Posts from the “Books” Category

Matthew Rolston: Hollywood Royale

Posted on March 1, 2018

Cybill Shepherd, Reclining, Los Angeles, 1986Matthew Rolston © MRPI, Courtesy Fahey/Klein Los Angeles

Anitta, Flower Gown, The Surreal Thing, Series, New York, 1987Matthew Rolston © MRPI, Courtesy Fahey/Klein Los Angeles

The magical grandeur of Hollywood glamour first came into vogue when Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich fled their native Germany in the 1930s and brought the aesthetics of the Weimar Republic stateside. Together they made six films at Paramount Studios, and introduced an innovative look using the spotlight on the face to create a luminous mask that stood in sharp contrast to the dark shadows it cast, emulating the aesthetic of 1920s Berlin.

By the early 1960s, the look had run its course and faded away, until Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton resurrected it in the late 1970s. Los Angeles native Matthew Rolston got his start at this time, shooting for Interview before rising to the heights of celebrity photography as a new Golden Age of Hollywood photography took shape. Working for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, Rolston embraced the aesthetics of George Hurrell and Irving Penn, creating timeless portraits of the era’s greatest icons from Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna to Christian Lacroix, Yohji Yamamoto, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

In celebration, Hollywood Royale: Out of the School of Los Angeles opens tomorrow at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, in conjunction with the recent publication of a magnificent monograph by the same name from teNeues featuring works made between 1977 and 1993. Here, Rolston speaks with us about the timeless allure of the glamour photo.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Don Johnson, Polo Clothes, Miami, 1986Matthew Rolston © MRPI, Courtesy Fahey/Klein Los Angeles

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

Philip Trager: New York in the 1970s

Posted on February 16, 2018

West Broadway, 1978. © Philip Trager

In 1970, Daniel Patrick Moynihan convinced the Nixon White House to support a policy of “benign neglect,” wherein basic government services were systemically denied to cities across the United States with large African-American and Latinx populations.

New York City quickly became the nation’s most famous victim of “urban blight” at the hands of the state. The city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy as manufacturers fled en masse, while landlords hired arsonists to torch their buildings knowing they could get more money from insurance than they could from resale. The city fell into desolate and desperate straits. Yet within this horrific landscape, New York maintained its dignity and strength, becoming the site for the most explosive cultural movements of the late 20th century.

The city’s landmark buildings and dramatic vistas were a symbol of the potent energy that lay within, a vision that spoke to American photographer Philip Trager. He and his wife Ina packed a view camera and two tripods into their Jeep Commando and drove into Manhattan from Connecticut, where they lived at the time.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

West 122nd Street, 1979. © Philip Trager

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Mr Chow: 50 Years

Posted on February 15, 2018

“Michael Chow, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basquiat’s mother and friends” (1984). Silver gelatine print; 77/8 x 97/8 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Portrait of Michael Chow” (1984). Polymer silkscreened on canvas; 80 x 80 inches.Artwork by Andy Warhol. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Restauranteur. Designer. Architect. Art Collector. World Traveler. Icon of style and substance Michael Chow – or M, as he is known – has transformed fine dining into an art at Mr Chow, providing a magical bridge between the East and the West for the past fifty years.

M was born Zhou Yinghua in 1939 in Shanghai to Zhou Xingfang (1895-9175), a leading figure in the Peking Opera who wrote and acted in more than 650 titles during his illustrious career, and Lilian Qui (1905-1968), who hailed from a wealthy family whose fortune was made in tea.

At the age of 13, everything changed when M was sent to boarding school in London. What he didn’t know at the time was that he would never see or communicate with his father again. “Suddenly there was a void within me,” M reveals.

Into that chasm, M plunged – first in despair, then finding himself in art. He studied at St. Martins and went on to paint for a decade before the market forces made it apparent that it was not receptive to a Chinese artist. Once again, M turned to art to guide the way, launching the very first Mr Chow in Knightsbridge in February 1968.

