Posts from the “Books” Category

Andrea Giunta: Radical Women – Latin American Art, 1960-1985

Posted on July 22, 2018

Paz Errazuriz (Chilean, b. 1944), La Palmera (The palm tree), 1987, from the series La manzana de Adan (Adam’s Apple), 1982-90. Gelatin silver print. 15 9/16 × 23 ½ in. (39.5 × 59.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galeria AFA, Santiago. ©the artist.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, the phenomenal survey of Latin American artists, enters its final weekend at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view through July 22, 2018. Accompanied by a catalogue of the same name published by DelMonico|Prestel, the exhibition is a stunning tour de force through a quarter century across the Western hemisphere showcasing an extraordinary group of women who experimented with photography, performance, video, and conceptual art to explore the issues of autonomy, oppression, violence, and the environment.

Photography plays a pivotal role in Radical Women, examining how it is both a work of art and a piece of evidence. Here archetypes and iconography are pushed to the edge as the artists featured here subvert expectations and stereotypes, offering fresh and empowering new perspectives for consideration.

Guest curator Andrea Giunta, who co-curated the exhibition with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, shares insights into the ways artists used photography to raise awareness, expose, and explore the issues facing Latin American women during a tumultuous and transformative time in history – issues that are as pertinent then as they are today.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Maria Evelia Marmolejo (Colombian, b. 1958), 11 de marzo—ritual a la menstruacion, digno de toda mujer como antecedente del origen de la vida (March 11—ritual in honor of menstruation, worthy of every woman as a precursor to the origin of life), 1981. Photography: Camilo Gomez. Nine black-and-white photographs. Five sheets: 11 3/4 × 8 1/4 in. (29.8 × 21 cm) each; four sheets: 8 1/4 × 11 3/4 in. (21 × 29.8 cm) each. Courtesy of Maria E. Marmolejo and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milan. ©the artist.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Latin America, Photography, Women

Joshua Lutz: Mind the Gap

Posted on June 27, 2018

House of Cards. © Joshua Lutz

Ever since he was a child, Joshua Lutz has dealt with the reality of mental illness. When he was five years old, he realized something wasn’t right as he watched his mother struggle with schizophrenia. Fear that he would inherit the disease or pass it along to his children became an ever-present fixture in his life.

Lutz turned to photography as a way to explore the impact of mental illness on his mother, his family, and his sense of self. In 2012, he published a book about his relationship with his mother; Hesitating Beauty (Schilt) is a poignant encapsulation of the woman who gave him life. To create it, Lutz stepped into a netherworld, a space where reality is filtered through an irrational lens, where quiet moments of lucidity are like rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds.

The book allowed Lutz to both explore and separate himself from the dark shadow schizophrenia cast across his life. This ability to be both insider and outsider at the same time led him further into the dark corners of the soul. This month, Lutz released another book grappling with similar subject matter; Mind the Gap (Schilt) is a poignant search for truth that explores the spaces between coherence and confusion that exist for those living with mental illness.

Lutz spoke with VICE about his personal journey and what it’s like delving into the murky, muddled realities of living with mental illness.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

Paukers. © Joshua Lutz

Categories: Art, Books, Photography, Vice

Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA

Posted on June 19, 2018

Anthony Friedkin, Jim and Mundo, Montebello, East Los Angeles, 1972. From The Gay Essay, 1969–73. Gift of Anthony Friedkin. ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries. Courtesy of Anthony Friedkin

Teddy Sandoval, Las Locas, c. 1980. Courtesy of Paul Polubinskas. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

Born in Tijuana in 1955, Edmundo “Mundo” Meza was raised in East LA, in the heart of the Chicano scene. As an artist, Meza worked outside of the mainstream, building a network of radical creatives who were dealing with issues political activism, identity, and social justice connected with the emergence of the Chicano Civil Rights, Women’s, and Gay Liberation Movements.

His untimely death from complications due to AIDS at the age of 29 in 1985 changed everything. As an early casualty of the epidemic, his voice was silenced too soon. Shortly after, his work stopped being exhibited and began to disappear.

Curators C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz were on an urgent mission to preserve what remained. As they began their work, they tapped into a gold vein. An explosion of artists from Mundo’s underground network began to pour forth, and over a period of four years, the curators developed relationships with more than 50 artists, groups, and bands working between the late ’60s and early ’90s.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Patssi Valdez, Reclining (Betty Salas and Gloria), c. early 1980s. Courtesy of Patssi Valdez

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects

Posted on June 19, 2018

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

In 1958, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff moved to Paris and met Jeanne-Claude, a Moroccan-born French woman who had studied philosophy at the University of Tunis. The young Bulgarian artist received a commission to paint a portrait of her mother and fell in love with the vibrant redhead, who serendipitously shared his birthday: the 13th of June, 1935. Fate conspired to unite this extraordinary pair of Geminis, who worked together until Jean-Claude’s death in 2009, transforming the experience of public art into something equal parts powerful and profound.

“I have a real need to appropriate reality,” Christo reveals in the stunning new book Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Urban Projects (D.A.P./Verlag Kettler), the first volume to give a comprehensive account of their work inside cities around the globe.

“The real is the real. The work is not a photograph, a film, or an image. It is the real thing,” Christo says, speaking with passion over the phone from the US. “This is because I have the enormous visceral pleasure of the real thing. I understand many people do not like to be in an uncomfortable place that is windy, hot, boring, because it is demanding of your effort, but if you have a physical pleasure to only do things like that (laughs), you understand. It is something.”

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“The Gates” (2005)

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions

Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre: To Survive on This Shore

Posted on June 18, 2018

Duchess Milan, 69, Los Angeles, CA, 2017 © Jess T. Dugan

From 2012 through 2017, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre travelled across the United States to meet with older trans and gender non-conforming people who live on their own terms, surviving and thriving despite all of life’s unexpected turns.

Understanding the power of representation, Dugan and Fabbre assembled an incredible collection of portraits and stories of people who live within the complex intersections of gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, geographic location, and age for the incredible new book To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer Verlag). The result is a phenomenal portrait of people from all walks of life who have lived to tell their tales – a feat unto itself given the fact that the average trans life expectancy is just 35 years old.

“From the beginning, we were mindful of trying to include as wide a range of experiences as possible,” Dugan explains. “Some people may think of LGBTQ as one community, but each person featured in the book approaches their identity in a different way.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Dee Dee Ngozi, 55, Atlanta, GA, 2016 © Jess T. Dugan.

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Photography

Fabio Sgroi: Palermo 1984-1986, Early Works

Posted on June 18, 2018

Picture it: Sicily, 1984. A young man named Fabio Sgroi is coming of age in Palermo, while a mafia war rages around him. The city is dark and desolate, but Sgroi and his friends find solace in the town’s nascent punk scene that – at this time at least – is strictly underground.

Over the next two years, Sgroi documents the punks, anarchists, surly drunkards, and melancholy monsters who gather regularly in Politeama Square or in each other’s homes, playing music and plotting schemes. Theirs is a teen rebellion filled with adolescent angst, the final chapter of a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; the last moment before the realities of adulthood begin to set in.

With the publication of Palermo 1984-1986, Early Works (Yard Press), Sgroi’s second book, we are transported to this Palermo – “an apotheosis of anarchy, where anomaly is normalcy,” as Francesco De Grandi describes it in the afterword. Ahead of the book’s release this Friday, Sgroi tells us more about this moment in subcultural history and the unique nature of Palermo punk.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Man

Categories: 1980s, AnOther Man, Art, Books, Music, Photography

This is No Dream: Making Rosemary’s Baby

Posted on June 13, 2018

Mia Farrow. Photography by Bob Willoughby © MPTV Images / Reel Art Press

In 1968, film director Roman Polanski brought Rosemary’s Baby to life and forever changed the way we imagine horror films. In a genre best known for its gruesome and grisly tropes, Rosemary’s Baby made the realm of the supernatural all too plausible in a delectable mixture of the mystical and the mundane.

The exquisitely cinematic film, which moves at a dreamlike pace, takes place inside New York’s stately Dakota building on 72nd Street and Central Park South, where a coven of witches decides to impregnate a young Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) with the child of Satan. Rosemary’s Baby is meticulously crafted so that every moment slowly unfolds in an exquisite tension that denies release until a denouement so quiet you realise there is no escape.

Yet, despite – or perhaps because of – the aesthetic perfection of Polanski’s work, the film production was a horror story all its own, one that is meticulously recounted in This Is No Dream: Making Rosemary’s Baby by James Munn (Reel Art Press). Set for release on June 12, the 50th anniversary of the legendary film, the book takes behind the scenes and on to the set, where drama was ever present.

“There was never a dull moment,” set photographer Bob Willoughby observes, as his photos help to convey the dark undercurrents at work. Although Polanski was riding high, at the height of his stardom while making this film, his countless scheduling delays put his job in jeopardy. At the same time, actor John Cassavetes, who co-starred as Guy Woodhouse, was ready to fight Polanski over creative differences.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Categories: 1960s, AnOther, Books, Photography

Stanley Kubrick: Through a Different Lens

Posted on June 13, 2018

Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick with Faye Emerson from “Faye Emerson: Young Lady in a Hurry”, 1950. © Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was just 17 years old when he became a staff photographer for Look, one of the biggest large format photo magazines of the ’40s. The Bronx native was a natural behind the camera, capturing scenes of everyday life that perfectly prefigured the intense sensibilities that would come to define his films.

In the era when Weegee ruled the New York photo scene, Kubrick began to carve out a space for himself, shooting the common man and woman as they went about the business of modern life in the years immediately following World War II. Although the scenes could be pedestrian, his photographs were anything but – as Kubrick skillfully crafted a palpable sense of intensity, drama, and tension that made every picture vibrate with life.

