Posts from the “Art” Category

Signs of Our Times

Posted on January 28, 2017

Farah Behbehani, Love rests on no foundation II. Courtesy of Merrell Publishers

We are witnessing acts of ignorance and arrogance so epic they are nothing short of crimes against humanity. When I wrote a review of Signs of Our Times: Calligraphy to Calligraffiti (Merrell) just a couple of days ago for Crave Online, I didn’t foresee the Muslim Ban figuring into things. I just wrote a few words about the beauty of a people that honored the Second Commandment to the letter of the law, one that was born of a grace and beauty that elegantly combines with the subversive eloquence of questioning the status quo–for it is the realm of artists to subvert assumptions that have grown stale and old. But here we are on the precipice, pushed to the edge by a psychopath who speaks for the descendants of Columbus. I don’t have answers but I am inclined to break free of the paradigm built on ignorance, arrogance, and the privilege that suggests the crimes of this country do not fall on my shoulders.

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

Yuri Dojc: Last Folio

Posted on January 26, 2017

Photo: ©Yuri Dojc, from “Last Folio.”

It was written. And then it was lost. But prophecies must reveal themselves. This is the story of serendipity, of miracles, of discovery that can only happen by the right person at the right time in life.

Yuri Dojc was born into one of the few surviving Jewish families in Slovakia in 1946. During the war, the nation had eagerly aligned itself with Germany, seizing Jewish businesses, closing schools, and carting the peoples off en masse to concentration camps where few lived to return. His parents escaped such a fate by fleeing to the mountains and hiding in a bunker outside a village that kept their presence a secret.

After the war, the Jews who returned or remained were careful to hide their identities. Dojc remembers, “You have to understand the history. Being a Jew was unpopular. You don’t tell anyone. You hide that because if you tell them, you might not have any friends. No one in their right mind would come out and do this.”

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Photo: ©Yuri Dojc, from “Last Folio.”

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Gordon Parks: I AM YOU

Posted on January 25, 2017

Photo: Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1948, by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapon against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or gun, like many of my childhood friends did,” American photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) revealed.

Parks understood that photography possessed the power to change the way we see and understand the world by speaking a language entirely its own. Seeing is believing, as the old saw goes, which is why representation matters. But representation is only the first step; truth is the pinnacle to which great artists aspire to reach.

Parks was not only a master of the medium, he was an activist using his work to propel political and social change throughout the twentieth century. He decided to become a photographer while working as a waiter in a railroad dining car, after observing passengers read picture magazines for pleasure. At the age of 25, he purchased his first camera and began to shoot, never putting his weapon down until the Lord called him home.

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Photo: Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956, by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Posted on January 20, 2017

Photo: Squatters attempt to defend their building by blocking the street with overturned cars and trash before an expected attack by the police on East 13th Street. 1995 © Andrew Lichtenstein

As we enter a brave new world filled with threats unfolding against the citizens of this nation by the very hand of the government it purports to serve, we can look to the recent past to find inspiration in the power of the people and their will to speak truth to power by any means necessary.

From race relations, policy brutality, and war to gay rights, abortion, and housing, ever issue facing the common man and woman was addressed by organizers who understood the power of mass protests. Civil disobedience, a term coined by no less that Henry David Thoreau in an essay of the same name penned in 1849, takes the high road of political activism. Grounded in the moral welfare of the people, it is a practice that is American at its core, for this country was founded upon the refusal to accept state-sanctioned abuse that openly violated human rights.

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Categories: 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Anthony Friedkin: The Gay Essay

Posted on January 19, 2017

Photo: Hustlers, Selma Avenue, Hollywood, 1971. ©Anthony Friedkin, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

In the Tao Te Ching, Leo Tzu observes, “Nature does not hurry, but everything is accomplished,” recognizing the way in which the Universe works, for what is meant to be occurs as it naturally unfolds through human experience. Perhaps artists are particularly sensitive to the times in which they live, as the zeitgeist flows like a channel throughout the air we breathe.

1969 was a pivotal year in American history. It was the year of the Stonewall Riots, which occurred in New York, when patrons at the Stonewall Inn fought back against the police during a raid at 1:20 am the morning of June 28. At that time homosexual acts were illegal in every state in the nation, with the exception of Illinois. As a result, the police frequently abused their power, targeting gay people and destroying their lives—until one night when the people stood up and fought back.

That same summer, at 19 years of age, American photographer Anthony Friedkin was traveling through Europe, thinking about what he would like to do as an artist. Friedkin, who had been honing his craft as a photographer since he was 11 years old, recalls, “I asked myself what would be the most complicated, challenging, difficult subject for a photo essay—and I decided on The Gay Essay for a lot of reasons. There is anger I still feel today when people suggest gay people are insufficient or lacking something that heterosexuals have. The audacity to judge and put down people and the conceit to say God told you this is what you are supposed to do! We all have our own unique sexuality, like your fingerprint.”

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Armand Boua: Forgotten People

Posted on January 19, 2017

Artwork: Armand Boua, Portraire des shèguès 1 | Tar and acrylic on cardboard | 172 x 104 cm | 2016. © Armand Boua, courtesy of Ethan Cohen, New York.

The peoples of the Ivory Coast have inhabited the lush tropics of Africa for more than 12,000 years. The land was home to several independent states until the nineteenth century, when the imperialist forces of France subjugated its peoples for more a century as part of the European scramble to pillage the continent of Africa of its vast wealth of natural resources. Hence the country’s current name, which came from the voracious French and Portuguese merchants who divided West Africa into five “coasts”: ivory, gold, grain, pepper—and slavery.

