Posts from the “Art” Category

The Artists Using Gender as a Tool and a Weapon

Posted on September 25, 2017

Photo: Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (0X5A1531), 2017. Archival pigment print, 51 × 34 in (129.5 × 86.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson, New York

Beyond the binary lays a world of infinite possibility, a space of total freedom and fluidity. ‘Male’ and ‘female’ are the space where we begin, and when we liberate ourselves from the paradigm of ‘either/or’ a vast wealth of gender expression begins to reveal itself.

Invariably, not everyone is comfortable within this extraordinary space. Many hold fast to simplistic, reductive thinking that diminishes the complexities and nuances of human experience and may resist enlightenment. Others understand the necessity of expansive and inclusive ideas, conversations and art – and it’s here that Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon takes off.

Curated by Johanna Burton, Trigger is a major exhibition featuring the work of more than 40 artists from all walks of life, which will be on view at the New Museum, New York this month and catalogued in a book of the same name on November 21.

By positioning gender at the intersection of race, class, sexuality and disability, Trigger exposes deep ambiguities, curious contradictions and fundamental questions at the heart of life on earth. The artists featured here offer ways to use gender to construct and dismantle culture, building new spaces and refurbishing the old. We speak with Burton about the importance of the show, and profile the work of six artists using gender as a weapon and a tool to embrace, reject and subvert the status quo.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Artwork: Tschabalala Self, “Loner”, 2016. Fabric, Flashe, and acrylic on canvas, 84 × 80 in (213.3 × 203.2 cm). Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg, New York

Artwork: Justin Vivian Bond, “My Barbie Coloring Book”, 2014. Watercolour on archival paper, 14 ½ × 11 ½ in (36.8 × 29.2 cm). Courtesy the artist

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Welcome to the 2017 Edition of the NY Art Book Fair

Posted on September 24, 2017

Photo: Sean Maung

Where else can you find the Jean-Michel Basquiat sleeve for K-Rob vs. Rammellzee’s legendary Hip Hop cut “Beat Bop” hanging on the wall like a work of art in the very same building where Jean-Michel’s original paintings once hung during his lifetime? The NY Art Book Fair, naturally.

Printed Matter’s famed book festival returns to MoMA PS1 this weekend, and it will literally take your breath away, with a line up of more than 370 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions, and independent publishers from 28 countries around the globe. The fair, which runs through 9pm this evening and tomorrow, September 24, from 11am–7pm, is a phenomenal opportunity to catch up with your faves and check out the latest happenings.

The NY Art Book Fair covers all price points, whether you wish to pay what you want for the phenomenal zines by Research and Destroy New York City or you have 5Gs to pony up for a David Hammons original painting of Michael Stewart, at the Printed Matter Rare and Out of Print booth.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Artwork: David Hammons, The Man Nobody Killed. Brooklyn, NY: EYE Magazine, 1986, at Printed Matter Rare & Out of Print.

Categories: Art, Bronx, Crave

Welcome to the “Backyard Biennial”

Posted on September 22, 2017

Patrice Helmar, Dýrfinna

Welcome to the “Backyard Biennial,” which kicks off today, Friday, September 22 at 6:30 PM, a showcase of art, photography, and live events at the home of artist Patrice Helmar in Ridgewood, Queens. The Biennial runs on Saturday, September 23 from 12–6 PM; Sunday, September 24 from 12–8 PM; and Saturday, September 30 from 12–6:30 PM.

Among the artists exhibited are faves Delphine Adama Fawundu, Yoav Horesh, and Thomas Roma — the Columbia University connection. Helmar speaks with us about her vision for the event, which is free and open to the public.

Please talk about the inspiration for the Backyard Biennial. How did this idea come about?

Patrice Helmar: This summer it was exciting, but also frustrating to see so many friends and colleagues posting their art travels. A common affectation was to extensively criticize work at various pavilions. I’m all for criticality but the mechanics of spectacle and spectator alike at such a grand monetary scale are hard to swallow.