From the very outset, Mr Chow was not just a restaurant – it was theatre: a stage for pleasure, passion, and intrigue, where Italian waiters served fine Chinese cuisine to sophisticated clientele and artworks by Allen Jones, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, and Jim Dine became an integral part of the experience. He established three restaurants in London before setting a course to conquer America.

Over the past half-century, M has opened restaurants in Beverly Hills, New York, Miami, and Las Vegas, always bringing glamour and theatre to the dining experience. Now, on the occasion of Mr Chow’s golden anniversary, M has released, Mr Chow: 50 Years (Prestel/Delmonico), a beautifully illustrated volume that explores a singular life in art, architecture, design, and cuisine, combining the very best of the east and the west.

Featuring works by Helmut Newton, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf, Francesco Clemente, and Ed Ruscha, just to name a few, the book reveals the significant role Mr Chow has played in the art world over five decades. Here, M speaks with us about a life in art: the past, present, and future vision of a man whose magic has touched countless hearts.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Manhattan, Photography

Lyle Ashton Harris: Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs

Posted on February 8, 2018

M. Lamar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1993. © Lyle Ashton Harris.

In the early morning on 17 October 1997, Lyle Ashton Harris wrote a poem “For Lawrence,” which he printed out and pasted into his journal, asking, “is there other ways to know thyself? / I guess in a sense I am still waiting / peaking through / I cry / fear, wondering, what, if I let it go, / to discover, to unveil another, to write, / to share myself with another, to trust myself. / i am still that little boy.”

The poem goes on to reflect on dying and death, on fear and desire, on the nerve it takes to be true to one’s self. It is something we all face in one way or another in this life – though the artist may grapple with these issues openly in their work, taking vulnerability to new heights of the sublime.

For Harris, the ascent began in 1993, when his exhibition Face: Lyle Ashton Harris opened at the New Museum. Here, he used photography, video, and audio to examine race, sexuality, and gender during a period when multiculturalism, globalisation, and AIDS activism dominated the world stage, transforming the conversation around black masculinity to expand beyond the rigid boundaries proscribed for African-American men.

The following year, Harris exhibited The Good Life, his first solo show, at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, where he subverted markers of identity to show just how vast blackness is when seen from the inside looking out. The show solidified Harris’s place in a new generation of artists transforming the art world.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Essex Hemphill, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1992. © Lyle Ashton Harris.

“Altar, Koreatown (Journal #1)”, 1997. © Lyle Ashton Harris.

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

Meryl Meisler: Self-Portraits Before Cindy Sherman

Posted on February 7, 2018

Self-Portrait, Playmate Hostess, NY, NY, December 1978 ©Meryl Meisler

Growing up in Long Island during the 1950s and 60s, Meryl Meisler had the typical suburban life: Girl Scouts, ballet and tap dance lessons, and prom. But while she loved her family and friends, she didn’t quite fit in. She quickly realized she didn’t want to be a housewife, teacher, nurse, or a secretary—pretty much the only options available to young women at that time.

As Meisler came of age, she began to discover her sexuality as a lesbian as well as her identity as an artist. “Photography is in my genes,” Meisler said. Her paternal grandfather Murray Meisler, her uncle Al, and her father Jack had all been lifelong practitioners of the art.

Meisler got her first camera in second grade, but it wasn’t until she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the mid-1970s that she became serious about the form while pursuing an MA in Art. During school breaks, she returned to her childhood home, where she staged a series of self-portraits that examined her past, present, and future. At this point, Meisler hadn’t heard of Cindy Sherman, but she had the same instinct. She sought to examine the construction of the female gender, from its rituals to its poses to its personas.

A selection of these photographs appears in Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY 70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre), while others have recently come to light as Meisler prepares for her next book. Here, she speaks with us about this seminal period of her life, sharing a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman ready to take flight.

Read the Full Story at Vice

Self-Portrait, Girl Scout Applying Lipstick, North Massapequa, NY, January 1975 ©Meryl Meisler

Categories: 1970s, Books, Photography, Vice, Women

Manhattan Transit: The Subway Photographs of Helen Levitt

Posted on February 2, 2018

Helen Levitt was an extremely private person and preferred to let her photographs speak for her – and if you listen very carefully, you might just hear the Bensonhurst accent coming through. “Dawling,” a photograph might intone with intimate familiarity, suggesting we come closer to get the gossip or a bite to eat. “Fuhgeddaboudit,” another might insist, making it clear the window for opportunity is firmly shut.

