Posts from the “Art” Category

Jordan Casteel: Within Reach

Posted on April 16, 2020

*Jordan Casteel. Shirley (Spa Boutique2Go), 2018 Oil on canvas 78 x 60 in (198.1 x 152.4 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York*

*Jordan Casteel. Joe and Mozel (Pompette Wines), 2017 Oil on canvas 90 x 78 in (228.6 x 198.1 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York*

The art of Jordan Casteel is grounded in empathy—in the space where the boundaries between the self and the other melts away leaving the impenetrable bond of compassion and understanding that lies at the very root of our humanity. Here, in the sacred realm of spirit, a mutual affinity between souls is distilled and preserved forevermore in mesmerizing works of art.

“My entire life, I would be the person described as a deeply empathetic, caregiver, leader, observer,” Casteel says. “It’s been a natural space for me to encompass because it is so inherent to who I am. I have always been curious about what people experience before they got in front of me: all the things that make them who they are. Then, when they are in front of me, paying attention to the subtle gestures, body language, and tonal shifts in a conversation that allude to something deeper or more meaningful.”

In Within Reach, her first solo museum exhibition (temporarily closed due to COVID-19) and accompanying catalogue, Casteel invites us into her world in a series of nearly 40 large scale paintings that celebrate the beauty of color as it exists in people, places, and the nature of art itself. Casteel’s encounters with the people of her community are so powerful and poignant, you might think she has known her subjects all her life—but many of the relationships begin with the first encounter to make their portrait. That’s simply Casteel’s way; she moves through the world with fluidity and ease, her curiosity guiding her to cultivate connections with people from all walks of life that populate the communities where she has lived and worked over the past decade.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*Jordan Casteel. Noelle, 2019 Oil on canvas 78 x 60 in (198.1 x 152.4 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York*

*Jordan Casteel. Amina, 2017 Oil on canvas 90 x 78 in (228.6 x 198.1 cm) Courtesy Casey Kaplan, New York*

Categories: Art

Peter Gatien: The Club King

Posted on April 16, 2020

*Main dance floor with mezzanine slide at Club USA, 1992. Photo ©Tina Paul, 1992.*
*from The Club King: My Rose, Reign & Fall in New York Nightlife, Courtesy of Little A*

From the late 70s to the late 90s, Peter Gatien reigned as New York’s “King of Clubs”, running four of the city’s most hedonistic playgrounds which operated seven nights a week during that time. With Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium, and Club USA, Gatien brought Babylon back to life, introducing spaces where innovative and influential new forms of music, fashion, art and culture could flourish. Whether cultivating the Club Kidsphenomenon at Michael Alig’s weekly Disco 2000 party or bringing hip-hop royalty together for Mecca with Funkmaster Flex, Gatien had a magic touch.

But Gatien ruled his kingdom from behind the scenes. With his distinctive eye patch and tall and rangy frame, he was known as a ghost, remaining in the background, and keeping his eye on the books. Ever discreet, Gatien was the consummate businessman who eschewed the spotlight, making sure the focus was always on the party and its denizens. However, his ‘live and let live’ ethos rankled the man who loved the cameras more than just about anyone else – then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who waged war on the city and its nightlife with his virulent ‘Quality of Life’ campaign. With Gatien in his crosshairs, Giuliani took aim, waging a vicious media and legal campaign that ultimately led to his deportation in 2003.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

*Peter GatienTaken from The Club King: My Rise, Reign & Fall in New York Nightlife, Courtesy of Little A*

Categories: Art

Cooper & Gorfer: Between These Folded Walls, Utopia

Posted on April 10, 2020

*YOHANA HOLDING SCISSORS, 2020 © COOPER & GORFER*

During a time of global crisis due to COVID-19, we can be reminded of the dangers of xenophobia, particularly towards vulnerable, displaced immigrant communities. Popular media often portrays immigrants seeking a better life as victims or criminals, rarely recognizing them as heroic figures blazing new paths through foreign lands. That’s where the work of artists Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer begins.