I spent part of the summer visiting my family and making work in Alaska. Before I headed north to buy the domain, Backyard Biennial. This felt like a small commitment to make a thing happen. What started as an inside joke became a serious curatorial endeavor as I reached out to various artists asking for their participation as early as May of this year.

Ian Lewandowski, Alex, Lorenzo, Benji.

While Manhattan has gone completely corporate and Brooklyn is undergoing massive gentrification, the borough of Queens seems (from the outside at least) to retain the flavor of Old York. Could you speak about the significance of hosting the Backyard Biennial in Ridgewood?

Patrice Helmar:. Ridgewood is where I currently work and live. I’m not a Native New Yorker, but I’ve heard from my friends who are about how much the city has changed. I’ve seen gentrification happen in the past five years that I’ve lived in the city, but I can’t imagine what it must feel like when it’s your own neighborhood.

There are artists I know who live and work in the city that are like me. These artists work multiple jobs, live with roommates or their families, try to avoid marginalized roles in a small corner of the art world, and may work hard enough to have a studio. Often these artists are deeply in debt because of student loans, and may struggle to afford materials to produce their work.

Having the Biennial in my backyard makes sense because it’s not an additional cost. It’s not a dedicated gallery space – commercial or otherwise, or part of an institutional framework. Another thing that has been interesting about putting the show together is having to consider that everyone who sees the Biennial will walk through my bedroom. It’s made me super conscious of my own living space, and feels very personal.

Courtney Garvin, Box Braids

How did you decide which artists to feature in the show? What would you say are some of the defining characteristics and themes of the works featured in the show?

Patrice Helmar: I’ve had a project for the past year called the Marble Hill Camera & Supper Club. It started when I lived in the Bronx and had a lot of space. There was a huge kitchen, and two parlor rooms. The house was a Victorian style home. Every month I’d invite four different artists, photographers, or writers to present their work via a slideshow. I’d cook a big dinner, and sometimes fifty or more people would show up. On average it would be about 20 to 25 people coming to spend the evening sharing work and hanging out.

There are a group of artists in the show from my hometown in Alaska. I made a conscious decision to include their works because they make strong work that I admire, and it isn’t always the easiest thing to show when you live in an isolated part of the country.

Also, I approached artists who are very well established. Some were unable to be in the exhibition, but two of my favorite artists, Thomas Roma and Tom Kalin were kind enough to agree to have works in the show. I’m very honored that their work is included.

Why did you decide not to sell the works?

Patrice Helmar: I don’t want the focus of the Backyard Biennial to be commercial. I want to people to hang out, and have art accessible and seen in a different kind of place.

Sitting in my garden with a cup of coffee and looking at laundry across the skyline on clotheslines, hearing dogs barking and kids playing, and having my neighbor’s tomatoes creep across my fence as they ripen at the end of the summer makes me feel alright. There are a lot of things happening in the world that don’t make me feel alright.

As excited as I am about sharing the Backyard Biennial, I’m really looking forward to spending that first morning alone with a backyard full of art I’ve handpicked, on a day when the show isn’t open to the public.

Allin Skiba, Boys Don’t Cry

Categories: Art, Photography

Remembering Jean-Michel Basquiat

Posted on September 21, 2017

Photo:Jean-Michel Basquiat on set of Downtown 81, written by Glenn O’Brien, Directed by Edo Bertoglio, Produced by Maripol Photo By Edo Bertoglio© New York Beat Films LLC, by permission of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat all rights reserved

Jean-Michel Basquiat joined the 27 Club on August 12, 1988. He died young, at the height of his success, breaking through boundaries that had marginalised countless African-American artists from establishing their rightful place in museums, galleries, and history books. With the $110.5 million sale of his painting at auction earlier this year, Basquiat once again was established at the pinnacle of American art, with his work setting records and putting him in the company of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

But who was the man behind the work, the Brooklyn native of Puerto Rican and Haitian lineage whose singular style set him apart and has influenced generations of artists worldwide since his death? As the Barbican opens Boom for Real – the first large-scale exhibition in the UK about the American artist – we speak with those who knew and worked with him over a period of ten years, to paint a portrait of the artist as a young man.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982. A frame from the ART/new york video “Young Expressionists.”Credit Paul Tschinkel.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Brooklyn, Dazed, Exhibitions, Graffiti, Manhattan, Painting, Photography

