Posts from the “Art” Category

Jamel Shabazz: Pieces of a Man

Posted on November 8, 2016

Photo: Untitled, East Flatbush, 1990. © Jamel Shabazz

Pieces of a Man (Art Voices Art Books), the newest monograph by legendary photographer Jamel Shabazz, is a tremendous undertaking, bringing us around the world and across time, yet always able to center on what we all share as human beings. The title speaks to the way in which each of us are so many things in this life and on this earth, with each photograph capturing a facet of our infinite complexity. The book, like the individual, proves that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, and yet sometimes we feel fragmented, or must only reveal one part of ourselves, and still remain authentic to our souls.

Pieces of a Man is a story of love and loss, of joy and pain, of life and death and rebirth with each page. It’s like listening to a classic album like What’s Going On—absolutely overwhelming and yet, you want to listen to it over and over. Shabazz talks with Crave, providing us with a treasure trove of insight and inspiration.

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Photo: Waiting, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 2012. © Jamel Shabazz

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Crave, Photography

Willy Spiller: Hell on Wheels

Posted on November 7, 2016

SUBWAY NEW YORK, 1977-1984 © by Willy Spiller 2016

Warm and faded colors of yesterday, oversaturated with blues and yellows, create a nostalgic haze enveloping with a warm embrace, reminding us of a time that has come and gone in just about every single way.

Willy Spiller’s photographs of the New York City subway system circa 1979 capture the feeling of the city at a crucial time. Two years after the brink of bankruptcy, the city struggled to come back from abject neglect and abuse under the federal government’s policy of benign neglect. As white flight took hold and the city was abandoned en masse, what remained with the True Yorkers who would not—or could not—leave the city that never sleeps.

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SUBWAY NEW YORK, 1977-1984 © by Willy Spiller 2016, courtesy of Sturm & Drang.

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Make Art Not War

Posted on November 1, 2016

“Harriet Tubman lives!,” artist unknown, n.d. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” Pablo Picasso observed, drawing attention to the fundamental cycle of existence: from nothing, something; from something, nothing—ad infinitum.

People, being creatures of habit as much as will, often find themselves leaning heavily towards one side or the other. We gravitate towards what is familiar, either to our character or to our experience, inclined to preserve that comforts of the known, trying to avoid the inevitable turn that must come. We may fight it within ourselves, longing to escape fate, or we may find ourselves in conflict with society and the power structure that initiates change.

Invariably, we struggle with the nature of life, this eternal cycle of creation and destruction that causes so much misery and strife—until we can come to terms with this duality and make peace with it. For some, this peace comes with integrating opposition into the creative process: this is the art of protest.

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Artwork: Reproduction of a poster by Jose Gomez Fresquet, printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, 1967. Courtesy of the CWLU Herstory Project. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Bronx, Crave

Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity

Posted on October 31, 2016

© Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/ Singapore; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; David Zwirner, New York, © Yayoi Kusama.

“I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland,’ Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama declares. At the age of 87, Kusama is one of the most famous living artists on earth, becoming known the world over for her mindblowing installations of the infinite.

With the polka dot as the basis for her work, Kusama has taken the most finite form and rendered it limitless. She explains, “A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement… Polka-dots are a way to infinity.”

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Women

Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements

Posted on October 30, 2016

Photo: Thjorsà River #1, Southern Region, Iceland, 2012. © Edward Burtynsky 2016. Courtesy Flowers Gallery, London / Metivier Gallery, Toronto

We have entered the Anthopocene Era, marked by the turning point when human activities began to make a significant global impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Many place the starting point with the Industrial Revolution, when mass production became the norm, and the machine rose to prominence as evidence of humankind’s ability to dominate nature—without thought or concern to the long term.

We’ve been riding this train for two centuries, quick to ignore evidence to the contrary, lest it cause us any intellectual or physical discomfort. The human impact on the planet is marginalized or excused while the changes to climate are carefully swept under the rug. The increase in extinctions and the decline in biodiversity go unremarked.

As Alduous Huxley observed in Vanity Fair in 1928, “”The colossal material expansion of recent years is destined, in all probability, to be a temporary and transient phenomenon. We are rich because we are living on our capital. The coal, the oil, the phosphates which we are so recklessly using can never be replaced. When the supplies are exhausted, men will have to do without…. It will be felt as a superlative catastrophe.”

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

Ai Wewei: #SafePassage

Posted on October 27, 2016

Photo: Incoming refugee boat, Lesbos, Greece. 17 February 2016 © Ai Weiwei Studio.

“My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression, a new way of communication. It is never about exhibiting in museums or about hanging it on the wall. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don’t think art is elite or mysterious. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate art from politics is itself a very political intention,” Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) told Der Spiegel in 2011.

Ai Weiwei rose to global prominence in 2011 Chinese authorities arrested him at the Beijing Capital International Airport, although no official charges were ever filed. He was placed under 24-hour supervision, accompanied by two guards who never left his side, then released after 81 days. It was a very different outcome from that of his father, the poet Ai Qing, who spoke out against the government in 1957. The whole family was exiled to a labor camp when Ai Weiwei was just one year old, then transferred to the remote province of Xinjiang, where he was forced to perform five years of physically demanding work in his 60s.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions

The Peter Tosh Museum Opens on the Legend’s 72nd Birthday

Posted on October 25, 2016

Photo: Peter Tosh © GAB Archive/Redferns.

Nearly thirty years after his tragic death, reggae legend Peter Tosh is being honored with a museum in his native Jamaica. The Peter Tosh Museum opened in Kingston on October 19, on what would have been his 72nd birthday, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his solo album Legalize It.

The museum features a collection of artifacts and memorabilia from Tosh, including his legendary custom-built guitar, which was shaped like an M16 assault rifle, and his beloved unicycle, which was his preferred means for transportation.

Born Winston Hubert McIntosh in the rural parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica, in 1944, Peter Tosh moved to the notorious slum Trench Town at the age of 16. He first picked up a guitar after watching a man play, memorizing everything his fingers were doing and playing it back to the man.

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peter-tosh-legalize-it-cover

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Music

Humanism + Dynamite = The Soviet Photomontages of Aleksandr Zhitomirsky

Posted on October 21, 2016

Aleksandr Zhitomirsky. On the Military Wavelength, 1968. Ne boltai! Collection. © Vladimir Zhitomirsky.

If only we could see ourselves the way others see us. Would we be able to tolerate it? The gap between self image and public perception can be quite a divide that becomes insurmountable when the ego feels threatened by anything less than flattering may come to the light. We may do everything in our power to deny what others see, including gaslight, discredit, and ad hominem attacks.

Nevertheless, self image is destined to reach an end; nothing lasts forever, including our most desperate dreams. It is here, in the passage of time, that a new vision emerges composed all those who have been paying attention all along. In the case of individuals, this usually has limited scope: most people fly under the radar and traces of their life vanish in death. But for nations, this is an entirely different affair. Despite best efforts to the contrary, dirty laundry continues to be aired.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Ruddy Roye: When Living is a Protest

Posted on October 19, 2016

Photo: Ruddy Roye. Blood, Sweat and Tears (Ryan), Morton Street, Newark, NJ, December 19, 2015 Archival pigment print on metallic paper, printed 2016, 35 x 35 in Edition of 10; Signed by photographer verso

From the top of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke, delivering a sermon to the world, one that resonates in our mind’s ear whenever we hear the words, “I have a dream.” The timbre of his voice is permanently imprinted on our soul, his words among the most patriotic ever spoken. On the eighth anniversary of the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Dr. King’s testimony was centuries in the making, calling forth the ancestors of this country’s earliest days.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter,” Dr. King warned. There is an exquisite horror to the dying soul that lurks within the living body, feasting upon flesh and bone. It has been said that silence equals death; to speak against injustice and oppression is the essence of what it means to be American. These are the words that photographer Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye carries within himself, revealing on his Instagram: “It is a creed I live by at whatever cost.”

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Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Liz Deschenes / Sol LeWitt

Posted on October 17, 2016

LIZ DESCHENES, Untitled (LeWitt) #6–14, 2016, Photogram, 122 1/2 x 122 7/8 x 1 3/4 inches

“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach,” Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) famously wrote as the first of 35 “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” published in 1969. It’s the perfect way to introduce his understanding of the work that artists create that manifests the Idea in physical space.

By forgoing the impulse towards linear thought, we lean more heavily on our sensory, perceptual, and emotional reactions. In doing so, we can be liberated from the tyranny of linear thought, its presumption of supreme validity, and its insistence on a singular way of comprehending the world. By abandoning the rational, we open ourselves to new experiences that can take us beyond the limitations of the “known.” It is in this fresh, uninhibited space we may come to discover new, uncharted depths of the soul.

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SOL LEWITT, On the Walls of the Lower East Side, 1979 [detail], Color photographs mounted on board, 18 1/8 x 15 inches (46 x 38.1 cm) 73 pages; 1 page at 15 7/8 x 15 inches

Categories: 1970s, Art, Crave, Manhattan, Photography

All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50

Posted on October 15, 2016

Emory Douglas, untitled (On the Bones of the Oppressors), 1969. Poster, 20 x 13.5 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. All Of Us Or None Archive. Gift of the Rossman Family.

Fifty years ago today, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to protect the citizens of Oakland, CA, from abuses of the state. Under the protection of the Second Amendment, the created armed citizens’ patrols to monitor police officers and challenge 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,” explained Seale, who was inspired by the Black Nationalist philosophy of Malcolm X.

Following the Great Migration, the demographics Oakland had been transformed by a new generation of African Americans living in a community ruled by de facto segregation. This was a new type of apartheid that hid its hand covertly instituting policies likes redlining that denied services like banking, insurance, healthcare, mortgages, credit cards, and retail to the black community. Combined with high unemployment, underfunded public schools, and substandard housing, a new form of poverty emerged, and the state, under then-Governor Ronald Reagan, sanctioned violence against.

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Emory Douglas, Afro-American Solidarity with the Oppressed People of the World, 1969. Poster, 22.75 x 14.875 in. Collection of the Oakland Museum of California. All Of Us Or None Archive. Gift of the Rossman Family.

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