Between These Folded Walls, Utopia, their new series of elaborately staged photographs and videos reveals the noble and courageous aspects of immigrant and first-generation narratives.

“We started working together 14 years ago at University,” Cooper says. “We did our Master’s thesis together. When you are in grad school, the sky is the limit and you have impossible ideas. Even though we come from different backgrounds, we share similar ideas. Nina came from architecture and I came from classical photography but we found a common ground of creativity: we were exploring the world and could use any medium.”

After reading an article about the West losing its ability to imagine utopia, the artists became intrigued with the possibility of discovering a space where it might exist today. “How can you create a better world?” Gorfer asks. “We have tried so many times to construct it. When you think utopia you think architecture and political systems — very mind-based creations. We are creating utopia outside ourselves. Whereas you read Eastern philosophy, you look inside and that’s nirvana.”

Read the Full Story at The Luupe

*Israa In Pink Scarf, 2020 © Cooper & Gorfer*

*Segal And The Tiger, 2018 © Cooper & Gorfer*

Categories: Art

Yannis Davy Guibinga: Liberation Through Art

Posted on April 6, 2020

Just a century ago, European imperialists occupied nearly 90% of Africa, subjugating the continent to a ruthless system of oppression, exploitation, and genocide. In Namibia, the Germans perfected concentration camps they would later bring to their own lands, while the Belgians exacted a holocaust in the Democratic Republic of Congo that resulted in the death of eight million people. Borders were drawn without respect to the native populations, while natural resources were stripped from the land at deafening speed. It wasn’t until World War II, when Ethiopia drove Italian settlers out, that the tide began to turn and the African Independence Movement was born.

During the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, dozens of African nations freed themselves from the pestilent grip of European colonization with Zimbabwe being the last to achieve liberation in 1980. Yet, even as Africans expelled foreign powers, a new plague took hold in the form of neocolonialism. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre first used the term in a 1956 rally for peace in Algeria to describe a system of capitalism, globalization, and cultural imperialism used by so-called “First World” nations to control rather than develop former colonies.

A decade later, Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, made it the subject of his 1965 book, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. Upon the book’s publication, the U.S. State Department was so enraged, they immediately performed a textbook act of neocolonialism, cancelling $25 million of American “aid” to the fledgling nation. “Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress,” Nkrumah wrote.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

Categories: Art

Manon Ouimet: Altered

Posted on April 3, 2020

Photography bears witness to the world in which we live, transforming now only how we see, but also how we think. It’s most primal power lies in the fact that you simply cannot unsee what it has shown: for better or for worse, it makes the invisible known.

With portraiture, photography adopts a humanizing approach: allowing us to gaze upon the other and discover what connections lie beneath the surface of the flesh and in the well of spirit. To stare is an act of aggression which the photograph neutralizes: it invites us to look tirelessly at someone who is not us, and consider both our relation to them and them in their own right, discovering captivating moments of beauty wherever they may lie.

In the series Altered, Manon Ouimet taps into the therapeutic power of photography to help people living with disfigurement reimagine themselves. The people pictured here, fully in the nude, have unwillingly embarked upon life-changing body alterations due to illness, war, accidents, and violence. Where disfigurement was once shunned and erased, they are now given the same care and sensitivity of any other great portrait subject.

The result is a fascinating look at the way in which visibility transforms our perceptions about beauty, wholeness, and humanity — while providing the subjects themselves with the opportunity to reveal a side of themselves that they generally hide from the world, as an integral part of their path to healing and self discovery. Here Ouimet shares her work championing the power, beauty, and dignity of fearless self-expression.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art

Helaine Garren: Bensinger’s

Posted on April 2, 2020

In 1961, The Hustler was released in America. The film took the nation by storm, telling the story of “Fast Eddie” Felson, a pool shark who challenged legendary “Minnesota Fats” on his home turf. It was based on a 1959 novel of the same name, which took its inspiration from Bensinger’s, a legendary pool hall located in a windowless basement on Diversey and Broadway in Chicago.