Kerry James Marshall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Untitled (Curtain Girl), 2016, acrylic on PVC panel, 76 x 61 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

“Extreme blackness plus grace equals power,” Kerry James Marshall observed, revealing an essential truth of the nature of the world. From a purely aesthetic sense, black is a color and it is something more. It is both the complete absence or absorption of light. It takes in all colors of the visible spectrum becoming the amalgamation all that we know, becoming the alpha and the omega: from where we begin and to where we return.

In this way, Africa as the birthplace of humanity makes perfect sense: from blackness all colors of wo/mankind have been birthed. Black is one of the first colors used by artists painting in the caves of Europe, those prehistoric beings who intuitively understood that essential power of the hue rested in both its immediate impact and its longevity.

With homo sapiens dating back nearly 200,000 years in Africa, in the grand scheme of history it is only in recent times that some have chosen to vilify blackness. Europeans became obsessed with framing it in a negative light, crafting the idea of race as a justification for a campaign of global imperialism that systematically pillaged, enslaved, and decimated peoples of a darker hue across Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.

From this we have inherited trauma rooted in profound psychosis that posits us in a position to spread truth to power. Giving voice to that which has been silenced, giving sight to that which has been distorted or erases, giving sanctuary to that which has been targeted for destruction: this is our shared responsibility. Each of us brings talents and gifts, wisdom and understanding, experiences and insights that fill in the blanks, fitting together like a puzzle of billions of pieces that reveal the image of God.

But… such a picture may never appear but that’s no reason to do what we must, for it is in our individual efforts that we light the spark of inspiration and fuel the flames of action. American artist Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama) leads by example, dedicating his life to the creation of a body of work that restores black to its rightful place.

His recent touring exhibition Mastry has claimed the space that it deserves, in the highest echelons of wealth, power, and history: the realm of fine art. In conjunction with the exhibitions, Phaidon has just released Kerry James Marshall, the most comprehensive book published on the artist.

The book is a tour-de-force, providing a comprehensive look at Marshall’s singular career and the ways in which he has used painting as a site for the writing of history. Marshall’s life itself traces the course of America over the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with the artist’s formative years deep in the heart of Dixie under the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

In 1963, his family joined the final wave of the Great Migration, moving to South Central Los Angeles, just in time to experience the horrors of the Watts riots in 1965. “By the time the riots got to where we were, it was like a carnival,” Marshall tells Charles Gaines in the book. “The violence that took place was confusing to me.… I started to see that the responsibility for my needs shifted to me as opposed to a collective. I try never to approach a thing as if I’m one hundred percent certain about what it is or what the proper response to it is supposed to be.”

Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20 x 16 cm. Picture credit: © Kerry James Marshall, photo: Matthew Fried, © MCA Chicago

With a perspective rooted in openness and self-reliance, Marshall set forth on a journey rooted in discovery. His purpose began to take shape in 1980, when he painted A Portrait of the Artists as a Shadow of His Former Self, a work that recalls the influence of the great African American painter Horace Pippin (1888–1946). But here, Marshall began his exploration of the power of black, of the color that would come to be a signature element in his work.

He told Gaines, “This was when it started to look like there was something that could be done with the black figure, that it could be used to explore ideas that are not only relevant to picture making by itself but also to convey some of those ideas that I’d been developing about where black people fit in. Before then, apart from the self-portraits, which I’d do as an exercise, I was still doing still lifes and paintings of inanimate objects in order to figure out how to paint…. [The issue of race] really came into focus with that one painting.”

With his focus honed and his skills at the ready Marshall set forth to create a body of work depicting the African American experience in all of its complexities, a profound portrait of a people that embraces the heroism of daily life, while also underscoring the culture and its relationship to the individual.

“To recognize the diversity of Blackness (to use Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s militantly colloquial spelling) would be to recognize that there is such a place as the interzone that poet Elizabeth Alexander once termed The Black Interior – primarily a psychic space where flocks of self-actualized black subjectivites freely roam about, walkabout and roust about, “Greg Tate writes in the book.

