Posts from the “Art” Category

Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age

Posted on July 7, 2019

Photo: Sara Cwynar. Red Rose, 2017. Pigment print mounted on Dibond 30 x 24 in. Artist’s proof ½ Collection of David Madee. © Sara Cwynar. Courtesy of Cooper Cole, Toronto and Foxy Production, New York .

Like any language, photography has given birth to a series of clichés that are reductive at best. At their worst, they become a vehicle for disinformation and stereotype, fueling pathologies by reinforcing the most dangerous aspects of confirmation bias. As Jenny Holzer noted, “Clichés endure” — and may very well exist until we root them out and expose them for the perilous, short-sighted, and sloppy thinking that they are.

Canadian artist Sara Cwynar takes aim at popular photographic clichés in her new exhibition, Gilded Age, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through November 10, 2019. Whatever medium Cwynar selects, she uses the form to explore and expose the ways in which images are constructed and recycled in an endless digital loop. Cwynar sets her sights on the preponderance of visual clichés that crowd our space, recognizing the ways in which they can be used as dog whistles to signify ulterior agendas.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot

Lee Stuart: Street Dreams – How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion

Posted on July 7, 2019

Jamel Shabazz. Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC 1981

“Rap is something you do! Hip hop is something you live!” KRS-One memorably said. Born in the Bronx in 1973, hip hop is not just music, dance, and art; it is a way of being in the world.

“I am a child of hip hop,” says Lee Stuart, Brand Director of Patta, a Dutch streetwear brand, who has curated the new exhibition Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion. Organised chronologically, the exhibition presents the visual legacy of hip hop through a series of 30 songs and illustrates them with the art, fashion, and photography that defined the era.

“We’re not trying to be historians,” Stuart says. “We are trying to immerse people in these images, show them and make them part of this energy.”

To select the songs, Stuart did what all heads love: he gathered his team and debated the merits of each track. He then chose corresponding work by artists including Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, Dana Lixenberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Kambui Olujimi, and Earlie Hudnall.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990 Courtesy PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas

Jamel Shabazz. Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC 1981.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Fashion, Music, Photography

Zak Ové: Get Up, Stand Up Now

Posted on June 27, 2019

Armet Francis, ‘Fashion Shoot Brixton Market’, 1973.

Jenn Nkiru, ‘Still from Neneh Cherry, Kong’, 2018.

“I was raised by a village,” says artist Zak Ové of his upbringing in West London. “It was a very outspoken black and West Indian community, [and I was] understanding how assertive one had to be to be seen.”

As the son of an Irish Socialist mum and acclaimed black filmmaker Horace Ové, the artist was raised with strong ideals that have guided him throughout his career: “Politics within the arts has always been very integral from my father’s generation onwards. [It helps us] attain equality, honesty, and perspective towards our own history.”

Now, Ové is honouring those who laid these foundations in Get Up, Stand Up Now, a new landmark exhibition which celebrates 50 years of Black creativity in the UK. The exhibition features historic artworks, new commissions, and never-before-seen work by 100 artists working in art, film, photography, music, literature, design and fashion. This includes the Black Audio Film Collective, Chris Ofili, David Hammons, Ebony G. Patterson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lubaina Himid, Althea McNish, Steve McQueen, and Yinka Shonibare.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Ajamu, from ‘Circus Master Series’, 1997

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Music, Painting, Photography

Collier Schorr: Stonewall at 50

Posted on June 26, 2019

Chella Man © Collier Schorr, courtesy of the Alice Austen House

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, homeless LGBTQ teens, trans women of color, lesbians, drag queens, gay men, and allies faced down the police during a raid at New York City’s Stonewall Inn – kicking off a rebellion on the streets of Greenwich Village and igniting the global Gay Liberation Movement.

Half a century after this historic uprising, American photographer Collier Schorr pays homage to 15 leading intergenerational LGBTQ activists and artists – including Eileen Myles, Zackary Drucker, and Judy Bowen – in a series of black and white portraits now on view in Stonewall at 50.

Native New Yorker Karla Jay was an early member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). “Stonewall came along in this age of rebellion against societal norms,” she says. “There were so many things happening in 1969: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Women’s Movement. I was a radical feminist and belonged to a group called Redstockings. We didn’t invent rebellion, but we ran with it because we were sex radicals.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Agosto Machado © Collier Schorr, courtesy of the Alice Austen House

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography

Rick Castro: Glory Hole

Posted on June 26, 2019

Rick Castro. Head bondage, 1992.

