Posts from the “Art” Category

Harvey Stein: Coney Island, An Eternal Romance

Posted on July 15, 2020

*Harvey Stein. The Hug, Closed Eyes and Smile.*

Street photographer Harvey Stein’s lifelong love affair with Coney Island began the first time he entered Brooklyn’s famed seaside playground. It was the late 1950s, and he was 14 years old.

“I didn’t like New York, it was too big, too noisy, hot and dirty,” the Pittsburgh native remembers. “Going to Coney was a treat… As we walked the crowded boardwalk at dusk on a simmering summer day, I was mesmerized by the people. I vividly remember a fistfight between two sailors in uniforms.”

Stein resolved to return to Coney Island someday, never imagining that he would do so more than a thousand times.

In 1970, Stein returned to “America’s Playground” for a class assignment, and was captivated by the eclectic characters drawn to sun, sand, and surf. Over the next half a century, Stein would amass a singular archive of charming vignettes, a selection of which are now in view in the new exhibition, Coney Island, An Eternal Romance.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Harvey Stein. Legs in photo booth, 1974.*

*Harvey Stein. Coney Island sign and shadow, 2008.*

Categories: Art

Liberation Through Art

Posted on July 15, 2020

Fifteen years after rising to global prominence, the bold and brash bravado of Abstract Expressionism was losing its edge. For all its rage against the mechanization of modern life, it had become synonymous with excess and ego. By the early 1960s, a new cool had emerged, one known as Minimalism, which took Mies van der Rohe’s maxim, “Less is more,” to its logical conclusion.

Forsaking the dramatics of Abstract Expressionism, which constantly asserted the artist and their message at the very center of the work, Minimalists sought a new kind of anonymity that favored materiality over all. Preconceived notions of art were abandoned. Narratives, metaphors, and symbols were vanished. The hand of the artist vanished. In its place all that remained was the space where the object and the audience could become entangled and engaged. Perception and experience reigned supreme, as the shape, color, line, and form of the object were reduced to their purest state.

Yet Minimalism was no less a male dominated space than Abstract Expressionism had been. The movement was realized in 1966 with the landmark “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors” exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. Of the 42 artists featured in the show, only three women were featured, among them Anne Truitt and Judy Gerowitz (later known as Judy Chicago).

Yet women were an integral part of Minimalism as it rose to prominence during the late 1960s and ‘70s — the same era that gave birth to the Women’s Movement. Despite not receiving recognition or remuneration comparable to their male peers, artists including Carmen Hererra, Agnes Martin, Beverly Pepper, Anne Truitt, Mary Corse, Eva Hesse, Vija Celmins, Noemi Escandell, Jo Baer, and Nasreen Mohamedi were committed to pursuing their destinies as leading proponents of the movement.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: Art

Katherine Simóne Reynolds: Ask Her How She’s Doing

Posted on July 8, 2020

*Katherine Simone Reynolds .Ask Her How She’s Doing: You’re Doing a Great Job, 2015*

*Katherine Simone Reynolds .Ask Her How She’s Doing: You’re Doing a Great Job, Family, 2015*

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,’ writer and activist Audre Lorde famously said. It’s a subject of vital concern to artist Katherine Simóne Reynolds, who began the photography series Ask Her How She’s Doing in 2015 while undergoing a major transitional period in her life.

Reynolds began approaching Black women in St. Louis neighbourhoods to ask: “How are you actually doing today?” This simple yet profound act of care opened a shared space for vulnerability. With this work, Reynolds attempts to dismantle the myth of the Black superwoman: a stereotypically strong, stoic figure who denies her needs, desires and wellbeing in order to bear the burdens of everyone else in her life.