“If you happen to own the Black Interior that belongs to Kerry James Marshall and you dare to take up the ambitious mission of rendering the interiors of the Black Whole – that loud, proud, obsidian realm saturated with oscillating frequencies, swooping modalities, spiky plateaus, swampy valleys, funky declensions, cosmic ascents, elaborate head rooms, and wickedly salty tall-tales – you have already reckoned with apprehending the liminality of American Blackness: the half hidden/half revealed qualities of that Free Bloack Thang that Duke Ellignotn believed imbued all truly black expression with a lofty and iridescent aura of transluesency, “Tate explained.

And, indeed, that one magnificent sentence is as much as masterpiece as the paintings it describes, so perfectly modulated in its nuances that the complexities of its content simply dissolve before your very eyes. It is what it is, as the classic African-American proverb recognizes.

And what it is restores balance to the earth, the soul and the spirit, the present moment and the history books. The mastry of Kerry James Marshall is a vision to behold, a marvel of necessity, desire, and self determination that leads by example and keeps the promise that possibility, when realized, is God made manifest on earth.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Painting

The 5 Art Shows You Need to See This Fall

Posted on September 19, 2017

Photo; Dawoud Bey. A Boy in Front of the Loew’s 125th Street Movie Theater 1976, Printed by 1979. Gelatin Silver print 230 x 150. Featured in “States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era“

Philippe Halsman, A Paragon of Beauty, Dalí’s Moustache, 1953-54.
Vintage photomontage print. 35.3 x 23.5 cm. Philippe Halsman Archive, New York © Philippe Halsman Archive. From “Dali/Duchamp”

Fall is when everything begins, as the new season kicks into gear and people get in the swing of things. As your calendar fills up, there’s no better time to get away from it all and dip into a museum to catch an exhibition that will inspire the soul and inflame the mind. Crave spotlights five of the best new shows opening this season, each one a phenomenal collection of art and ideas.

States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era

The history of the United States is a multifaceted mosaic of experiences, tiled together around a fragile center that exploded in civil war in the nation’s first hundred years. In its second century, it was rocked over and over again by peoples determined to live into the rights guaranteed under the Constitution against those who would deny them. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the nation faced some of its greatest challenges, from the Civil Rights Movement, which spawned the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements, to the devastation of COINTELPRO and a government that willfully used illegal measures to destroy its people from within.

Looking back at what was and the promises of what might have been, Nottingham Contemporary, UK, presents States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era, a collections of 250 photographs by 16 American masters, now on view through November 26, 2017. Among the artists featured are Crave faves Diane Arbus, Dawoud Bey, Mark Cohen, Bruce Davidson, Louis Draper, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Jim Goldberg, Danny Lyon, Mary Ellen Mark, Stephen Shore, and Garry Winogrand.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

From Martin Wong: Human Instamatic

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

Stephen Dupont: Piksa Niugini Portraits and Diaries

Posted on September 16, 2017

Photo: Sing-Sing Performers, Goroka Show, Eastern Highlands © Stephen Dupont

It is estimated that ancient inhabitants first migrated from Africa by way of Southeast Asia to Papua New Guinea (PNG) between 50,000-70,000 years. Around 7000 BC, agriculture developed in the highlands, making it one of the few areas in the world where people independently domesticated plants, and by 3000 BC, traders from Southeast Asia began to collect bird of paradise plumes native to the island.

Sharing an island with Indonesia, PNG rests just TK miles from Australia. Home to 6.3 million people, PNG is considered one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world with 848 different languages listed for the country, of which 12 have no known living speakers. PNG is also one of the most rural counties, with only 18% of its population living in urban centers. Although the nation has the sixth fastest-growing economy in the world, as of 2011, at least one third of the population lives on less than $1.25USD per day.

PNG is one of the world’s least explored countries, both geographically and culturally, making the work of Stephen Dupont even more salient and prescient in ways we cannot yet fully comprehend. His newest book, Piksa Niugini Portraits and Diaries (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press) is a two-volume slipcased set that documents PNG’s most important cultural and historical zones: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville, and the capital city of Port Moresby.