In 1960, Félix Houphouët-Boigny led the Ivory Coast to independence and ruled for land for 33 years. In 1999, a coup d’état took place, setting the stage for two civil wars in the new century. The upheaval has been devastating with human rights violations reported on both sides. The nation currently ranks 172 (0f 188) on the United Nations Human Development Index, a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators. As with many Africa nations post-independence, the struggles facing the peoples of the Ivory Coast are largely ignored by the world that continues to profit off its resources.

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Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Ming Smith

Posted on January 18, 2017

Photo: Ming Smith, Sun Ra space II, New York City, New York, 1978 Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 2000 28 3/16 x 39 7/8 in. © Ming Smith, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery

Ming Smith is the quiet storm, her photographs evoking the soul of Billie Holiday’s music in photographic form. She has lived as an artist all her life, creating a body of work that captures the mysterious beauty of eternal truth. “Images outlive us,” Smith observes, and at the same time, without them, things disappear and the moment is gone. In this way, photographs become not only a work of art or an artifact—they become part of the collective consciousness that defines human experience.

“Something flows through you,” Smith explains. The photographer becomes a channel open to the world, transforming three dimensions into two then delivering them so that we may feel and understand their point of view. Smith’s perspective is as singular as she is. The first African-American woman to have her work collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Smith is a pioneer, an innovator, and a rebel imbued with ineffable elegance.

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Titus Kaphar: Shifting Skies

Posted on January 17, 2017

Artwork: TITUS KAPHAR, Destiny 2, 2016, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. ©Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Several years ago, I first wrote the words, “Destiny is the handshake between God and Man,” not fully realizing yet, that the covenant was not between the individual but with the species as a whole. Our destiny is not inherently singular; it is intertwined by the forces of humanity working for or against the greater good of the whole.

Those who fail to see our interconnection are invariably complicit in the exploitation and destruction through unconscionable disregard masquerading as willful ignorance. They take comfort in the belief cognitive dissonance will protect them, but such logical fallacies only cause a greater fall from grace.

Those who understand the fact that injustice to one is injustice to all continuously seek to elevate their understanding of the problem so that they may become a part of the solution in the way they are best designed to contribute to it. For American artist Titus Kaphar, this has been an ongoing quest, one in which he uses his art to investigate and expose our presumptions of criminality and guilt in a system that was purposely designed to exploit and enslave the most vulnerable.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery 1959-1971

Posted on January 16, 2017

Artwork: Martial Raysse, Made in Japan, 1964, photomechanical reproductions and wallpaper with airbrush ink, gouache, ink, tacks, peacock feathers, and plastic flies on paper mounted on fiberboard, overall: 129.86 244.48 cm (51 1/8 96 1/4 in.) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972

For just over a decade, Virginia Dwan changed the landscape of the American art world at a critical period in its development. In 1959, at the age of 28, she launched Dwan Gallery in a storefront in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. Dwan was a natural, inasmuch as she worked on instinct. She had the dream of opening a gallery and she went for it, embracing the guts and nerve of the avant-garde.

Focused on the latest from Paris and New York, Dwan Gallery introduced Los Angeles to a definite selection of Abstract Expressionists, Neo-Dadaists, Pop Artists and Nouveaux Réalistes including Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Niki di Sant Phalle, and Jean Tinguely. Her 1962 group show My Country Tis of Thee has gone down in history as one of the earliest exhibitions of Pop Art and her 1964 exhibition Boxes marked the first time Andy Warhol presented his famed Brillo boxes.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Magritte: La trahison des images

Posted on January 16, 2017

Artwork: René Magritte, La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), 1929 Huile sur toile, 60,33 x 81,12 x 2,54 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection © Adagp, Paris 2016 © Photothèque R. Magritte / Banque d’Images, Adagp, Paris, 2016

La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est past une pipe) is one of Belgian painter René Magritte’s most infamous works. In English, the painting is known as The treachery of images, which depicts a sleek brown pipe with the words “This is not a pipe” underneath in French.

Naturally, it stops one dead in their tracks. Clearly this is a pipe we are looking at. But no, Magritte smiles with a sly grin. This is a painting. A pipe is an entirely different thing. This hangs on a wall. It is simply to be gazed upon for the pleasure of looking. Whereas a pipe, you stuff it, you hold it in your hands, set it aflame, and then draw it to your lips. While it might be a handsome object, its most important aspect is its function, one that is a matter of smoke and lungs, nicotine and blood, and that curious boost of energetic calmness that the drug so graciously gives.

Indeed, this is not a pipe. This is a painting calling itself out. The year was 1929, and it was quite unlike high art to take such a pithy view of itself. But Magritte had other plans for his life behind the easel. He abandoned the sanctity of art to use it as a means to deconstruct itself, creating a myriad of quixotic, romantic, sentimental, amusing, or tragic imagery.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

“Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” on His 88th Birthday

Posted on January 15, 2017

Photo: James Karales (American, 1930-2002), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Home with His Family, 1962 (in Kitchen), 1962, gelatin silver print. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase, 2008.38

On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Thirty-one years later, in 1999, a jury of six whites and six blacks found the United States government guilty of assassination and wrongful death in the murder of Dr. King in civil court (the full transcript can be downloaded here). Yet the case received virtually no press coverage nor is it taught in most schools, despite the fact that children are given a day off to honor of one of the nation’s most important freedom fighters.

You might ask yourself, Why is that? For the answer, we can turn to the words of Dr. King himself. In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), he explained, “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

Fortunately, we live in the Information Age, where vast stores of verified facts can be accessed free of charge. We are no longer dependent on the “education” system to teach us how or what to think, what questions to ask, or how to learn. One of the greatest treasures we have today is easy and immediate access to credible sources, delivered straight to our fingertips. We can live the dream in a way Dr. King could never have imagined when he spoke in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

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Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography