Posts from the “Art” Category

Susan Meiselas: Mediations

Posted on May 21, 2018

Self-Portrait, from the series 44 Irving Street, 1971. © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos

For more than 40 years, American photographer Susan Meiselas has grounded her work in the idea of place. Whether working on the front lines of civil war in Nicaragua or backstage with carnival strippers in New England, Meiselas is fully present in the moment, seeing not just the surface of things but that which lies beneath – the spirit within the flesh and bone that continues to live in her photographs long after they are made.

Mediations, her newest book (Damiani/Jeu de Paume/Fundació Tàpies) traces her singular journey across time and space, exploring the ways in which the photograph works as object, art, and evidence. The book, which accompanies a touring exhibition that will open at SFMoMA on July 21, is not so much a catalogue as it is a meditation on the threads that weave the complex tapestry of Meiselas’ career.

In it, a variety of writers offer their take on the issues that inform the questions at the heart of her work; such the language of the body, the meaning of place, the position of the photographer, and the legacy of documentary work. They also begin to consider the ways in which the photograph works as a book or a print, a scan or a memory.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

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

BOOM FOR REAL: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Posted on May 18, 2018

(L.) Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1979. Featured in the Zeitgeist art exhibition. (R.) Jean-Michel Basquiat in BOOM FOR REAL: THE LATE TEENAGE YEARS OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo Credit: © Alexis Adler. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In the 1970s, the streets of New York were crumbling under the weight of the systemic denial of basic government services under a policy of “benign neglect.” As white flight took effect, landlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings, knowing they could collect more for insurance than from rent checks, while Nixon’s White House criminalized and disrupted the city under the guise of the “War on Drugs.” Then, when all hope seemed lost, President Ford dropped the death knell, refusing to bail the city out of financial crisis.

Yet within the waves of destruction, a new world began to take shape, one created by the youth who understood that necessity is the mother of invention. With nothing left to lose, they began to create grassroots cultures that would take the world by storm in the form of hip-hop, graffiti, punk, and No Wave. During the late 70s and early 80s, these scenes came together, mixing and remixing into original new forms, spawning a new breed of artist best exemplified by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Although he died in 1987 at the age of 27, his legacy looms large, inspiring new generations who recognize that the issues he addressed 30 years ago—like police brutality, erasure of African-American history, and the commodification of art—remain unresolved. Driven by a desire to unearth the roots of Basquiat’s creativity, filmmaker Sara Driver created the documentary BOOM FOR REAL: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which explores the artist’s life and legacy through those who knew him best.

Driver also teamed up with culture critic Carlo McCormick and Mary-Ann Monforton, the associate publisher of BOMB magazine, to curate Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat, a group art exhibition featuring Basquiat’s friends and contemporaries, including Nan Goldin, Kenny Scharf, Al Diaz, and Lee Quiñones at Howl! Happening gallery in New York.

Driver spoke with VICE about Basquiat’s New York, a playground for visionaries from all walks of life that continues to speak truth to power today.

Read the Full Story at VICE

L: Jean-Michel Basquiat R: Jean and friends. Photo Credit: © Alexis Adler. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Manhattan, Vice

LES YES!: Meryl Meisler 1970s & 80s Lower East Side Photos

Posted on May 17, 2018

Mom at Sammy’s Roumanian NY, NY July 1978. © Meryl Meisler / courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

100 years ago, New York’s Lower East Side (LES) was the pre-eminent melting pot – a mixture of old and new immigrants leaving Europe en masse, creating a singular blend of Ashkenazi Jews, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Poles, and Romanians. With some 400,000 Jews living in the hood, the Ashkenazi made up one of the largest groups in the LES, bringing their unique spin on old-world culture to the city that never sleeps.

A neighbourhood with a leaning towards radical politics, the LES helped foster a new culture rooted in housing reform following the publication of Jacob A. Riis’ 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, which documented the horrors of people forced to live in slums. The New Law Tenements passed in 1901 resulted in the construction of settlement houses – such as the Henry Street Settlement on Grand Street – which transformed living conditions for the working class, and has continued to serve the community for generations.