PNG is one of the world’s last frontiers, and Dupont’s photographs reveal a people and a place that is on the brink of detribalization. As Dupont notes, “I love this country. I didn’t think I ever would, but something here gets into your blood…. The Gardener Fellowship handed me the opportunity to take my camera, diaries, and sketchbooks into some very wild and remote places—a chance to do what I do best, be a nomad, a storyteller, and capture the beauty, mystery, and the trauma of this strange and epic land.”

Photo; Sing-Sing Performers, Goroka Show, Eastern Highlands © Stephen Dupont

Indeed, epic is the perfect word to describe the world Dupont depicts, a world that dissolves at our fingertips. With each turn of the page we venture further inside a place that is unknown from the outside. These two volumes read as a visual poem of great depth and breadth, a poem of an ancient tradition that is spoken in languages entirely too original as to be understood upon a cursory glance. Each of Dupont’s photographs requires inner stillness and silence of the mind to absorb the brilliance of a nation that has maintained a distinct identity over millennia.

The portraits, collected in a single volume, give us a look at the finished work as a cohesive whole, but it is the diaries that give us an understanding and a feeling for Dupont’s travels. We see his Moleskine notebook scanned with handwritten notes, his full contact sheets, newspaper stories, snapshots, aerial views, landscapes, all of which provide a larger context for the space the portraits occupy in the larger frame. Dupont’s typewritten journals, which appear at the end of the book, give us a means by which to situate his work. Too often we only see the finished work, never knowing the means to which the photographer had to achieve his goals. Dupont’s journals change this, and give us a greater understanding to the commitment he brings to documenting PNG.

As he explains, “I’m no anthropologist or historian; my intentions are more personal, artistic, even experimental. Through my photography and in these books I hope to capture a passing footprint of society here, to highlight detribalization and the cultural changes taking place in Papua New Guinea in 2011. It’s not just art. It’s a piece of history—photographs, observations, notes, drawings, and reflections that offer an alternative window into on one of the most intriguing and inspiring places I have ever experienced.”

First published at L’Oeil de la Photographie
April 1, 2014

Photo: Sing-Sing Performers, Goroka Show, Eastern Highlands © Stephen Dupont

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Richard Boch: The Mudd Club

Posted on September 15, 2017

Photo: Mudd Club Fashion Show, 1980. Photography Nick Taylor.

Photo: Jackie Curtis and Bowie. Photography Bobby Grossman.

The Mudd Club: the name alone embodies the mystical, mythical essence of Old York – a city where you could reinvent yourself from the ground up. All it took was ingenuity, desire, and nerve to do-it-yourself, take it to the streets and show out on the world stage.

In the fall of 1978, the Mudd Club opened its doors at 77 White Street, long before anyone referred to the triangle below Canal as “Tribeca.” Back then it was an outpost on the frontier of downtown. As manufacturing shops packed up and left town, huge industrial buildings stood bare, attracting artists who transformed these commercial spaces into studios and homes. When they needed a break, they hit the Mudd, a tiny spot that became the ultimate nightclub, bringing together people from all walks of life.

Here the No Wave rubbed shoulders with Hip Hop, while graffiti writers and post punk musicians filled the joint. Everyone from Halston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David Bowie to Nan Goldin, Lydia Lunch, and Dee Dee Ramone could be found in the mix. This is the place where Fab 5 Freddy taught Debbie Harry to rap and no one thought twice about a white woman dropping rhymes on the mic.

From 1979 to 1983, the Mudd Club was the place to be, the ultimate scene for insiders and outsiders alike, a place where art, music, fashion, and culture completely reinvented itself with luminaries like trans model Teri Toye, drag legend Joey Arias, and performance artist Klaus Nomi sharpening the cutting edge. On any given night, something wild and wonderful was going down, whether it was a theme party like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Funeral Ball,” a reading by William S. Burroughs, or a live performance by Nico.

