Posts from the “Art” Category

Richard McCabe: Revelations

Posted on March 16, 2020

*Brandon Thibodeaux. Sno Balls and Ice Cream, Duncan, MS. 2015*

The American South is a region so vast and multi-dimensional that it defies assumptions. To be able to truly capture it, you need to step back and take a panoramic view.

In the new exhibition Revelations, the Ogden Museum presents a story of the South in more than 75 images taken from the early 1900s to the present. The show includes works by artists including Keith Calhoun, Chandra McCormick, Walker Evans, Andrew Moore and Dorothea Lange, among others.

The exhibition takes its title from the Book of Revelations, the final book of the New Testament, which speaks to the future of humanity while giving a nod to the present and the past. “Revelations is an action word that spurs wonder or new discovery through art,” says Richard McCabe, the Ogden Museum Curator of Photography.

Read the Full Story at Huck

*Maude Schuyler Clay. Tutwiler Boy with Headdress, 1990*

*Andrew Moore. Zydeco Zinger, Abandoned Six Flags Theme Park, New Orleans. 2012*

Categories: Art

Willi Smith: Street Couture

Posted on March 15, 2020

Decades before inclusivity, diversity, visibility and representation became buzzwords du jour, African-American fashion designer and inventor of streetwear Willi Smith (1948-1987) blazed a groundbreaking path to democratise fashion and make it accessible and affordable for people from all walks of life. “I design for no particular age or race, but for someone who is curious about the world,” Smith told Metropolis magazine in 1985.

In 1976, Smith partnered with Laurie Mallet to launch the iconic brand WilliWear, which planted the seeds for a global revolution in fashion that is even more pertinent now, some three decades after his untimely death at the age of 39 from Aids. “Smith pioneered much of what is resonating in fashion today – extensive collaborations between fashion, performance, architecture, graphic design and visual art,” says curator of contemporary design Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, who organized Willi Smith: Street Couture, the designer’s first museum exhibition.

The exhibition explores Smith’s innovative approach to design, casting, and marketing in a series of photographs, video, design drawings, garments, patterns and ephemera that showcase Smith’s ability to transform clothing into a revolutionary force. Smith valued style over status and used his designs to cross-pollinate ideas about personal freedom that defied constructions of race, gender and class while embracing the multicultural ethos of the street.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

*Brand poster from Willi Smith: Street Couture © Cooper Hewitt Press Images*

Categories: Art

Robert Wilson on Robert Mapplethorpe

Posted on March 13, 2020

*Robert Mapplethorpe, Joe / Rubbermann, 1978 Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission*

In death, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) has risen to stratospheric heights, his work helping to elevate the medium of photography into the realm of fine art. Whether making portraits of black men, bodybuilders or BDSM fetishists, Mapplethorpe imbued his photographs with exquisite finesse, using classical aesthetics to convey the sculptural beauty of his subjects.

A natural-born provocateur, Mapplethorpe understood how to suffuse his work with the perfect balance of the elegant and the explicit so that the viewer might contemplate each image the same way, no matter what the subject was. He crafted every work with technical precision, directing every element from the lighting to the pose to create an aesthetic democracy, where all things were rendered equal when they appeared before his camera lens. “I look for the perfection of form,” Mapplethorpe said. “I do this in portraits, in photographs of penises, in photographs of flowers.”

On March 14, Galerie Thomas Schulte will present the completeRobert Mapplethorpe: XYZ Portfolios. Created between 1978 and 1981, each portfolio contains 13 photographs each: X features imagery from New York’s gay S&M scene; Y floral still lifes; andZ portraits of black men. The gallery will also present Robert Mapplethorpe selected by Robert Wilson, a selection of prints by avant-garde theatre director and designer Robert Wilson, who was a close friend and collaborator of Mapplethorpe.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

*Robert Mapplethorpe Jack Walls, 1982 Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission*

Categories: Art

Derrick Adams: Patrick Kelly, the Journey

Posted on March 12, 2020

One day, while shopping at London’s Harvey Nichols back in 1987, Princess Diana cast her eyes upon a sequined leopard-print Patrick Kelly ensemble. “It’s too tight, isn’t it?”People magazine reported the Princess asked her male bodyguard. He gave the nod. “I’ll take it,” Diana decided, forever the rebel.

It was a testament to how far Kelly had traveled in his extraordinary life, charting a singular destiny that forever transformed high fashion, though he died before the world had the chance to receive the fullest expression of his gifts. But in the 35 years Kelly graced this earth, he created a life and legacy that resonates 30 years after his death.

