Posts from the “Art” Category

Sheila Pree Bright: #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests

Posted on December 26, 2018

Sheila Pree Bright. 2015, Justice League NYC’s “March 2 Justice” from New York to Washington, DC, in protest of police brutality.

On November 27, Ferguson activist Bassem Masri was found unconscious on a bus in suburban St. Louis. Just 31 at the time of his death, Masri is the latest untimely death of local activists who have passed in sudden and mysterious ways.

Many will remember the murder of Deandre Joshua, just 20 years old, when his body was found with a gunshot to the head inside his car, which had been set on fire during the height of the protests against the extrajudicial assassination of Mike Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson.

Then in 2016, the body of Darren Seals, 26, was found — the same manner of killing exacted upon one of the most prominent activists in the movement. But the deaths did not end there. In 2017, Edward Crawford, 27, was found shot to death in the backseat of his car, and just as recently as October 17, Ferguson activist Melissa McKinnies discovered her son, Danye Jones, 24, lynched in her backyard.

On December 3, HBO premiered Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, a documentary film that asks, “What really happened to Black Lives Matter activist Sandra Bland?” In her death, Bland became a symbol of all that the government has done — and the ways in which the true story is hidden from view.

During the height of the protest movement, there were often photographs of men, women, and children holding signs asking, “Am I Next?” It is difficult to ignore this question paging through the book, #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests (Chronicle) by Sheila Pree Bright, a selection of which are currently on view in Radical Lens at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum through May 31, 2019.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Sheila Pree Bright. 2015, Students of Historically Black Colleges and Universities stand in solidarity with
students of University of Missouri, demanding the resignation of President Tim Wolfe.

Categories: Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

A Guide to Judy Chicago’s Most Boundary Shifting Works

Posted on December 18, 2018

“Heaven is for White Men Only” (1973). Courtesy of Judy Chicago.

Judy Chicago has spent the better part of her career using confrontation and provocation to blow the roof off this place. Born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939, the artist announced her new name with a sign posted inside her 1970 exhibition at California State College, Fullerton, that stated: “Judy Gerowitz (her first husband’s name) hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago.”

The new surname signalled a change had come, one fuelled by the fires of liberation and self-determination. For the past 50 years, Chicago has been on the front lines for over half a century, calling out sexism, misogyny, and the abuses of the patriarchy – while honouring women who have forged a path through history against the odds.

Now, at the age of 79, Chicago is enjoying a renaissance, beginning with Roots of The Dinner Party: History in the Making at the Brooklyn Museum – a return to her most infamous work, a lightning rod for controversy sure as the day is long. Most recently, Chicago opened two shows in Miami in conjunction with Art Week, including a new exploration of Atmospheres and A Reckoning, a major survey spanning four decades. Here we look back at some Chicago’s most controversial works.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Pink Atmosphere, 1971, Cal State Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, 2018. Judy Chicago’s Atmosphere

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Exhibitions, Painting, Women

Tschabalala Self: Free Range Miami x Bodega Run

Posted on December 13, 2018

Free Range Miami, Photography Tschabalala Self

Free Range Miami, Photography Tschabalala Self

Last Friday night, as part of the 777 International Mall at Free Range Miami during the city’s annual Art Week, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist RAFiA Santana took to the stage. She wore a black bustier and thigh high boots, her bright, tight cropped curls accented by touches of fuschia coloured fluff at her wrists and around her waist, as she performed a six-song set in front of vibrant projections of pink and purple audio-reactive geometric patterns that she designed for a show.

“It was a crazy Miami night, and there was so much going on that there was a crazy ebb and flow, and every thirty minutes there would be almost a different crowd of people,” RAFiA says. “There was a separate private birthday party going on upstairs with older white people who kept poking their head down, and I was like, ‘Bring your friends, bring them down!”

The sounds of Fela Kuti, James Brown, and Soul || Soul filled the air, as DJs including Fulathela, Young Wavy Fox, Loka, and Michael Mosby kept the vibes going for a steady ebb and flow of guests making their way through the converted mall that is now home to Mana Contemporary Miami, a community-based arts center hosting numerous events throughout Art Week.

“The week has been so exhausting,” laughs African-American artist Tschabalala Self, who is in town to present Lee’s Oriental Deli & Market, the latest work from her ongoing Bodega Run series: a site-specific installation for Fringe Projects Miami located inside a store owned by a Filipino local.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Tschabalala Self’s Bodega Run

Tschabalala Self’s Bodega Run

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Music

Nick Zinner: 131 Different Things

Posted on December 13, 2018

Brussels 2008 © Nick Zinner

Back in 2001, Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner began making illustrated books with writer Zachary Lipez and art director Stacy Wakefield. Their fifth collaboration, 131 Different Things (Akashic Books), takes us back to New York at the turn of the millennium, to those final moments of a former age of a decadent bohemia that is not that long ago, but so very far away.