For two years, at the Mudd Club’s height, Richard Boch manned the door, deciding who would make it past the legendary ropes and enter the delirious den of iniquity that embodied the downtown scene at its height. As a doorman, Boch played a critical role in casting the characters you would see inside, a glorious mélange of celebrities, local legends, and underground superstars. He has just released his memoir The Mudd Club (Feral House) and speaks with us about how to throw the hottest party in New York.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo: Ivy crash out at Mudd Club on the second floor, 1979. Photography Alan Kleinberg

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Dazed, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Stephen Barker: The ACT UP Portraits – Activists & Avatars, 1991–1994

Posted on September 15, 2017

Photo: Mark Harrington, copyright Stephen Barker

Halston. Robert Mapplethorpe. Keith Haring. Freddie Mercury. Eazy E. Antonio Lopez. Martin Wong. David Wojnarowicz. Herb Ritts. The list goes on – and on. More than 675,000 people have died of Aids-related illnesses since the epidemic first hit in 1981, devastating a generation coming-of-age in the wake of the gay, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s.

Where it was once an all-consuming force decimating lives, survivors of the terror and trauma rarely revisit those horrific times. It is difficult to express the scale and scope of the agony of illness and the pain of death that happened day after day, year after year, for decades. Imagine a funeral for friends and family every week. Envision the fear spread by misinformation and ignorance, in the wake of a government that turned its back on the victims of the virus.

During the first four years of the crisis, President Ronald Reagan never said a word about the disease, which had infected nearly 60,000 people – 28,000 of whom had died. In 1987, Senator Jesse Helms amended a federal bill to prohibit Aids education, saying such efforts “encourage or promote homosexual activity.”

The battle lines were drawn: it was the people vs. the government.

In 1987, ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) was formed in response. Organised as a leaderless network of committees working with affinity groups, members of ACT UP took it upon themselves to battle the disease and the government firsthand. Their slogan, “Silence = Death,” became the rallying cry for activists, who, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, refused to go gently into the night. They raged until their actions turned the tide.

ACT UP took on every aspect of the crisis, coming up with grassroots solutions to clearly defined problems. Photographer Stephen Barker worked as part of ACT UP’s Needle Exchange Program on New York’s Lower East Side. He also participated in the first “Funeral March,” one of the most powerful public protests against the regime, wherein Mark Fisher’s body was carried in an open coffin from Judson Memorial Church to the steps of the Republican National Committee on the eve of the 1992 presidential election.

Barker’s photographs made during these actions, along with a selection from the “Nightswimming” series made in places where men regularly went for trysts, will be on view in the exhibition Stephen Barker: The ACT UP Portraits – Activists & Avatars, 1991–1994, at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York (September 14 – October 28, 2017). Below, he speaks with us about the lessons he learned in the fight for life and the war against death.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Photo; Funeral March, copyright Stephen Barker

Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Sadie Barnette: Dear 1968…

Posted on September 12, 2017

Detail from My Father’s FBI File, Project III, 2017. Laser prints, aerosol paint, rhinestones, mounted on plexiglas, 28 pages, each 10 1_2 x 8 3_4.© Sadie Barnette. Courtesy of the artist.

In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI put Rodney Barnette on a watch list after the Vietnam veteran became co-founder of the Compton, California, chapter of the Black Panther Party. At the time, the FBI was running COINTELPRO at full speed, illegally using government operatives and resources to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise “neutralize” the Panthers.

For years, the FBI tracked Rodney’s every move, creating a 500-page dossier that his daughter, artist Sadie Barnette, finally secured after a four-year effort to obtain the files under the Freedom of Information Act. From these files, Barnette has crafted an incredible work, titled Dear 1968…, now on view at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery in Pennsylvania through October 13, 2017.

For Dear 1968, Barnette mines her father’s personal and political histories, using documents from the file, family photos, and drawings to reclaim Rodney’s humanity and reveal the U.S. government’s systemic abuse of power to oppress African-Americans operating well within their rights under the constitution.

Founded on October 16, 1966 in Oakland, CA, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was specifically created to protect American citizens from the abuses of the state. Under the protection of the Second Amendment, it created armed citizen patrols to openly monitor police officers and defend against rampant acts of police brutality.