As the first American and first black person to become a member of the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter in 1988, which governs the French ready-to-wear industry, Kelly brought the pop exuberance of Elsa Schiaparelli back to the runways of Paris Fashion Week. But Kelly’s sensibilities were formed in more modest beginnings: Vicksburg, Mississippi during Jim Crow. Born in 1954, Kelly’s father died when he was 15. He and his two brothers were raised by his mother Letha, aunt Bernard, and grandmother Ethel Rainey—who Kelly told People was “the backbone of my tastes.” When he was six, she showed him a fashion magazine. He immediately noticed there were no Black women in it. “Nobody has time to design for them,” she said. Kelly knew then exactly what he was born to do.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*Patrick Kelly Button Pin, mid-1980s. On loan from the collection of Carol Martin, Atlanta.*

Categories: Art

Walter Robinson: Art-Rite

Posted on March 11, 2020

*Art-Rite Issue 21, 1978. Illustration by Julia Rifka. Image courtesy of Primary Information.*

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” A.J. Liebling famously wrote in his 1960 essay titled “The Wayward Press: Do You Belong in Journalism?” forThe New Yorker. We are given to mythologize the integrity of the Fourth Estate, mistaking the Bill of Rights for the Ten Commandments, often overlooking the basic fact that media is a business like any other. Only the rare, independent outlets escape the fetters of profit hungry power brokers by existing on a shoestring, their precarious state allowing them to stand beholden to none.

Invariably, this doesn’t happen every day. Timing is everything—and so is location. For three young college students back in the 1970s, New York proved to be the ideal place to create an art magazine perfectly in step with a changing art world. The city had been gutted and left for dead. But New Yorkers, living by Plato’s dictum, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” created brand new forms of art and culture—and nobody could stop them.

While the streets gave birth to graffiti, punk, and hip hop, the art world soon found itself in the throes of revolution. By the end of the 1960s, modern art had reached its apotheosis with the advent Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks. After destroying the conventions of Western art, Modernism had nowhere to go, leaving the playing field wide open at the dawn of the 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Art Rite

*Art-Rite Issue 7. Illustration by Vito Acconci.*

*Detail from Art-Rite subscription advertisement. Images courtesy of Primary Information.*

Categories: Art

Jamil Hellu: Together

Posted on March 10, 2020

Jamil Hellu, “I am a queer black person. As a descendant of the Southern slave trade, I’m flipping the script of patriarchy,” avows Beatrice Thomas. “Like the Black Panthers, I’m a protector of my community, claiming female power.”, 2019.

Before the onslaught of gentrification, the San Francisco Bay Area was one of the most radical cities in the nation. With the advent of the jazz scene and the Beat poets of North Beach, the hippie counterculture of Haight-Asbury, the Gay Rights Movement in the Castro District, and the punk scene of the 1970s, San Francisco was one of the rare places where the fringe was always centered.

Although the city has changed radically with the tech boom, there still remain radical enclaves. Deep in the mix is photographer Jamil Hellu, who has developed a distinct visual vocabulary examining the intersections of cultural lineages and queerness over the past decade.

His new exhibition, Together, now on view at SF Camerawork through March 14, 2020, explores issues of identity relating to race, gender, and sexuality. The exhibition features photographs and video installations that highlight Hellu’s use of self-portraiture and representations of queer visibility engaging the Bay Area’s diverse LGBTQ communities to create a symphony of contrasting queer voices that co-exist simultaneously.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Jamil Hellu, Lark Alder grew up in Southern California feeling ostracized from the surf beach culture for being a queer woman. “Surfing is about finding balance. When you are on the wave, you are on a liminal space: in between. I associate that to being queer.”, 2019.

Categories: Art

The Jill Freedman Memorial Exhibition

Posted on March 10, 2020

Jill Freedman. Sock It To Me. A woman sits next to graffiti on a shelter reading ‘Sock It To Me, Black Power’ in Resurrection City, a three thousand person tent city on the Washington Mall set up as part of the Poor People’s Campaign protest, Washington DC, May 1968.

Just before Jill Freedman died last October, she concocted a plan to have her home health aid meet her at her apartment at 10 in the morning. “I’m getting out of here,” Freedman said over the phone, before wheeling herself towards the exit of the rehabilitation facility. She was stopped by security, who sent her back to her room, then posted her photograph to warn staff an escapee was on the premises. It was a fitting metaphor for Freedman’s entire life.

Born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, Freedman remembered being a child and looking through picture magazines that published some of the earliest photographs of the Holocaust. Recalling the moment brought her to tears, her empathy for victims of injustice becoming a defining factor in her work as an artist.