“Black women wellness is something I take very seriously,” says Reynolds. “It has not been a temporal performative fix through one sole project, but something that is imperative to survival.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Katherine Simone Reynolds .Ask Her How She’s Doing: You’re Doing a Great Job, Nicole, 2015*

*Katherine Simone Reynolds .Ask Her How She’s Doing: You’re Doing a Great Job, Cynnamon in the Business,*, *2015*

Categories: Art

Judith Black: Pleasant Street

Posted on July 7, 2020

In 1979, Judith Black enrolled in the Creative Photography Lab at MIT to pursue her MFA in photography. A single mother of four living on limited means, Black moved her brood into a dilapidated apartment into Cambridgeport, Massachusetts: a multi-ethnic working-class neighbourhood that had been part of the industrial, port area of the Charles River just 15 minutes from the school.

“It was a very hard time in my life,” Black remembers. “We were lucky to find the apartment and to be able to afford it. It was then that I realised how the chance of birth gives one privilege… or denies it.”

Amid the relentless demands of being a working mother and student, Black turned to photography to create a space to record the lives of her loved ones long before family-based work was taken seriously by the art world. “It was seen as too ‘confessional,” Black says.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Eli Reed: The Formative Years

Posted on July 3, 2020

*Eli Reed. Les Wormack. Oyotunji. South Carolina. USA. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos*

*Eli Reed. Ginger. Washington D.C. USA. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos*

*Eli Reed. This photo is typical street scene probably in Perth Amboy or East Orange, New Jersey. Early 1970s. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos*

“I was the good kid, always reading, painting, quiet, never getting in trouble,” Eli Reed says of his early years. Born in 1946 in Linden, New Jersey, Reed was aged 4 or 5 when he moved with his family to Perth Amboy, a few miles south, as a result of a fire that destroyed their home. When his mother died, the family moved again: Reed, his father, and two brothers went to live in the John J. Delaney Homes, a low-income housing project on the outskirts of the city. The industrial brick buildings of the Delaney Homes, built in the 1950s and since demolished, were once home to 252 families including Reed’s friends: Bruce Taylor, who became a defensive back for the 49ers and his brother Brian, a player for the New Jersey Nets. Reed grew up playing stickball with local kids, many of whom were tagged as troublemakers from a young age. “All the tough guys were my friends because I respected them as other people. Stickball was the connecting cord.”

As an adult, Reed would discover that Perth Amboy had long been a site of resistance, dating back to its time as one of the stops on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of routes and safehouses used by enslaved African-Americans to escape northward into free states and Canada (or south out of the United States altogether) during the 19th century. “In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan tried to incorporate themselves into Perth Amboy and they were kicked out, literally,” Reed says. “They made another attempt and they were greeted by six thousand Perth Amboyans, who drove them out — which made me feel pretty good. I saw Perth Amboy as a decent place and not as bad as what was going on in other parts of the country, such as the South. It was a good place to grow up.”

Read the Full Story at Magnum Photos

*Eli Reed. Boy from the African village. Oyotunji. South Carolina. USA. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos*

*Eli Reed. This is a photo made with a very old early Leica camera with a messed up lens. My father, Ellis Reed Sr. and his friend Annie Brimson. Newark, NJ in 1970. © Eli Reed | Magnum Photos*

Categories: Art

Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle

Posted on July 2, 2020

*Claudia Andujar. Youth Wakatha u thëri, a victim of measles, is treated by shamans and paramedics from the Catholic mission, Catrimani, Roraima, 1976.*

*Claudia Andujar. Guest decorated with vulture and hawk plumage for a feast, photographed in multiple exposure, Catrimani, Roraima, 1974*

Now 89, photographer Claudia Andujar has dedicated more than half her life to protect the Yanomami people of the Amazon rainforest from the imperial forces that threaten their survival.

It is a lesson Andjuar learned as a youth during World War II, when the Germans arrived in Oradea, a town on the border of Romania and Hungary during World War II. Andujar, then 13, and her mother fled to Switzerland, the place of her birth. Her father, a Hungarian Jew, and his family, were taken to Auschwitz and Dachau, where they later died.