“Our position was: If you don’t attack us, there won’t be any violence; if you bring violence to us, we will defend ourselves,” Seale explained. But they didn’t stop there. Well versed in the letter of the law, the BPP established the Ten Point Platform and Program t hat called for freedom, full employment, reparations, housing, education, military exemption, end to police brutality and murder, freedom for the incarcerated, Constitutional rights during trial, and full self-determination.

The BPP filled a void and met a need, quickly mobilizing nationwide and setting up chapters in 68 cities within five years. Invariably, the United States government, which had long profited under the systems of slavery and Jim Crow, was incensed by this act of self determination and self preservation, and began a system of counter operations designed to take down what Hoover described as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

COINTELPRO had been operating illegally for years until the historic 1971 break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, which exposed the weapons of the government that had been using surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, and ultimately murder to destabilize, discredit, criminalize and ultimately destroy the movement.

The break-in was organized by eight anti-war activists, including the late Haverford Professor of Physics and of Mathematics William Davidon. In response, Barnette has created a new work for the show titled “Untitled (Citizen’s Commission).”

“For this exhibition, I created a drawing that imagined a logo for the name the eight ‘burglars’ gave themselves—the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI,” said Barnette. “By giving themselves this official title, they imagined a world where the government is accountable to the people. They broke in because they rightly suspected that the FBI wasn’t simply gathering information, but was actively sabotaging their antiwar organizing. They weren’t fighting for privacy; they were fighting for the right to dissent.”

Barnette has been showing works from Dear 1968… throughout 2017, but they have taken on increasing significance following the actions in Charlottesville, where police officers were suspiciously absent from the right-wing protests and the current regime openly stood behind the KKK and Nazi movement. It would be naïve to think that COINTELPRO was a unique or ahistoric event, but it is not. It is simply the scheme that has been uncovered, while so many others operate under the cover of darkness and disinformation.

In bringing the story of her father’s persecution to light, Barnette reveals a truth: that some of the greatest terrorists we face as a nation are hiding in plain sight. Their paychecks are drawn from tax dollars and their missions against upstanding citizens of this nation are supported by the regime.

Karl Marx observed, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” — but he was wrong. The second, third, fourth, fifth, infinite repetition of the act is far from absurd. It is evidence of a malignant and despotic nature that is yet to be destroyed.

Detail from My Father’s FBI File, Project III, 2017. Laser prints, aerosol paint, rhinestones, mounted on plexiglas, 28 pages, each 10 1_2 x 8 3_4.© Sadie Barnette. Courtesy of the artist

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art

Tabitha Soren: Surface Tension

Posted on September 12, 2017

Though we may have the world at our fingertips, often the only thing we have to show for the minutes, hours, days gone by are a trail of greasy swipemarks left behind. Mindlessly, we wipe the evidence away and delve back in, sending and receiving photos, videos, and messages in a never-ending stream of digital consciousness.

We rarely consider, let alone see, how these actions change the way we perceive reality. Former television journalist Tabitha Soren took notice of this phenomenon one day while on a plane, reading the manuscript for her husband’s latest book on her iPad. When she turned off the machine, she noticed these grimy finger trails all across the surface. She instinctively whipped out her phone to snap a quick photograph, entranced by the marks of where she had “been”.

This single image became the catalyst for Surface Tension, a series of large-scale photographs that look at how we look, asking us to see beyond the appearance of things. Here, Soren saw an opportunity to reflect on the media we consume, transforming digital detritus into poetic, painterly images of images we might not otherwise see as art, such as America’s two greatest loves: cat videos and porn.

Soren, who got her start appearing in the Beastie Boys’ landmark 1987 music video, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party),” rose to fame as an anchor for MTV News, following Bill Clinton on the 1992 Presidential campaign trail, and interviewing controversial figures from Yasser Arafat to Anita Hill. After reaching the pinnacle of success, she decided to go behind the lens. Below, she speaks with us about the life on the other side of the camera.

Read the Full Story at Dazed Digital

Categories: Art, Dazed, Photography