The Brooklyn soul of Levitt is firmly entrenched in her perfectly composed portraits of daily life in New York. Once upon a time before gentrification took hold, New Yorkers were everything America aspired to be. They came from all walks of life, frequently crossing paths, having the good sense not to gawk or to stare because that would be gauche. They came to expect the unexpected and took it in stride, spouting Cindy Adams catchphrase, “Only in New York, kids,” with pride.

They were characters, in every sense of the word, but rarely were they posers because somebody would pull their card. The New York of Helen Levitt spanned seven decades, from the 1930s through 90s, as she walked it streets, discreetly taking photographs without anyone clocking her. She was as much a part of the scene as everyone else, but she was on a mission: to create a body of work in tribute to this big galoot, this metropolis sitting on a pile of schist that would becoming the most powerful city in the world while Levitt walked its streets.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Khalik Allah: Souls on Concrete

Posted on January 29, 2018

Photo: © Khalik Allah

Photo: © Khalik Allah

In the summer of 1998, Khalik Allah had come to a major crossroad after failing eighth grade. Dancing with a B-boy crew had been keeping him out late at night, and school had failed to interest him. Yet he understood the importance of educating himself. Concerned about his future, he headed up to Harlem and began to study with the Five-Percent Nation at the Allah School.

The Five-Percent teachings provided Allah with the self-knowledge and street smarts needed to turn his life around. When he graduated high school, he received a $1,000 scholarship that he used to buy his first camera. He took up filmmaking, then photography, with a mission to create an original style that he could use to create what he describes as “psychic x-rays” – portraits of the soul that lies within.

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Photo: © Khalik Allah

Categories: Art, Books, Huck, Manhattan, Photography

Harry Gruyaert: East/West

Posted on January 24, 2018

Las Vegas downtown motel, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, 1982. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

“Higher emotions cannot be communicated in color,” American photographer Paul Strand claimed – revealing the power of irrational beliefs to take root in the mind and spread like a virus through those who fear to question ideology in search of the truth.

The decision to invite Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert (b. 1941) to join Magnum Photos in 1982 caused dissent among the ranks. At that time Gruyaert had been working in color for two decades, but the powers that be “didn’t see color,” so to speak. Photography was still a fledgling medium in the art world, and those who were desperate to join the ranks revealed a powerful insecurity that fed simple-minded biases and false hierarchies designed to exclude innovative thinkers who worked outside the narrow frame of the status quo.

Gruyaert, however, was undeterred. His commitment remained consistent throughout his remarkable career. In 1981, Geo photo editor Alice Rose George commissioned Gruyaert to photograph Las Vegas. Rather than provide his take on the tired tropes of the Strip, Gruyaert ventured off the beaten path ton the Vegas where residents lived. The result was entirely too realistic; Vegas was not the place of fantasies and spectacle – it was a world where people eked out their existence on the margins.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Moscow, Russia, 1989. © Harry Gruyaert Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Feature Shoot, Photography

Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style

Posted on January 22, 2018

Tony Vaccaro, Georgia O’Keefe with “Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow” and the desert, 1960. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of Tony Vaccaro studio.

Georgia O’Keeffe is an American original, who created the life she wanted to live on her own terms, liberated from the constraints and constructs imposed on women during the first half of the 20th century. For over seven decades, O’Keeffe cultivated her public persona, challenging all aspects of the status quo, in order to live her truth in the eyes of the world.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style is the first exhibition to examine the relationship between the artist’s lifestyle and her work. Curated by Wanda M. Corn and assisted by coordinating curator Austen Barron Bailly, the exhibition features a selection of never-before-seen garments designed and created by O’Keeffe that became part of her signature look, along with iconic artworks and photographs by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, Cecil Beaton, Bruce Weber, Todd Webb, Arnold Newman, John Loengard, and Tony Vaccaro, among others.