“All you could smell was all the action and an atmosphere of a torture chamber,” said Artie Bodendorfer, a nearly unbeatable one-pocket pool hustler. “It was the greatest and most exciting pool room to be in, with all the high class, low class, thieves, killers, judges, lawyers, politicians, policemen, gentlemen, pimps, drug addicts, con men. You name it – Bensinger’s had it all.”

In 1970, Helaine Garren (1944-2016), a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, stepped inside Bensinger’s and got to work on her first assignment. Garren, who long enjoyed playing pool herself, recalled having spent “many of my bad-girl years learning the game”.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Tseng Kwong Chi: East Meets West

Posted on April 2, 2020

*New York, New York, 1979 © Tseng Kwong Chi, Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery*

Born in Hong Kong to Chinese Nationalists escaping the reign of Chairman Mao, Tseng Kwong Chi (1950-1990) was hailed as a child prodigy when began painting at the age of 10. In 1966, his family emigrated to Vancouver, Canada. Tseng then set his sights on studying photography at L’Académie Julian in Paris, graduating in 1975. Three years later, he arrived in New York and quickly became an integral part of the downtown art and club scenes of the 1980s. With three continents under his belt, Tseng viewed himself as a citizen of the world, rather than labeling himself or his art as Chinese.

Yet Tseng understood how he was seen, and began mischievously playing with his identity. In 2015, his sister Muna recounted a story of Tseng arriving at a dinner his parents threw at the posh Windows on the World restaurant located at the top of the World Trade Center wearing a Zhongshan suit purchased in a Montreal thrift store. His parents were appalled but the maitre’d treated Tseng like a visiting dignitary. That encounter planted the seeds for the “Ambiguous Ambassador,” a persona Tseng adopted for East Meets West (a.k.a. Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series), a selection of which is now on view in an intimate exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1987 © Tseng Kwong Chi, Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery*

Categories: Art

Claudia Summers: Life Lessons from a Former Dominatrix

Posted on March 25, 2020

*Claudia in Androgeny, 1979. © Marcia Resnick.*

Claudia Summers is the quintessential downtown New York It Girl—the perfect blend of beauty, brains, style, nerve, and enough DGAF energy to set this town on fire and watch it burn. Hailing from St. Louis, she arrived in Manhattan by way of San Francisco during the 1970s, bridging the punk, disco, and no wave scenes. She got her start in sex work as a dancer working at mafia-owned strip clubs in Times Square before becoming one of the city’s most revered dominatrixes at a time in New York City history when the BDSM culture was deeply underground. Summers and a colleague opened their own place, designed their own furniture, and created their own equipment to use on men paying good money to submit to mistresses with a reputation for being hardcore.

Muse of Marcus Leatherdale, Summers chose to pursue sex work at a time when few women did. She used her freedom and earnings to finance her dreams of becoming a rock star, playing synthesizer in the Andy Warhol-managed musical outfit Walter Steding and the Dragon People, and appearing as lead vocalist on the 1984 club hit “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” which was banned from commercial radio and MTV. All the while, Summers was working through her own trauma, trying to heal from an assault that changed her life forevermore while simultaneously managing a drug habit that made her a high functioning heroin addict for years. Summers, who is currently working on a novel of linked short stories, shares her journey, offering hard-won wisdom and insight for anyone aspiring to liberate themselves from the patriarchy.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*Walter Steding and The Dragon People poster. © Cat Yellen-Rebennack.*

*Dominatrix-Mistress Julliette NYC 1984. © Marcus Leatherdale.*

Categories: Art

Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha

Posted on March 25, 2020

*Liz Johnson Artur, Josephine, Peckham, 1995. Chromogenic photograph, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy the artist. © Liz Johnson Artur.*

Growing up in Germany, Russian Ghanaian artist Liz Johnson Artur spent her summers in the former Soviet Union. But in 1986, she received an invitation to stay with a family friend in Brooklyn. Deep in Williamsburg, long before it was gentrified, Artur found herself in a black community for the very first time.