In a new online exhibition titled Glory Hole, the ‘King of Fetish’ Rick Castro delves deep into his 30-year archive to unearth a selection of rarely shown photographs. Featuring intimate portrayals of the male body, the Tom of Finland Store exhibition celebrates fetish and BDSM at a time when corporate censorship openly threatens expressions of queer identity. Just this year, Facebook barred Castro from his account for 30 days to prevent him from promoting his exhibition Fetish King: Seminal Photographs 1986-2019 at the Tom of Finland Foundation.

“It’s depressingly becoming really prevalent,” Castro tells Another Man from his home in Los Angeles. “Everything is becoming G-rated. The guise of community standards has nothing to do with the insidiousness of removing a specific voice (of the LGBTQ community). It’s biased and it’s very much overkill.”

But Castro has never allowed anyone to silence his voice. In the early years of his career, he struggled to find a venue to show his work. “Up until the internet, fetish never had a huge forum,” Castro says. “But now, it’s being co-opted and gentrified just like everything else.”

With Glory Hole, Castro fights back, showing why he wears the crown and reigns supreme. Here, alongside an exclusive preview of Glory Hole, he shares memories of his encounters with Kenneth Chang, whose photograph graces the cover of the 1992 cult classic The Bondage Book Vol. 1.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1990s, AnOther Man, Art, Photography

Max Blagg: An Englishman in New York

Posted on June 24, 2019

Ralph Gibson. Hand of a Poet

Max Blagg arrives, apologizing for being but a few minutes late, his British accent quite debonair. He steps into the salon, sitting on the sofa, allowing Glitterati mascot Alfrieda the basset hound to snuggle on up, as he recounts the adventures of an Englishman in New York.

“I was the youngest of twelve children. We lived in a small town in the English Midlands. We were working class. There was lots of love. It was a great family. But I was the only one with the inclination to read books.

“I started writing at 15, a gift that was triggered by my sister dying of breast cancer, a slow motion event that happened at home. It was truly awful. Writing poems about her pain seemed to give me some relief. At the same time, I was becoming interested in girls. A bizarre collision of sex and death. Looking back, I wrote a lot of pretty bad poetry back then. But I also played soccer for the school team. I had a double life.

“In my house, higher learning was not encouraged. It was that working class mentality: Don’t expect to rise above your station. At 17 I passed the A level exams and qualified for college. My mother had no intention of letting me go away, but I secretly applied and got into a college in London with a very generous government grant. The poorer your parents were, the more money you got. That would never happen today.

“I wasn’t that comfortable in London, it’s under the sign of Capricorn. But after almost getting a B.A. degree I met a lovely girl at a jumble sale who gave me lots of American poetry to read. I was so entranced by Frank O’Hara that I quit my job as a bricklayer’s laborer and bought a one-way ticket to NYC. I had one address, 118 Spring Street. I want to put a little plaque on that building. I showed up there, and Ignacio and Caroline, kind folks I hardly knew, put me up for months. We’re still close friends. Soho back then was deserted, a playground for artists. I got a job in construction on 53^rd Street, Street, across from MoMA where Frank O’Hara had worked. New York, miraculous place. Instantly felt like home.”

In the years since he first arrived, Mr. Blagg has made a life for himself in the New York literary scene. Since 1979, he has published five volumes of poetry and prose, as well as collaborated with artists including James Nares, Alex Katz, Jack Pierson, Richard Prince, Donald Sultan, Billy Sullivan, Keith Sonnier, Joe Fyfe, Jerelyn Hanrahan and Nicholas Rule, creating texts and poetry inspired by their work and used in gallery and museum exhibition catalogues, and artworks. Along the way he has performed his ‘stand-up poetry’ at venues as diverse as the Kitchen, the Guggenheim Museum, the legendary club Jackie 60, as well as St Marks Church, Bowery Poetry Club, CBGB, The Gershwin Hotel, Tin Pan Alley, the Performing Garage, and many other choice locations.