“Georgia O’Keeffe was never afraid of standing out,” Barron Bailly observes. “She had a certain fearlessness and a conviction of who she was and what she needed to do to make the art she was called to make. This show demonstrates her identity as an independent, as someone who did not worry about fitting into a mainstream conception of what a woman should look like and how a woman should dress, of what and how a woman should paint.”

Read the Full Story at Huck Online

Georgia O’Keeffe, Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (Ram’s Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal, 1992.11.28. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.

Categories: Art, Books, Exhibitions, Huck, Women

Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful

Posted on January 22, 2018

Untitled (Naturally ’68 photo shoot in the Apollo Theater featuring Grandassa models and founding AJASS members Kwame Brathwaite, Frank Adu, Elombe Brath, and Ernest Baxter 1968, printed 2016. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) 1968, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

On the evening of January 28, 1962, a massive crowd gathered outside Harlem’s Purple Manor, eager to gain entrance to Naturally 62 – the landmark event that introduced the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement to the world.

The brainchild of photographer Kwame Brathwaite (born in 1938) and his older brother Elombe Brath (now deceased), Naturally 62 presented Blackness in its natural state through a powerful combination of fashion, music, and politics. The brothers, who were born in Brooklyn to a politically active family, had embraced Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement and co-founded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and fashion designers. “Our mission was to reach the folks so that they could see their own work,” Brathwaite reveals. “It was a time when people were trying to organize and improve the community, to get themselves in order so that they would not be the low man on the totem pole.”

The brothers worked on two fronts, supporting the African independence movement while embracing Black business at home, producing jazz concerts at legendary locales including Club 845 in the Bronx and Small’s Paradise in Harlem. But it was a local beauty contest that gave the brothers the inspiration for Naturally 62. A year earlier, while attending the annual Marcus Garvey Day Celebration, they watched ‘The Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest’, wherein models came to the stage without make-up, their hair free from heat press.

Read the Full Story at AnOther

Untitled (Self Portrait) 1964, printed 2017. Photography by Kwame Brathwaite, Image courtesy the artist and Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles.

Categories: 1960s, Africa, AnOther, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Calvin Reid: View from the Hilltop

Posted on January 21, 2018

Calvin Reid

When I began my career as a book publicist, Calvin Reid was the first journalist I met in person. His warmth and wit, his disarming charm, and his knowledge of the book publishing industry cannot be underestimated. As Senior News Editor of Publishers Weekly, the premier trade publication, Mr. Reid has been at the forefront of the major changes in book publishing for the past thirty years.

More than a reporter, Mr. Reid is a businessman. He understands the nature of the medium to the point that he has been a central figure in the rise and success of graphic novels as a genre of publishing. Here, he shares his experiences as an artist and journalist over the past five decades.

Calvin Reid: “I was a curious kind of kid, always reading books, newspapers, and comics (comics obsess me to this day) and sports. I still love comics and sports to this day. I was always a reader. As a kid I realized that if you read a lot you had an edge on people particularly adults, especially if you read the newspaper and remarked on a story. I remember thinking that they liked that. I read endlessly.

I always loved books as a kid. As a job, it was a pure accident. They used to call book publishing, ‘The Accidental Profession.’ A lot of people entered the profession from very disparate fields. Often they started in business, and couldn’t bear it any longer. They made career turns and lucked into publishing. I came about it the same way.

My background is as an artist. I have a BFA in Art Education with a minor in Photography from Howard University, and an MFA in Printmaking from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. I also wrote for The Hilltop, the Howard University student newspaper, and was the newspaper’s photo editor. We had a big budget, I think about $80-90K per year, and all the editors were paid a stipend. I wrote about jazz and art in The Hilltop and supported myself as a freelance photographer covering a regular schedule of writers’ conferences held at Howard.

While I was there, I photographed people like James Baldwin, C.L.R. James, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and musicians from Archie Shepp to Sonny Rollins. I also attended FESTAC 77 in Lagos, Nigeria. It was an Olympics of African Diasporan culture. It was held for one month, every four years and attracted artists, intellectuals and academics of African descent from around the globe. I covered the whole event as a photographer along with another reporter from The Hilltop. Probably one of the most incredible experiences of my college years.