“Up until then I hadn’t really travelled in any countries that had a black population,” she says. “Coming to Brooklyn was something I didn’t expect, but I realised I could take pictures of people,” she says. Over the past three decades, Artur has been taking photographs of the African diaspora as an extension of herself, seamlessly integrating the practice of photography into her everyday life.

The result is Artur’s ongoing Black Balloon Archive, selections from which are included in the intimate exhibition Dusha, along with two videos and a selection of sketchbooks. “Dusha,” which means “soul” in Russian, is at the heart of Artur’s work. As a self-described “product of migration” who adopted London as her home, Artur’s artistic process is her way of being in the world.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Liz Johnson Artur, Country Show, 2016. Chromogenic photograph, 24 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist. © Liz Johnson Artur.*

Categories: Art

Akasha Rabut: Death Magick Abundance

Posted on March 24, 2020

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans – but the true horror lay in the government’s failure to protect the city’s people, resulting in some 1,200 deaths. Catastrophe struck in the storm’s aftermath, with over one million people from the central Gulf Coast displaced across the United States, some still stranded in FEMA-provided trailers more than five years after the storm. But over time, the people of New Orleans returned home, rebuilding their city and restoring the culture to its glory.

“A connection that was made through this trauma with each other. It’s forced them to be really creative. Living through that really inspires people. I feel like they are luminaries,” says photographer Akasha Rabut, author of the new book, Death Magick Abundance(Anthology), a mesmerising portrait of the post-Katrina generation in New Orleans made over the past decade. “People here live everyday like it’s their last day and that’s beautiful to me. Everybody here is very friendly and there’s a real sense of community. We have a lack of infrastructure here and the people are the ones taking care of each other.”

Read the Full Story at AnOther

*Caramel and Candi, Calliope Projects, 2015 © Akasha Rabut*

Categories: Art

Bernard Lumpkin and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones: Young, Gifted and Black

Posted on March 19, 2020

*Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Blue Dancer, 2017. Oil on canvas. 68 x 54 in. © Tunji Adeniyi-Jones*

Fifty years ago, Nina Simone released “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a song written in memory of her dear friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry who died in 1965 at the tender age of 34. It became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement that soon found its way into a 1972 episode of Sesame Street. Simone sang, “We must begin to tell our young / There’s a world waiting for you / This is a quest that’s just begun” to Gen X babies, who took the message to heart and paid it forward to the children of Generation Z, who fearlessly stand at the forefront of a brave new world.

With the Black Lives Matter movement centering issues of race in the discourse, the historically exclusionary art world has finally made space for Black Art. A wealth of established, mid-career, and emerging artists are breaking new ground, be it at auction houses, major museum exhibitions, on magazine covers, or with new books. Yet Black Art is far from a trend; it has informed the world for thousands of years in various incarnations in Africa and across the diaspora.

This point is beautifully illustrated in the exhibition Young Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, which pairs collectorBernard Lumpkin with critic Antwaun Sargent to curate a masterful showcase of some of the most innovative and influential contemporary black artists. The exhibition is a symphony of voices and visions from across generations all around the globe, creating a mellifluous confluence of style, media, and subject matter. Culled from the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, Young, Gifted and Black features works by David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sadie Barnette, Jordan Casteel, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Deana Lawson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, whose work appears on the cover of the catalog. Here, Lumpkin and Adeniyi-Jones discuss how when the collector and artist work together, they can transform the narrative of identity, politics, education, and art history.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*D’Angelo Lovell Williams, The Lovers, 2017. Pigment print. 20 x 30 in. © D’Angelo Lovell Williams, Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.*

*Vaughn Spann, Staring back at you, rooted and unwavering, 2018. Polymer paint and flashe on wood panel. 74 x 54 in. © Vaughn Spann, Courtesy of Martin Parsekian / Half Gallery.*

Categories: Art