Freedman arrived in New York in 1964 to work as an advertising copywriter. After Dr Martin Luther King Jr was killed in 1968, she quit her job to attend the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. Two years later she published her first book, Old News: Resurrection City, documenting life at the makeshift camps that housed some 3,000 protesters on the Mall until the police bulldozed them on June 24.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Jill Freedman. Resurrection City Residents. A police officer watches the residents of Resurrection City, a three thousand person tent city on the Washington Mall set up as part of the Poor People’s Campaign protest, Washington DC, May 1968.

Categories: Art

Hayley Austin: The Springs

Posted on March 10, 2020

At the age of eight, Hayley Austin spent the summer in her grandparents’ Las Vegas home. It was located in a subdivision whose streets took their names from Italian villages and Swiss hamlets. As a child, the city baffled and fascinated her. “It seemed like such an improbable place, out there in the desert in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “It lodged itself in my memory, unresolved.”

In 2018, Austin returned to Las Vegas to look beneath the neon façade of Sin City. The trip resulted in The Springs (Kris Graves Projects), an intimate photography book that explores the city’s jarring wealth gap. “Las Vegas was in the image of get-rich-fast-capitalism,” Austin says. “This unlikely place, a reminder of the optimism or sheer willpower of the people who converted a mirage into a dream city, was the perfect place for a close-up on the American dream’s status.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Jeff Divine: 70s Surf Photographs

Posted on March 10, 2020

Hailing from San Diego, California, Jeff Divine took up surfing in 1964 when he was 14. Two years later he bought a camera, and the rest is history. For the next 35 years, he worked as a photo editor with Surfer magazine, the bible of the sport, and Surfer’s Journal, documenting the then-nascent surf scene long before it became a global phenomenon.

With the March 10 publication of Jeff Divine: 70s Surf Photographs, we travel back in time to the golden age of surfing. In Divine’s sumptuous colour and black and white photographs, we join bands of teenage boys as they invent the culture and the sport that would soon take the world by storm. “We were so addicted to surfing. It was so deep in our psyche, like nothing else mattered,” Divine tells Another Man. Here, the photographer shares his memories of life riding the wave.

Read the Fill Story at AnOther Man

Categories: Art

Tomas Wüthrich: Doomed Paradise

Posted on March 9, 2020

Tomas Wüthrich. Long Tevenga, Malaysia, 2016. Peng and son Ulen at the foot of a strangler fig.

In 1894, British colonial official Chares Hose described the Penans, a nomadic hunter-gatherer people living in the headwaters of the rivers flowing through the ancient forests of the Kingdom of Sarawak — now known as Borneo. Hose described something the people of Europe hadn’t known for several millennia: a way of life predating the advent of agriculture.

“They are great hunters, being able to move through the jungle without making the slightest noise, and have a name for the slightest living thing, which name is known even by the small boys,” Hose wrote, his admiration betraying a propensity to underestimate the people of a culture far older than he dared dream. “They are wonderfully expert in the use of the blowpipe, shooting their poisoned arrows with such precision that is must be said they seldom miss even the smallest subject aimed at.”

Hose’s awe would have been better reserved for the ability of the Penans to collectively resist the concentrated effort of the government to destroy their way of life, most recently when loggers set forth in the 1980s to invade their territory in the name of profit.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

*Tomas Wüthrich. Long Tevenga, Malaysia, 2019. Udi with a male Argus pheasant. The beautiful feathers can be worth money.*

Categories: Art

Trump Revolution: Immigration

Posted on March 5, 2020

*Tijuana. 2019. Park on the USA-Mexico border. From the project “La Jungla” © Lua Ribeira / Magnum Photos*

When Donald Trump announced his bid for the presidency of the United States on June 15, 2016, he let the world know where he stood, using racist, xenophobic rhetoric to foment anti-immigration sentiment from his white national base. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump claimed. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Though Trump himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 23 women since the 1980s, his scare tactics worked. Since elected, he has waged a campaign against immigrants from the Global South on both sides of the border. In just three years, the policies Trump Administration have destroyed families, uprooted countless lives, and left people to suffer and perish in facilities that deny them rights granted under the Geneva Conventions.

In the barrage of daily headlines, it’s easy to lose track and forget the scale and scope of these abuses of power. The new exhibition Trump Revolution: Immigration, the first of a year-long six-part series exploring the impact of the 45th presidency, takes on the task of making sense of this relentless assault. Here, curators Cynthia Rivera and Michael Kamber bring together the work of eight photographers and filmmakers including Greg Constantine, Kholood Eid, Luis Antonio Rojas, Elliot Ross, Griselda San Martin, John Moore, Cinthya Santos-Briones, and Laura Saunders, examining the complexities of the problem while showing the true human cost.

Read the Full Story at Blind

*U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officers stage a raid to arrest an undocumented immigrant in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. © John Moore/Getty Images*

Categories: Art