Rarely seen photographs from Kubrick’s work for Look at the subject of Through a Different Lens, a new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York and book published by Taschen. Here, we travel with Kubrick over a period of five years, as he traverses the streets of New York, bringing us onto the movie set, under the big top, into the boxing ring, and backstage on Broadway to get a look at extraordinary lives as they unfolded.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Joseph Rodriguez: Spanish Harlem – El Barrio in the 80s

Posted on June 11, 2018

In the wake of World War I, Puerto Rican and Latin American immigrants first began arriving in New York, settling in a little corner of upper Manhattan around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue, which is now known as Spanish Harlem. With a foothold firmly established in El Barrio, the neighborhood blossomed after World War II, when a new wave of immigration transformed the face of the city.

By 1960, some 63,000 Puerto Ricans called Spanish Harlem home, bringing the culture of the Caribbean to the northern climes. With bodegas and botánicas catering to the culinary and spiritual needs of the people, Spanish Harlem became an enclave unto itself.

But the land of the free was hardly this to the immigrants who faced a system of exclusion that kept them in a state of poverty. By 1970, Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan established a policy of “benign neglect” that deprived Latinx and African-American communities nationwide of basic government systems. Add to this a drug war started by the Nixon White House to flood these neighborhoods with heroin in order to destabilize and criminalize the population, and the results were devastating.

By the late 1980s, after crack made its way through the streets, the people of Spanish Harlem were struggling with rampant crime, addiction, and poverty. At the same time, AIDS was taking innocent lives while the Reagan White House turned a blind eye on a plague that was disproportionately harming the Latinx and African American communities.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Puerto Rican-American photographer Joseph Rodriguez became familiar Spanish Harlem as a child, when he traveled uptown to visit his uncle who had a candy shop in El Barrio. Like many of his generation, he fell victim to the heroin epidemic and ended up incarcerated on Rikers Island for drug possession during the early 1970s.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Lorna Simpson: Collages

Posted on June 5, 2018

Earth & Sky #30, 2016. By Lorna Simpson, From Lorna Simpson Collages, Chronicle Books 2018.

It is a point of beauty, pride, power, and politicisation, but black hair has also long been a target for racial bias and discrimination. On May 16, the United States supreme court refused to hear the case of Chastity Jones, an African-American woman whose job offer from Catastrophe Management Solutions (CMS) in Alabama was rescinded when she refused to shear off her locs. CMS maintained that this traditional black hairstyle, which holds spiritual significance for some who wear it, was not in compliance with the company’s policy.

The supreme court effectively denied Jones and others who wear locs protection under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws any form of discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. The court’s rebuff ensures that employers and schools can continue to deny black men and women access on the basis of their hair – be it worn in dreads, afros, or any design that is not “in compliance” with racially determined standards of appearance.

While the court sidesteps responsibility to its citizens, African-American artist Lorna Simpson restores pride and power to the people. Born in 1960, Simpson came of age as the flames of the Black Power and Pan-African movements blazed bright, the images of “Black is Beautiful,” which embraced black hair and African features, became an integral part of her aesthetic sensibility.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

For Rose, 2013. By Lorna Simpson, From Lorna Simpson Collages, Chronicle Books 2018.

Categories: AnOther Man, Art, Books

Albert Watson: The Eye

Posted on June 1, 2018

L: Christopher Makos, Altered Image, Andy with Black Hair, Holding a Mirror, New York, 1981. Photo © Christopher Makos. R: Anton Corbijn, Damien Hirst, 2011. Photo © Anton Corbijn © The Eye by Fotografiska, to be published by teNeues in May 2018

For art lovers, visiting Fotografiska, the photography museum in Stockholm, is a must. Unlike traditional institutions, Fotografiska bills itself as a meeting place where everything revolves around photography. But the museum is highly regarded for staging exhibitions of work by world-renowned photographers, many who’ve never shown in Sweden, as well as emerging talents.

Fotografiska is in the process of expanding its international presence, opening new locations in London and New York in early 2019. To commemorate the new outposts, the museum just released The Eye by Fotografiska (teNeues), a monumental photography book featuring work by artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Ren Hang, Gus Van Sant, and Annie Leibovitz, among many more. Featuring more than 250 photos by about 80 photographers, the book is a love letter to the camera and the way it transforms how we perceive the world.

Scottish photographer Albert Watson appreciates the power of photography more than most. Over five decades, he has established himself as a master of the medium, working across all genres. Whether photographing Michael Jackson for the cover of Invincible or Tupac for Juice, Watson has been creating iconic images since 1973, when he shot his first professional portrait of Alfred Hitchcock wringing the neck of a rubber chicken.

Watson wrote a rare essay, published in The Eye, reflecting on the elements that make a photograph unforgettable. VICE caught up with him recently to talk about the power of the medium, at a time when nearly everyone with a smartphone holds the power to create images and distribute them instantaneously.

Read the Full Story at Vice Online

Albert Watson, ‘Monkey with Gun, New York’, 1992

Categories: Art, Books, Photography, Vice