In 1976, a young Jewish-American photographer named Meryl Meisler began frequenting art events at the Henry Street Settlement, where her cousin and roommate taught art. Here, she met Mr Morris Katz, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Grand Street. A retired widower who once worked at Coney Island guessing weights, Mr Katz cut a striking figure that could best be described as Yiddish chic. Donning a sports jacket over a zebra-patterned shirt, patterned bow tie and plaid pants, Mr Katz warmly greeted Meisler at the street corner and offered her a lollipop. She was instantly charmed.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Women with gift boxes NY, NY April 1978. © Meryl Meisler / courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Janette Beckman: The Cool Clique

Posted on May 16, 2018

Salt N’ Pepa, New York. Copyright Janette Beckman

For over 40 years, British photographer Janette Beckman has been a fixture on the underground scene, creating a body of work that is stored deep in the memory banks of music fans everywhere. You may have seen her shots on the covers of seminal albums like the Police’s Outlandos D’Amour and EPMD’s Unfinished Business, or on singles like New Edition’s “Candy Girl,” the B-52s’ “Love Shack,” Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” and Run-DMC’s “Mary, Mary.” One thing is for sure: Janette Beckman is everywhere.

Whether shooting music, fashion, portraiture, or documentary work, Beckman’s commitment to celebrating cutting-edge culture has made her one of the most important photographers of our time. But Beckman never rests on the success of her past achievements. Now 57 and living in New York, you can find her most recent work in the pages of Interview magazine, capturing up and coming female rappers. Or in the new Levi’s campaign—creating block party vibes for the new millennium. Whatever the case, Beckman is always in the mix, celebrating the spirit of rebellion, freedom, and self-determination that exemplifies the DIY culture that she has long helped shape.

Read the Full Story at Bust Magazine

The Islington Twins, London, 1979. Copyright Janette Beckman

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Bust, Music, Photography

Marc H. Miller: Punk Art, the Exhibition

Posted on May 15, 2018

Ruth Marten installing at the Punk Art Show

Portrait of Victor Bockris by Marcia Resnick, from her series ‘Bad Boys’

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Punk Art, the first exhibition to showcase the visual artists of a revolutionary new scene. Co-curated by Marc H. Miller and Bettie Ringma, the seminal 1978 show featured a stellar line up of talents from the burgeoning New York scene.

From Blondie’s Chris Stein, Suicide’s Alan Vega, and Ramones’ art director Arturo Vega to photographers Roberta Bayley, Marcia Resnick, and Jimmy DeSana, filmmaker Amos Poe and tattoo artist Ruth Marten, Miller and Ringma invited some of the most innovative and original artists of the time to install their work at Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC, an alternative arts space run by Alice Denney, who conceptualised it in the same vein as PS1.

“A whole new generation were making themselves felt and replacing the earlier generation that had emerged in the 60s. We realised that if things were going to happen, we were going to have to do it ourselves and it made perfect sense to say, ‘Okay, we can get a whole new art movement going.’ Feminist art was the model: it was more about an idea and an attitude than a specific style,” Miller explains.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

X Magazine (published by COLAB)

Categories: 1970s, AnOther Man, Art, Exhibitions

Huck Magazine: The Coming of Age Issue

Posted on May 14, 2018

Cover Story: Angela Boatwright X Godlis: Punk Now and Then

If coming of age means realising who you are, then the breakthrough can arrive at any time – no matter what stage you’re at. But wherever life takes us, wherever we end up, we all remain connected to the same point in our rearview mirrors: that wide-eyed teen just trying to figure shit out as best we can.

Join us as we celebrate characters who know that better than anyone – from the teenage activists shaping our future to prodigious creatives who don’t believe in failure – and keep forging their own path regardless.

For more, visit Huck Magazine

Categories: 1970s, Art, Huck, Music, Photography

Then They Came For Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Posted on May 11, 2018

Dorothea Lange, Oakland, California, March 13, 1942. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

Dorothea Lange, Centerville, California, May 9, 1942. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

It has been said that history repeats itself – and if this is true it is because the majority of people are pragmatists. For them, life occurs through a lens of cognitive dissonance framed by confirmation bias. They seek reinforcement of opinion in place of truth, relying on other people to tell them what and how to think. They prefer the appearance of goodness over goodness itself, forgoing sacrifices that would require they take radical responsibility in the name of self reliance.

As a result, mythological narratives become objects of faith and become rooted in identity, where integrity should be. Invariably, when push comes to shove, they shrug. It’s not their problem – until it is. And by then, they’ve passed the tipping point and it’s much too late.

All of this could be avoided were people willing to acknowledge that myths are not truth, that historical fact consistently undermines the veracity of their sacred cows and renders them nothing more than illusions. Let us consider the idea that the United States is the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” as they claim in “The Star Spangled Banner” (the same song that explicitly endorsed the killing of slaves).