“One of my great friends from Howard of that time is the journalist/critic and musician Greg Tate. He was an all around Afro-Futuristic icon even then. When I came up in Washington, D.C. during the 70s everyone was publishing their own little magazines at the time. We were all helping each other do our own magazines. It was an interesting time to be at Howard as it was a time of transition from the black power movement to more assimilationist black cultural politics that followed. The art department in particular was very focused on black nationalist sensibility and activism and very concerned with the role of the black artist. That really prepared me for the rise of multiple viewpoints, parallel art worlds, market factions, and commercial critiques.

Calvin Reid

I came to New York to be an artist. I arrived June 7, 1981. I continued to produce etchings and lithographs as well as drawings after I moved to New York and I have exhibited widely in New York and in shows around the country. Moving to New York and meeting and marrying my wife were the two best decisions of my life.

New York is the central marketplace for art and after grade school (and a short stay in Pittsburgh) I had moved to the East Village/Lower East Side of New York just as the East Village art scene started to buzz in the 1980s. I was making prints at the historic Printmaking Workshop, under the late Bob Blackburn. A little later my roommates (shout out to Patty Harris and Janet Gillespie!) and I started a zine called 108 East Village Review, named after the building number of the loft we were living in. We reviewed the shows and artists on the gallery scene that blew up after FUN Gallery opened in the East Village. We reviewed shows, went to parties, rode that wave.

The East Village was having a moment, and I said, ‘Hey we should write about this!’ The artists were doing it themselves. We weren’t waiting to be picked out of a crowd. It was a very cool time to be in New York. You could show your work in a gallery, or an abandoned building. You could meet editors, collectors, curators, and publishers directly. Writing about art got me into shows. The early East Village Galleries, artist-run galleries, that were showing their friends before it all evolved into a more professional gallery scene. I eventually went on to write about contemporary art for the old Arts magazine, Art in America and other art magazines.

My plan was to find a way to work and to do the artist thing. I got a job as a temp; I was a ‘Kelly Girl’ (Laughs). I worked for Kelly Services in different places including Matthew Bender, which is a legal publisher. Later I switched jobs and became a typist at Library Journal, which eventually led to me becoming a journalist. At Library Journal I typed up the book reviews that librarians wrote on little sheets of paper, each about 300 words long. They were mailed in from all over the country and even from Europe where we had our far-flung correspondents. I typed them into the Atex system; this was back in the early days of digital layout and electronic production.

This was a great job to have as an artist. I showed up, typed, and was out by 5:01 p.m. I was surrounded by books. Books were always magic to me. They take you away from where you are, they make you think, and they enable you to connect with other people even though no one is around. Books provide entertainment and education.

While I was at Library Journal, I moved over to Publishers Weekly to be the Assistant to the News Editor in 1986. In a weird way it is almost the same job as I have now—except everything has changed. PW is a multi-faceted publication that is updated hour-by-hour. I am not only a Senior News Editor at PW, I am also the co-editor of PW Comics World, with my colleague and co-editor Heidi MacDonald. My obsession with comics has evolved into a department in the magazine. I first began reviewing graphic novels at PW in the late 1980s before eventually launching regular news coverage of comics publishing and later, with Heidi, PW Comics World, a now-twice a month newsletter on comics and graphic novel publishing.

Comics in this country have traditionally been part of the magazine industry. But thanks partly to the role of PW and our coverage (as well as the changing attitudes of librarians and teachers), comics and graphic novels are now established as a category in the book industry. Book-format comics were originally an afterthought in the comics industry. That was transformed when graphic novels became a significant and growing niche in publishing proper. The big New York houses now all have imprints or editors that acquire comics titles for their lists. PW has become a pulpit to bring comics to the book market. It has proven itself indispensable.

Publishing has been transformed by the digital world. The challenge now is covering an industry that doesn’t look anything like it once did. I feel like I live in the future. I don’t even remember how I was able to do my job in the old days. “

Categories: Art, Books