Posts from the “Art” Category

Ida Wyman: Life with a Camera

Posted on March 4, 2020

*ida Wyman. The Transette, San Antonio, 1948.*

When she was in her 80s, Ida Wyman (1926-2019) shopped a proposal for her memoir, Girl Photographer: From the Bronx to Hollywood and Back. It was the story of her career as one of the few women photojournalists working for picture magazines like Life and Look. Unfortunately, at the time, the publishing industry failed to recognise Wyman’s extraordinary gift, pluck and verve.

Though Wyman flew under the radar her entire life, it never got her down. She was driven to chart her own path from an early age, becoming the first “girl mailroom boy” at Acme Newspictures in the 1940s. After three years she realised she wanted to make features rather than report news, and in 1945 she sold her first photograph to Look. That same year she lost her job at Acme – they let her go to hire men returning home from the war.

Still, Wyman persevered. She joined the New York Photo League, recognising a shared commitment to documentary photography. The Photo League’s progressive politics made them a target for McCarthyists; they were blacklisted in 1947 and forced to disband in 1951. But Wyman pressed on and made her way out to Hollywood to photograph movie sets on assignment for Life.

Read the Fill Story at Huck

*Ida Wyman. Poster for Crest Theatre Air Conditioning, the Bronx, NY, 1946.*

Categories: Art

When Marina Abramović and Ulay Moved the Art World to Tears

Posted on March 3, 2020

*Still: Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010. Via YouTube.*

In April 1988, Marina Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, who died yesterday) staged The Lovers, one of the most epic works in the history of performance art. Stationed at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, the famed artistic couple set forth to walk some 5,995 kilometres of the Wall and meet at Erlang Shen, Shenmu, a Buddhist temple in the Shaanxi province, where they were to be married. But things did not work out as they had planned.

They chose the Wall because it was the only manmade creation visible from space, and they recognised something of this scale and scope which made it the perfect setting for a work of art. It took them eight years to secure permission, during which time their relationship had deteriorated.

Their grand romantic gesture revealed just how arduous the relationship had become, as Abramović found herself climbing through piles of rubble where the Wall had fallen into disrepair. She was accompanied by a translator who was forced to walk beside her as punishment from the government for making an underground photography book about American breakdancers. For the first two months, they barely spoke – while entire villages came out to see a woman walking the wall alone.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Categories: Art

The Secret Male Nudes of 1930s and 40s Photographer George Platt Lynes

Posted on March 3, 2020

*George Platt Lynes, Portrait of Bill Miller, c. 1953 © Estate of George Platt Lynes, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

While making his name as one of America’s foremost fashion photographers of the 1930s and 40s, George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) spent years working in secret on a series of male nudes that were revealed in the years after his death. The photographs only survived by the fortunes of fate; Lynes, who famously led an extravagant life, became pressed for money and sold more than 600 prints and several hundred original negatives to Dr Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. The rest where destroyed by Lynes himself, just prior to his death.

Although Lynes rarely photographed explicit acts, he took care to create images that, as he told Kinsey in a letter, rendered the word “erotic” inadequate. Kinsey, for his part, did not look at the work as art but as artefact: evidence of sexual behaviour and fantasy in postwar America. Lynes, on the other hand, recognised the work as the most important in his highly successful commercial and fine art career, a career that started by pure serendipity.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

*George Platt Lynes, Nude Torso (Robert L. Shafer), c. 1954 © Estate of George Platt Lynes, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City*

Categories: Art

Vaginal Davis: The White to be Angry

Posted on February 28, 2020

“Whimsy, whimsy, and more whimsy—that’s always been my aesthetic choice,”Vaginal Davis says, her voice soaring with joy at the very thought of it. After a whirlwind trip to launch the installation of her seminal 1999 work, The White to Be Angry, at the Art Institute of Chicago and a series of standing-room only events, Davis has finally returned to her home in Berlin, where she has lived since 2005.

“I don’t like to be dogmatic, didactic, or preachy because people don’t really listen. I’m an around the way girl, that’s what I am,” Davis says, tapping into her South Central, Los Angeles roots. A true American original, Davis’s origin story is the stuff of legend. Her mother, a Black Creole “femme lesbian separatist” then 45 years old, met her father, a Mexican-American Jew in his 20s, just once. Davis was conceived during a Ray Charles concert at the Hollywood Palladium in the early 1960s. Born intersex, Davis’s mother rejected the doctors’ orders that she choose a single sex for her child, allowing her the freedom to be both.