131 Different Things tells the story of Sam, a bartender in New York, who gets word that his ex-girlfriend Vicki has quit AA and has gone on a bender. Desperate to save his one true love, Sam teams up with his buddy Francis in search of Vicki in various downtown bars, encountering an eclectic mix of characters that flourish at night – all of whom seem to conspire to wreak havoc, thwarting Sam’s efforts at every turn.

“It’s a love story on many levels – between the friends, the two protagonists in the story, and the main character and the woman he is trying to find,” Zinner says. “It’s also a proper love affair with all the characters and the city as the backdrop is a central character to it all.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Brooklyn 1998 © Nick Zinner

New York 2009 © Nick Zinner

Categories: Art

Lilli Waters: Others Dream

Posted on December 12, 2018

From Where We Came

Utero © Lilli Waters

“At dusk and dawn, the edge of slumber and first light, these figures awaken out of the darkness and live in the hours when others dream,” LilIi Waters writes in the artist statement for her disquieting series, Others Dream, which features women amid an otherworldly landscape that is equal parts foreboding and curious.

Photographed across Western Australia, the images from Others Dream offer a mystical, mythical portrait of the primordial essence of life that begins in utero before being launched upon the earth. They offer themselves as wordless poems, silent revealing secrets to us, offering a moment of meditation where we can escape the artifice that civilization demands and return to something infinitely simpler albeit impossible to fully comprehend.

Here Waters shares her journey, revealing the path that brought her to the creation of this body of work, offering insight on the effortless synergy of life and art.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

The Road Before. © Lilli Waters

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Jamie Reid: XXXXX – Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit.

Posted on December 12, 2018

Anarchy In The UK, 1976 © Jamie Reid.

For half a century, Jamie Reid has done it his way, on his own terms, refusing to kowtow to the establishment and its pompous self-regard. Under his careful eye, art becomes a vehicle for anarchy, subversion, and resistance against the powers that be.

Now, for the first time in his career, Reid is the subject of a major retrospective: XXXXX: Fifty Years of Subversion and the Spirit. The show brings together collage, drawings, paintings, prints, posters, photographs, film, and installation work made over half a century. So why now? “I haven’t been asked before,” Reid says, before casually adding that he did not begin selling his work until a decade ago.

Most famous for sticking a safety pin through the Queen’s nose, desecrating the Union Jack, and crafting the ransom note letter styling of the Sex Pistols’ graphics, Reid has been a pivotal figure in the establishment of punk. His work helped shape the movement into not only a form of music, fashion and art, but into a philosophy predicated on the notion that capitalism is the biggest scam going today.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Be Aware, Fight Back, 1994. Courtesy John Marchant Gallery. © Jamie Reid

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

Chris Stein: Point of View – Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene

Posted on December 11, 2018

Legs McNeil, Anya Philips, and Debbie on the Staten Island ferry. More Punk magazine outtakes, 1976. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

Brooklyn’s own Chris Stein took up photography in 1968, at the age of 18, and began to amass a body of work documenting New York life as the punk scene came into existence. In 1973, he met and began working with Debbie Harry, and together they founded Blondie. From this rarified position, Stein had the best view in the house, the consummate insider in the quintessential outsider scene.

His new book, Point of View: Me, New York City, and the Punk Scene (Rizzoli New York), is a visual diary of daily life during the 1970s, the rawest decade of them all. Stein takes us all the way back to his days as a student at SVA, and gives us a guided tour of a young artist coming of age in a city that was equal parts decadent and derelict, and home to characters like none before or since, be it William Burroughs, David Bowie, Divine, Andy Warhol, or the Ramones.

Much like the people who have departed the earth, Point of View is filled with iconic landmarks of the city that have since disappeared like the Fillmore East, the Women’s House of Detention, Times Square strip clubs, graffiti-covered trains, abandoned cars on the street, and the World Trade Center. They say you can’t go home again, so what’s a True Yorker to do?

Put it down in photographs and stories, so we can always remember the way we were, word to Babs. We have assembled here some of Stein’s choice photographs and stories from the book for a trip back to a time not so long ago that is so very far away.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Snuky Tate, Fab 5 Freddy, and kid punk band the Brattles, 1981. The Brattles opened for the Clash at their New York City show at Bonds on Times Square. © Chris Stein, courtesy of Rizzoli New York.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time

Posted on December 7, 2018

Eugene Richards, Grandmother, Brooklyn, New York, 1993. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

More than half a century ago: the New Journalism came of age — a style of reportage so wholly unlike what came before that made it clear the seeming “objectivity” espoused by the Western eye was blind to its own innate biases. Rather than continue to presuppose one could be disinterested in covering subjects like Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, many journalists took a stand, opting to explore the complex truths of human life during the final half of the twentieth century — including their own.

Like W. Eugene Smith before him, photographer Eugene Richards (b. 1944) used the photo essay as a means to engage with his subjects through the profound transformation that comes when human beings not only connect, but are seen, heard, understood, and able to share their lives in a holistic way.