Despite the rhetoric we know these words to be untrue, as proven time and again by the actions of the United States government. A pervasive prejudice exists, cowering in the shadows and consistently reasserting itself with abject violation of the Constitutional rights of this nation’s citizens. Consider Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, issued in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Toyo Miyatake, Hand and Barbed Wire, ca. 1944. Courtesy Toyo Miyatake Studio.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Japan, Photography

Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls

Posted on May 11, 2018

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Angelina “Pepper” Davis / Eric Emerson. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

During the summer of 1966, while hanging out in the famed backroom of Max’s Kansas City, Andy Warhol took a napkin and began to draw a line down the middle. On one side, he wrote “B,” and on the other “W.” From this simple sketch, the concept of a split screen film, which would become Chelsea Girls, was born.

“I want to make a movie that is a long movie, that is all black one side and white the other,” scriptwriter Ronald Tavel recounts Warhol explaining, in Ric Burns’ documentary film Andy Warhol.

A true radical in the avant-garde cinema community, Warhol’s first major film was Sleep (1963): a five-hour, 20-minute silent film of John Giorno, his boyfriend at the time. It could be described as an endurance test, for nothing much happened. Warhol took this idea of the still camera and the unedited reel of film, combined it with the faux-documentary sensibility of cinéma vérité, added his Superstars into the mix, set them in a simple scenario, and let them do their thing.

The result was Chelsea Girls was born: a split-screen film featuring 22 different 33-minute reels featuring appearances by Nico, International Velvet, Eric Emerson, Brigid Berlin, Mario Montez, Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Susan Bottomly, and Ingrid Superstar that became Warhol’s first commercially successful film – due in no small part to the classic cocktail of sex, drugs, and drama.

“Before, people fell asleep during my films. When they didn’t walk out,” Warhol observes in the new book, Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (D.A.P./The Andy Warhol Museum, May 24). “But Chelsea Girls is packing them in. Why? Because it’s dirty.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Andy Warhol, The Chelsea Girls, 1966. Pictured: Nico / Ondine. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

Andy Warhol, “3 Min. Mary Might”, 1966. Pictured: George Millaway, Ronnie Cutrone, Angelina “Pepper” Davis, unidentified man. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan

Guzman: This Is Country Living

Posted on May 11, 2018

I am thrilled to announce my feature on Guzman has been selected for the cover of the latest issue of Upstate Diary. The new issue features Terry Jones from i-D magazine, Laurie Simmons, Rockwell Kent, Eleanor Friedberger, Paul Rudolph, Victoria Sambunaris, Steven Holl, Duncan Hannah, Victoria Bartlett and more.

For more information, visit Upstate Diary

Categories: Art, Photography, Upstate Diary

All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party

Posted on May 10, 2018

Endia Beal, Sabrina and Katrina, 2015, from “Am I What You’re Looking For?”, courtesy of the artist, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018.

On October 15, 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton – two students at Laney College in Oakland, California – founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) to protect the citizens of their hometown from abuses of the state.

Under the protection of the Second Amendment, they created armed citizens’ patrols to monitor an almost all white police force that regularly brutalised African Americans citizens with impunity. From their grassroots efforts, a nationwide movement was born – one that radicalised a new generation of youth to fight for their Constitutional rights.

The BPP set up chapters in 68 cities in order to implement the Ten Point Platform and Program, which called for freedom, full employment, reparations, housing, education, military exemption, an end to police brutality and murder, freedom for the incarcerated, Constitutional rights during trial, and full self-determination.

The leaders of the BPP had mastered the law, and knew exactly how to exact the rights granted by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This – combined with their ability to build coalitions with other political groups including the Young Lords, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, and the Chicano Workers Movement – created a very real threat to the systemic racism that had kept these groups vulnerable, marginalised, and living under constant threat.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018

Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Photography

Silvia Prada: Tom of Finland

Posted on May 10, 2018

Tom of Finland, Reference Pages, Mixed Media Collage on Paper, 1966-1990. Courtesy of Tom of Finland Foundation

Growing up in a family-owned hair salon during the 1980s, Spanish artist Silvia Prada spent her formative years gazing upon countless images of male beauty and style, and developed a taste for gay pop icons. When she read an article on Tom of Finland in Interview magazine, Prada felt a profound kinship and liberation through the twin engines of sensuality and self-expression.

For Prada, Tom was a seminal force in shaping her aesthetic sensibilities and artistic processes. Joakim Andreasson, Prada’s good friend and creative director of the Tom of Finland Store, knew of her obsession and arranged an introduction to the Tom of Finland Foundation. From there, a beautiful collaboration began and has culminated in TOM, an online exhibition of new drawings and collages inspired by the archive, accompanied by a book of the same name from Capricious Publishing.

Here, Prada reflects on the universality of Tom’s work, and arts ability to speak to people of all genders and sexualities from all walks of life.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Silvia Prada, Untitled, Graphite on Paper, 2017Courtesy of Silvia Prada

Categories: AnOther Man, Art