Coming of age in the heady days of 1970s West Coast punk, Davis took her name in homage to activist Angela Davis, schooling the clueless like a true revolutionary on every front. The originator of the homo-core punk movementand a gender-queer art music icon, Davis rose to underground stardom while taking on a diverse array of personas while performing with art bands including Black F*g, Cholita! The Female Menudo, the Afro Sisters, and Pedro Muriel and Ester (PME).

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*The White to be Angry, 1999. Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago, ©Vaginal Davis*

Categories: Art

Rainbow Shoe Repair: An Unexpected Theater of Flyness

Posted on February 26, 2020

Back in the 1980s, New York’s Lower East Side was the premiere shopping destination for the fashionable who loved a good bargain. Customers could pick up the latest leather or fur, knowing that haggling over prices with vendors was simply de rigeur.

Long before 9/11 put an end to the local garment manufacturing business, many residents were employed at local factories, which handled 70 per cent of all women’s garments made in the city. The neighbourhood, home to the city’s immigrant communities for more than a century, was densely packed with a distinctive mix of Eastern European, Black, Puerto Rican, and Chinese residents.

The area offered a snapshot of multiculturalism at its height, revealing how diverse populations could peacefully co-exist in the everyday world. At the same time, the neighbourhood suffered at the hands of bureaucrats, who instituted policies like housing inequity and “benign neglect” to create generational cycles of poverty. Despite, or perhaps because of the challenges, the neighbourhood had long been a hotspot for radicalism with reformers, organisers and activists leading the way.

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Carolee Schneemann: Cruel Optimism

Posted on February 23, 2020

Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body #2 from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, 1963, Photo credit: Erró. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann and P·P·O·W, New York © Carolee Schneemann

Just before pioneer radical feminist artist Carolee Schneemann died in 2019 at the age of 79, the establishment finally honoured her work, awarding her the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and staging her first comprehensive retrospective at MoMA PS1. The trailblazing artist, best known for works including Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll(1975), frequently used her body to challenge the patriarchy and reclaim the power of women’s sexual agency before, during, and after the Women’s Liberation Movement.

For her efforts, Schneemann was expelled from Bard College, physically attacked during one performance, and rejected by feminists as pandering to the male gaze. Yet Schneemann was a giant upon whose shoulders so many women artists and pop culture icons stand, and her legacy is being honoured with a selection of iconic works in the “Cruel Optimism” section of the Felix LA Art Fair.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body #1 from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, 1963, Photo credit: Erró. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann and P·P·O·W, New York © Carolee Schneemann

Categories: Art

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

Posted on February 23, 2020

They say gender exists on a binary, but they are misinformed. Masculinity and femininity are not ends of a pole, but two parts of an ever-expanding circle, constantly seeking new expression in the world. We’ve been indoctrinated to see binaries where they do not exist, buying into simplistic “either/or” constructs that create false hierarchies and real inequality.

“We live in a moment where, on one hand, we’ve never lived in a more tolerant and inclusive society and on the other hand it feels incredibly homophobic, transphobic, and women’s rights are being eroded,” says Alona Pardo, curator of the new exhibition, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography. Although Pardo first conceived of the show years ago, the #MeToo movement galvanized her thinking about hegemonic masculinity in the West where, in recent years, we have been experiencing a relentless resurgence of regressive leadership.

“This is a pivotal moment,” Pardo says. “We talk about toxic masculinity, fragile masculinity, and the crisis of masculinity—and there certainly is. This hegemonic masculinity that defines the dominant, white-fisted male in Europe and North America has very outdated codes to which they subscribe: physically aggressive, combative, physical size and strength, stoic, and resilient. These tenets of masculinity are designated as static and immutable, but when you begin to unravel this thing, its foundations are precarious.”

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*Peter Hujar, David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II), 1982.*

Categories: Art

Bruce Gilden: Lost and Found

Posted on February 19, 2020

Between 1978 and 1984, photographer Bruce Gilden took to the streets of New York, shooting some 2,200 rolls of film. “Around that time I was a cocaine addict, but I think it started more heavily after ’81, ’82,’ he says. “I lived through that, but the city was rough, tough, raw, violent, filthy. But it had lots of soul. It was my kind of town. It was dangerous. I wrote that I devoured the city; I went everywhere.”