“Claudia has carried that trauma throughout her life, which was also marked by the search of new roots and of a new place where she would feel comfortable, safe, and welcomed,” says Thyago Nogueira, curator and co-author of Claudia Andujar: The Yanomami Struggle (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/ Dist. Thames & Hudson).

“Claudia understood the horrors of history could repeat themselves against a fragile society, and transformed the guilt she carried for not being able to stop the violence from the past into a powerful determination to react.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

*Claudia Andujar. Collective house near the Catholic mission on the Catrimani River, Roraima, 1976*

*Claudia Andujar. Aracá, Amazonas/Surucucu, Roraima, 1983.*

Categories: Art

Baldwin Lee: Black Americans in the South

Posted on June 29, 2020

*Baldwin Lee. Vicksburg, MS (Alan and Friend) 1983.*

As a first-generation Chinese American growing up in New York’s Chinatown, Baldwin Lee promised his father he would attend MIT. However, after enrolling, he was absolutely miserable until he took a photography class with Minor White. Lee quickly abandoned his studies of science and technology in favour of the arts, before going on to pursue his MFA, studying with Walker Evans at Yale.

In 1982, Lee became a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and travelled for the first time to the Deep South. Excited to get to know the environs, he set off on a 10-day, 2,000-mile road trip, visitingLouisiana, Florida, and Georgia, photographing everything he found interesting along the way.

“Walker Evans had photographed in this area 50 years earlier,” Lee says. “When I was travelling and looking at places he had gone, it shocked me that absolutely nothing had changed. You believed you had stepped back into 1935.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Baldwin Lee. Vicksburg, MS (Alan Pulling Friend) 1984.*

*Baldwin Lee. Shreveport, LA (Man’s Back Suit).*

Categories: Art

Black Cowboys Mount Up for BLM Protests

Posted on June 25, 2020

*Flag bearer carrying the Pan African flag at the Arizona Black Rodeo. Photography Ivan McClellan*

*A rider at the Roy Leblanc Invitational Rodeo in Okmulgee Oklahoma. Photography Ivan McClellan*

32 years after it was first released, N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” became the rallying cry across the United States, as 10 per cent of American adults – 25 million people – have joined Black Lives Matter protests around the nation after a video surfaced showing Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin brutally killGeorge Floyd on May 25.

But the City of Compton, where N.W.A. hails from, was noticeable calm, cool, and collected. “That was very profound to me. Compton has always been notorious for being really hostile when it comes to police brutality,” says Randy Hook, leader of The Compton Cowboys and Executive Director of nonprofit youth equestrian organisation Compton Junior Equestrians.

nspired to take action, Hook contacted Mayor Aja Brown, and with her support, they organised the Compton Peace Ride on June 7 through his hometown. “We wanted to work with our mayor because she’s a Black woman and she’s all about what we’re all about,” Hook says. With her support, the Compton Cowboys, a tight-knit group of riders who have known each other since childhood, mounted up and led the people to the steps of City Hall, where Mayor Brown and NBA star Russell Westbrook, a Long Beach native, gave speeches.

“We had a whole brigade of horses. It looked like the cavalry out there. We were leading the charge, taking up the rear, with all the horses behind all the people. There’s something very powerful about being Black, being cowboys on horses, and fighting for American values even though we are the oppressed party,” Hook says. “We wanted to be sure we left that message on a global scale that Compton is not what people think it is – it’s a community, love, and peace. We care about our kids and we want them to have a better future.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*Keenan rides through the streets of Compton, California.. Photography Walter Thompson-Hernández*

*“Central City, 2014”. Photography Akasha Rabut*

Categories: Art

Jamel Shabazz: City Metro

Posted on June 23, 2020

*Soros for Life, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NYC © Jamel Shabazz, courtesy of Galerie Bene Taschen*

*The Righteous Brothers, NYC 1981 © Jamel Shabazz, courtesy of Galerie Bene Taschen*

Hailing from Red Hook, Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz was just nine years old when he first read Leonard Freed’s 1968 book Black in White America. The book, which documented the challenges African Americans faced in the struggle for civil rights, impressed upon Shabazz the power of photography to transform the way we see and think about the world and our place in it.