“Poetry seized me by the scruff very early on. I’ve always worked at it, albeit erratically rather than methodically. It is what I do. I haven’t published as much as I would have liked, but in the last ten years, there’s been a personal renaissance. ‘In age I bloom again/and relish versing,’ as Georgie Herbert put it. Most recently, I did a collaboration with the photographer Larry Clark. It was pure poetry. He gave me the images and said, ‘Write whatever you want.’ Then he created an exquisite limited edition portfolio just so I could make money from poetry! I’ve always gravitated more towards artists than writers. I hate the starving poet cliché. It’s too old, that story.

“Recently, I’ve been working on vintage typewriter covers, stenciling text on them. It’s an object you can hang on the wall. The catalogue, Venus at the One Stop, has the poems that the stenciled fragments are taken from. It’s a new vehicle for me, and a way of putting the Word on the wall. The only drawback is that now my loft looks like a typewriter repair store.”

One of the poems featured in the catalogue is titled “Into the West” and it appears alongside a corresponding case, titled “Remington Streamliner #2.” It hangs on a white brick wall, a Duchamp readymade with but one distinction: it reveals the hand of the poet.

Into the West

On the verandah of someplace

my nerves are rocking like a chair,

looking out beyond Ohio toward the

long blonde coast of California.

A few drops of ink, midnight blue,

scattered on the orange field,

evening sun retreating, engraving

memory on the skull’s smooth shield.

Mr. Blagg reveals, “I have been reading, among other scriveners, the medieval Chinese poet Lu Yu. There is a sparseness to the writing, an elegant simplicity that evokes very human moments. I would love to do that. Good poetry is concise, compact and compressed. In the last couple of years, I’ve written an ‘embellished memoir’ Ticket Out, and it was hard for me to stretch out the prose. The more I pushed it, the more I could see the stretch marks.”

Poetry, in its essence, is the word emboldened. It is liberated from the strictures of syntax and the taxes of grammar, and as it lives upon the printed page or breathed into the ether. And so the poem becomes something else, perhaps a potion, perhaps a spell, as it conjures another world, a world of the sensations of pure literary form.

A poem may be as chic as a gown, as precisely refined and exquisitely designed, evoking that great je ne sais quoi that is what we think when we say “chic” even if we can’t exactly define it. Mr. Blagg observes, “Chic is a way certain people carry themselves. Paris is chic by definition. My idea of chic is more like New York, needs a bit of rough, an edge here and there. There is nothing deliberate about it. It’s something innate rather than acquired; you either have it or you don’t.

“Black Sparrow Press, Charles Bukowski’s former publisher, was my idea of book chic. I would buy the authors they published, just for the look and the texture of the books. Ecco Press bought the company after Bukowski died, and they started printing facsimile editions of his original works, but the covers are reproduced on shiny paper, It was a like a fake Chanel bag. It was anti-chic. You can’t fake chic.”

Categories: Art, Poetry

The Historic “Battle of the Legends” at The Met

Posted on June 21, 2019

Malik Mugler, photography Benjamin Lozozsky

Fifth Avenue was set aflame as hundreds gathered at the footsteps of The Met to watch six icons of the ballroom scene in a vogue battle for the history books. Dubbed “Battle of the Legends: Vogueing at the Met,” this first-of-its-kind showcase was held to celebrate Pride and Costume Institute exhibit, Camp: Notes on Fashion — just hours before the season premier of season 2 of Pose.

“When we got to a ball, we will hug you but when its time to battle, it’s time to battle!” announced Jack Mizrahi, co-founder of House of Mizrahi, who emceed the evening’s festivities decked out in a custom-made mauve Dapper Dan ensemble complete with knee-high Gucci socks.

The competition was judged by no less than Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, who donned a Versace “Vogue” print top and long red flowing skirt. Wintour was joined at the judges’ table by ballroom icons José Gutierrez-Xtravaganza, Father of the House of Xtravaganza; Sinia Alaia, overall mother of House of Alaïa; and the Legendary Mother Lola Mizrahi as well as queer icons Twiggy Pucci Garçon, executive producer of Kiki; Our Lady J, executive producer and writer for Pose; and Jordan Roth, president of Jujamcyn Theaters.