Soon thereafter, Gilden started using a flash, shooting primarily on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, where fascinating characters turned out en masse. He filed the older works away inside his Mercer Street loft, only to rediscover most of them in 2015. “I uncovered an amazing body of work but the problem was that somehow I couldn’t find 250 rolls of film,” Gilden says. “This was very upsetting to me. But the bright side is that I found this body of work that would have been lost forever if I died.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art

coletivA ocupação: When It Breaks It Burns

Posted on February 17, 2020

When the São Paulo government proposed closing over 100 public schools in October 2015, high school students rose up in rebellion against the state. After tagging a series of hostile street protests they took it to the next level. Over the next three months, they organised occupations of the schools themselves – climbing over school walls, breaking the locks, barricading the doors, and declaring: “the school is ours.”

“The reorganization project was so absurd that it felt like everyone was against it; the community, intellectuals, students and teachers,” says Brazilian photographer Alicia Esteves.

Soon a booklet – translated into Portuguese from a Chilean leaflet made by students who occupied their schools in 2006 – began to circulate through the hands of students in São Paulo. “Suddenly the first school was occupied, and then another one,” Esteves remembers. “10 schools were occupied, and then more than 100 schools. At the end over 250 schools were occupied. I had just got my first digital camera around this time and thought I could help the occupation by photographing it.”

Read the Full Story at Huck

Categories: Art

Contact High: A Visual History of Hip Hop

Posted on February 15, 2020

*Martha Cooper, Frosty Freeze and the Rock Steady Crew, New York, 1981, courtesy of the artist.*

More than 45 years after hip hop got its start in the Bronx, a new wave of women are dominating the charts and challenging the hypermasculine culture by embracing their agency. Artists like Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, City Girls, Rico Nasty, and Doja Cat are changing the game with their fearless style, bold personas, and lyrical flow—transforming their fierce, feminine energies into cold hard sales.

Though there have always been women in hip hop, it was, and largely remains, a boys club. But the success of female artists represents a significant shift in the culture, revealing there are fewer limitations for women than ever before. “Nowadays, women are more empowered. They can move through the world and operate however they want,” says Vikki Tobak, curator of Contact High: A Visual History of Hip Hop, a new exhibition and book that features iconic works by women photographers includingJanette Beckman, Angela Boatwright,Martha Cooper, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Sue Kwon, and Sheila Pree Bright, among others.

Contact High showcases the contributions of women on all fronts, whether in front or behind the camera, styling the shoots or designing the clothes. “I saw myself as the Lone Ranger in my lane,” says trailblazing entrepreneur April Walker, the mastermind behind the iconic ’90s apparel line Walker Wear, worn by celebrities including The Notorious B.I.G., Aaliyah, Tupac Shakur, Run-DMC, and Snoop Dogg. “I remember deciding that I was not going to let the world know that there was a woman behind a men’s brand. It was really unheard of at that time. Instead, I let the product speak for itself and get out there before I started doing interviews. Looking at the trajectory of hip hop, women have had to fight tooth and nail in every space that we existed.”

Today we stand on the shoulders of giants and pioneers, women whose love of the culture inspired them to create, innovate, and contribute. Here, Tobak, Walker, and Boatwright share their memories of being a woman in hip hop during its formative years.

Read the Full Story at Document Journal

*Angela Boatwright, Nicki Minaj, Queens, 2008, courtesy of the artist.*

Categories: Art

How Women Are Shaping the Future of Food Photography

Posted on February 14, 2020

Perhaps our love for pictures of food stems from the age-old desire to have our cake and eat it too. The image becomes a memento rapt with the possibility of good things to come while stoking our memory for the sensual experience of taste, smell, and touch. The sight of food evokes a longing, not unlike that of seeing our beloved looking their best.

With the stratospheric rise of Instagram, food photography has become one of the most popular genres and the industry has taken note. A new generation of women photographers are working to create dynamic new styles that resonate with today’s consumers.

Digital technology has signaled a profound shift in the way we think and communicate who we are and the ways we engage with the world. While some naysayers see the social-media-led democratization of the medium as a loss, many understand that expanding and enhancing visual literacy will only serve to further its potential. Instagram proves the demand for food photography is truly insatiable, restoring this once marginal genre to the forefront of the conversation. But it doesn’t end there.

Read the Full Story at The Luupe

Categories: Art