlemen, selections of which are now on view online in Andy Warhol Polaroids at Fotografiska New York.

The Sex Parts and Torsos series began when a man boasted to Warhol of his tremendous appendage, which he allowed the artist to photograph. Warhol placed it in a box labelled “Sex Parts”. In 1977, he returned to the series with renewed gusto, using a 35mm camera and a Polaroid Big Shot to make tightly framed shots of torsos, buttocks, and penises of men recruited from gay bathhouses by Halston’s boyfriend, artist Victor Bockris.

The works were made less than a decade after the US Supreme Court decriminalised the possession of “obscene” materials in 1969, yet photographs of male nudes were still the provenance of pornographers. “Warhol’s sexuality was known within some circles, but it was something he kept private in many ways,” says Amanda Hajjar, Director of Exhibitions. “This work is significant in telling us about Warhol as a person, an artist, and that the queer community was still very much underground.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Sex Parts and Torsos, 1977. Unique polaroid print © 2020 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Jim Hedges Projects

Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Ladies and Gentlemen (Kim),1974. Unique polaroid print © 2020 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Hedges Projects

Categories: Art

Shirley Baker: Punks 1980s

Posted on July 15, 2020

*Shirley Baker. Two colourful punk girls. 1980s.*

Hailing from North Salford, England, Shirley Baker (1932-2014) was an identical twin. Both girls grew up to become artists, though Baker was private and solitary while her sister was the extrovert. “She was always a great people watcher,” says Nan Levy, her daughter and Director of the Shirley Baker Estate.

Baker began taking photographs at the age of eight, becoming one of the few women in post-war Britain to receive formal photographic training. After graduating from Manchester College of Technology, she embarked on a career as a freelance photographer and writer, preferring to produce work on her own terms.

“She was a free spirit,” Levy says. “She set her own projects and never went anywhere without her camera. There are bodies of work on supermarkets and airports. She saw the funny side to things that other people didn’t see.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Shirley Baker. A stylish young lady in punk attire stands on a Camden street as shoppers hunt for bargains in the market behind. 1986.*

Categories: Art