The competition for the title of “Legend Slayer” was fierce. Ballroom favourites Bootz Prodigy, Omari Mizrahi, Ty Ebony, Malik Miyake Mugler (replacing the originally announced Dashaun Lanvin), Asia Balenciaga and Tamiyah Miyake-Mugler took the stage in a series of three semi-final rounds before Malik Miyake Mugler and Asia Balenciaga faced off in the finals.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Tamiyah Mugler, photography Benjamin Lozozsky

Jack Mizrahi, photography Benjamin Lozozsky

Categories: Art, Dazed, Manhattan

Roger Gastman: Beyond the Streets

Posted on June 20, 2019

Lil’ Crazy Legs during shoot for Wild Style. Riverside Park NY, 1983. Photo Martha Cooper

Graffiti first emerged on the streets of New York and Philadelphia half a century ago as marker tags by young teens with a desire to make their mark. A new art form emerged, and from it styles bloomed, transforming the age-old desire to mark our territory in the most literal way.

Graffiti hit like a bomb, leaving cities covered with the most electric kind of public art: one done for love, not money, at the risk of arrest, fines, and imprisonment. It spread from city to city like a virus through movies like Wild Style and Style Wars, books like Subway Art, and art exhibitions dating back to 1973. It inspired generations of artists from all around the globe to create, innovate, and leave their mark on society in a manner that was nothing short of in your face.

Although New York has largely been scrubbed clean of the art form it unleashed upon the world, “it is still considered the number one graffiti tourism destination,” says Roger Gastman, curator of Beyond the Streets. The exhibition features hundreds of large scale works by over 150 contemporary artists, including Charlie Ahearn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, the Guerilla Girls, Eric HAZE, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, and Dash Snow.

Read he Full Story at Huck Online

Style Wars car by NOC 167 with door open, man reading newspaper. 96th Street Station, New York, NY, 1981. Photo Martha Cooper

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Huck, Photography

Sex, Frocks and Rock & Roll

Posted on June 18, 2019

“Sometimes reality is the strangest fantasy of all,” a deep voice slowly says before the pitch-black screen explodes with a heavy guitar riff and a montage of scenes beautiful and bizarre in the original trailer for the 1966 film Blow-Up — the ultimate art house tale of sex, frocks, and rock & roll.

We enter into a day in the life of Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer modeled on 1960s bad boys David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Produced by Carlo Ponti for MGM, Michelangelo Antonini’s first English language film deftly combines aestheticism and existentialism to flawless effect, giving us everything and nothing — much like the troop of mimes that bookend the film.

We first encounter Thomas dipping out of a doss house at the break of dawn and hopping into his Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III Drop Head Coupé, offering the first of many stark contrasts between the artist and his subject. Though set in Swinging London, the city is eerily empty, quiet, and perfectly manicured — an unnerving sense of alienation at every turn.

Read the Full Story at Jacques Marie Mage

Categories: 1960s, Art, Fashion, Jacques Marie Mage, Music, Photography

Roy DeCarava & Langston Hughes: The Sweet Flypaper of Life

Posted on June 18, 2019

“We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” Langston Hughes said of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his landmark art book collaboration with Roy DeCarava recently republished by David Zwirner Books.

In 1952, DeCarava became the first African-American photographer to win a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He used the one-year grant of $3,200 to make the photographs that would appear in the book, a tribute to Harlem glowing in the final years of its legendary Renaissance.

DeCarava gave Hughes a selection of prints from which the poet wrote the story of Mecca through the eyes of Sister Mary Bradley, a fictional grandmother who knows everybody’s business and will put you on if you listen.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Manhattan, Photography

Motherward, 1985: Photographs by Elbert Howze

Posted on June 14, 2019

A few months after Elbert D. Howze died in 2015, his widow Barbara Howze paid a visit to the Houston Centre for Photography. The photographer had requested that his archive was donated to the centre, and she wanted to honour his final wishes.

Director and curator Ashlyn Davis remembers Mrs. Howze’s distress after learning that the Centre was not a collecting institution. “She said, ‘But I have a whole trunk full!’ So we went and got six portfolio boxes with hundreds of photos,” Davis recalls.

That summer, Davis went through the boxes and discovered a spiral-bound maquette for a photo book Howze had titled Fourth Ward. The book featured a collection of portraits made 1985 of the residents of Freedmen’s Town, a historically black community founded in 1866 by people finally liberated from the shackles of chattel slavery.

Rather than move north, residents built at least 558 settlements that formed the heart and soul of black Houston. Originally built on swamps no one wanted, Freedmen’s Town occupied prime real estate in the centre of the city – and in due time began attracting developers and gentrifiers who wanted a stronghold downtown as the city began to rapidly expand during the 20th century.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Photography