Throughout the course of his career, Richards has focused on the essential experiences of life that are daily fodder for headlines including birth, death, poverty, prejudice, war, and terrorism. But through Richards’s lens, we come to understand just how little we know — and how deeply reliant we are upon those who do the reporting in our stead.

In Eugene Richards: The Run-On of Time, now on view at the International Center of Photography through January 6, 2019, we are given a stunning trip through Richards’s life in photography. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue distributed by Yale University Press serve to remind us that we are responsible for evaluating not only the content but also the quality and caliber of the source itself. It is not enough to be talented and to have mastered technique; one must stand for something, and in doing so, use their skills in the service of the greater good.

Here, Richards shares his extraordinary journey, that includes a healthy dose of skepticism about the photograph itself.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Eugene Richards, Snow globe of the city as it once was, New York, New York, 2001. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

Eugene Richards, Wonder Bread, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1975.
Gelatin silver print. Collection of Eugene Richards. © Eugene Richards

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Photography

7 Black Artists You Should Know

Posted on December 7, 2018

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 02: DJ Juliana performs onstage at the Gucci Bloom Fragrance Launch at MoMA PS.1 on May 2, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Gucci)

Throughout history, great works of art have been ascribed to the hand of “Anonymous,” their names erased and authorship denied. Virginia Woolf famously said, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Fortunately, we are now at a time to write and publish our histories, firmly inscribed. With Art Basel in Miami Beach heating up this weekend, here are seven black artists on our radar out here changing the game.

Read the Full Story at Broadly

Nina Chanel Abney. Photo by J. Caldwell

Categories: Art, Broadly, Music, Painting, Photography, Women

Art Kane: Harlem 1958

Posted on November 27, 2018

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

American photographer Art Kane was introduced to the idea of the “Big Picture” while serving as a member of the Ghost Army – a 1,100-man unit tasked with creating 20 battlefield deceptions, complete with dummy tanks and fake radio transmission to mislead the German Army during the 1944 invasion of Normandy. “The experience of creating something larger than life really stuck with him,” Jonathan Kane, his son, tells me.

By 1958, Kane was restless. At 27, he was the hot young art director for Seventeen magazine but he yearned to be a photographer. He got word Esquire was planning a special issue dedicated to jazz and decided to pitch his very first photography story: “A Great Day in Harlem,” which they accepted and published as the issue’s centerfold.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of this legendary group portrait, one of the most celebrated images in American history, Jonathan Kane has put together the phenomenal book, Art Kane: Harlem 1958 (out this month via Wall of Sound Editions), featuring texts by Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, and Art Kane, as well as dozens of never-before-seen photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Count Basie, and Gene Krupa, among others.

“It’s exciting to see the outtakes, and also rare,” Kane reveals. “My father did not believe in outtakes. He was about his one vision. I’m normally very protective but become bigger than even his original intention. The book is a journey through that day, and a revelation of the intimacy and connections between the musicians, and what is in the mind of a young photographer doing his first major professional assignment, and how it all crystallised in the ‘Big Picture.’”

Here, in an excerpt from the book, Art Kane looks back on this moment in time, as history was being made on the streets of Harlem.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Photography Art Kane; Taken from Art Kane: Harlem 1958, Wall of Sound Editions

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Janette Beckman & Cey Adams: The Mash-Up

Posted on November 27, 2018

Top: Janette Beckman | LADY PINK. Queen Latifah, New York City, 1990/2016

In the years leading up to the birth of hip hop, graffiti was sweeping the streets of New York and Philadelphia, reinventing itself on the cusp of a new millennium. No longer was it mere inscriptions from anonymous hands, but an emerging world filled with charismatic characters who took style to a level never before seen.

As tags hit the street and masterpieces appeared on the trains, graffiti’s vibrant style, innovative aesthetics, and transgressive nature made it the natural visual expression of a new DIY culture coming into its own. In the 45 years since Kool Herc began spinning breaks, graffiti and hip hop have linked up to collaborate in countless ways; perhaps most famously in the culture first feature film, Wild Style. The film starred some of the scene’s most influential writers at the time, including Lee Quinoñes, LADY PINK, ZEPHYR, and CRASH – each of whom were recently invited by artist and graphic designer Cey Adams to bring their talents to The Mash Up: Hip-Hop Photos Remixed by Iconic Graffiti Artists (Hat and Beard Press).

The Mash-Up is the brainchild of Adams, the former Creative Director of Def Jam, and British photographer J anette Beckman, whose portraits of hip hop’s greatest stars have graced countless album covers, magazines, and newspapers since she first encountered the artists in 1982. Here, some of the finest to ever wield spray can and marker remake Beckman’s classic images of everyone from Run DMC, Slick Rick, and Salt-N-Pepa to Grandmaster Flash, Queen Latifah, and Big Daddy Kane.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Janette Beckman | Claw Money. Salt-N-Pepa, New York City, 1987/2014

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Graffiti, Huck, Music, Photography