As the son of a U.S. Navy photographer, Shabazz recognized the camera was a tool that could be used to both document and safeguard life. He began making photographs in high school, after which he joined the army. When Shabazz returned home in 1980, he began to see the impact of gun violence across the community, and in just a few years the ravages of crack and AIDS. Photography quickly became a calling that Shabazz pursued without recognition or remuneration for years.

Instead, Shabazz followed his instinct, understanding that photography was more than a medium or commodity: it was a means to connect with a new generation of Black and Brown teens coming of age in a nation that had systematically targeting them for destruction for centuries. When he wasn’t working as a Corrections Officer for the New York Police Department, Shabazz would hit the streets in search of people whose spirit touched his soul, seeing something in them that he sought to preserve through his work.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*The Fly Girls, Brooklyn, NYC 1982 © Jamel Shabazz, courtesy of Galerie Bene Taschen*

*The Crew, Lower East Side, Manhattan, NYC 1984 © Jamel Shabazz, courtesy of Galerie Bene Taschen*

Categories: Art

Meryl Meisler: Studio 54

Posted on June 22, 2020

Meryl Meisler. Silver Boots, Studio 54, June 1977.

On April 26, 1977, Studio 54 opened its doors and introduced the world to a new era of nightlife. Owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager transformed a former TV studio into a nightclub that hosted extravagant theme parties for the crème de la crème – which included everyone from celebrities to street corner legends.

The door policy was extremely selective; only the most fabulous need apply. But once ensconced behind the velvet ropes, it was democracy on the dance floor. Sex, fashion, and disco were the order of the day, creating a heady mélange of glamour and decadence in the years just before the advent of AIDS.

That June, a young artist named Meryl Meisler, then 25, set forth on what would become a regular foray to the clubs with her partner in crime, Judi Jupiter. “Judi called the publicist for Studio 54 and got us on a list,” she remembers, “then she became friendly with the doorman, Marc Benecke. Once he knew us, we were in.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Meryl Meisler. Rejected From Studio 54 No No (with Judi Jupiter). Studio 54, NY, NY, October 1978.*

Categories: Art

Celerating the Black Liberation Movement Through Art

Posted on June 19, 2020

*“Untitled, Harlem, New York” (1963) Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation*

*Henry Taylor. “The Times Thay Aint a Changing, Fast Enough!” 2017.*

The fight for Black Liberation did not begin with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland,Mike Brown, or the 1,274 of the Black men, women, and children killed by police officers since 2015. It did not begin with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or the Black Panther Party, all systematically targeted for destruction by the US government. It did not begin with the death of Emmett Till or the 4,743 lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1882-1968.

The fight for Black liberation started long before the nation was born, at the dawn of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which in the 15th century would force some 12 million Africans into slavery over the next 400 years. By the time the first enslaved Africans landed on the shores of the British Colony of Virginia in 1619, Europeans had already accumulated a century of generational wealth from human trafficking.

The fight for Black Liberation started with the slave rebellions throughout the Western hemisphere, though American history and media have all but erased its powerful legacy. When Haiti became the world’s first Black republic in 1804 after the enslaved rose up and defeated the French, the West quaked in fear of righteous retribution for their crimes against humanity. The Black Liberation Movement is a response to racism, which is inextricably intertwined with capitalism and imperialism – and it will not end so long as the agents of empire create and maintain systems of power to oppress, exploit, and deny people the universal human rights.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

*“A Distant View” (2003) Carrie Mae Weems*

*“Red Jackson with His Mother and Brother, Harlem, New York” (1948) Courtesy of Gordon Parks Foundation*

Categories: Art