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Posts from the “Books” Category

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.

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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.

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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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Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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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.

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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.

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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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Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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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

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.

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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.

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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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Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, 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.

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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

Yoav Horesh: Aftermath

Posted on January 12, 2017

Photo: August 9, 2011. Sbaroo Pizzeria, Jerusalem. Photographed: August 2003. © Yoav Horesy, courtesy of SPQR Editions.

Israeli photographer Yoav Horesh remembers a formative moment many years ago while walking with his father through a pedestrian mall in downtown Jerusalem on the way to buy new shoes. “A block behind us, a guy came running down the street, shooting an AK 47 and throwing hand grenades. My father pulled me into an alley, and in three or four minutes, everything was over. [The gunman] was probably shot dead; the ambulances came. Then my father said, ‘Okay, we’re going to buy shoes now.’”

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“Is it right or not? I don’t have an answer,” Horesh observes, pondering the implications of an immediate return to normalcy. But the question remains. It is a question that has affected Horesh in ways he’s just beginning to actualize through his work as a photographer, which takes on the subject of trauma with thought, concern, and tremendous care.

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Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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December 1, 2001. Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem. Photographed: January 2004. © Yoav Horesy, courtesy of SPQR Editions.

Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Iwan Schumacher: 1972

Posted on January 3, 2017

Photo: © Iwan Schumacher, courtesy of Edition Patrick Frey.

The beauty of liberation is that it is a deeply personal affair, requiring none but ourselves to realize. In many ways, it is a test of courage more than anything else: do we have the faith and the will to choose freedom from the known? For artists, the answer is always, “Yes!” That’s what makes them who they are; they cannot be contained by preexisting ideologies. Pablo Picasso knowingly advised, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them alike an artist.” And sometimes all it takes to break the rules is to discard them hand over fist.

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In early 1972, Iwan Schumacher had been living in south London, where he had been teaching photography at an art school. He bought a Canon half-frame camera that allowed him to take 72 pictures, as opposed to 36, on a regular 35mm roll of film. The camera was small enough to travel everywhere he went, quickly becoming a diary of his daily experiences. Later in the year, Schumacher returned to Switzerland to assist on a documentary movie and started to work on his first film. All the while, he continued to take photographs, amassing an archive of more than 3,000 images.

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

Hollywood Royalty | Debbie Reynolds & Carrie Fisher

Posted on January 1, 2017

Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds, 1973

One of the greatest love stories of our time, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher will be laid to rest together, as they were never meant to be apart. Together, they defined the changing image of women for over 60 years, fiercely self reliant, in varying states of grace.

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But it was Postcards from the Edge that hit the high water mark, most likely because books are my first true love. The fact that Carrie, who “hid in books” while growing up could then use them to reveal herself to the world with a wry, tender humor to process the pain she felt, and then turn around and write the screenplay so that no less than Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine could bring this story to life….

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Whew. Aspirational, inspirational, pure liberation through art, beauty, and truth. I wrote a few words for CraveOnline for two women who bring tears of love and happiness to my eyes.

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

Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb: Violet Isle

Posted on December 30, 2016

Photo: Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, 1993. Photo by Alex Webb.

Cuba, the Violet Isle—a name known to few for the rich color of its fertile soil, is an island that has captivated the imagination of the world through a tumultuous history that has played a significant role in the political machinations of the twentieth century. It is a land has emerged in the twenty-first century as a complex nation coming to terms with a fate that is yet unforeseen. As we reflect upon the country’s future, we may look to its recent past, to its people and its landscape.

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Over the course of 15 years, photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb made 11 trips to the Violet Isle, each of them documenting different corners of the country. While Alex Webb focused on the country’s street life, Rebecca Norris Webb turned her attention to the displays of animal life, exploring tiny zoos, pigeon societies, and personal menageries. Together, they published Violet Isle in 2009 with Radius Books and while the book has since sold out and gone out of print, they continue to share the work in exhibitions around the world.

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Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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Photo: Havana, 2008. Photo by Rebecca Norris Webb

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

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art

Posted on December 22, 2016


Artwork: Amy Sherald, High Yella Masterpiece: We Ain’t No Cotton Pickin’ Negroes, 2011. Oil on canvas; 59 x 69 inches (149.86 x 175.26 cm). Collection of Keith Timmons, ESQ, CPA. Image courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. © Amy Sherald.

The American South: a land shrouded with myth and mystery, wrapped in layers of illusions and untold history. Novelist William Faulkner suggested that the South is not so much a “geographical place” as an “emotional idea,” furthering the disjunction between the reality and illusion that has permeated the South throughout its existence.

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Place is the foundation upon which culture is built and from this culture comes ten thousand things that shape and influence the human experience, from the physical and the spiritual to the intellectual and the emotional realms. To understand the multifaceted nature of the South, it behooves us to take a more nuanced view, taking in the many elements that make the South its own complex and fascinating world.

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Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, currently on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, through January 8, 2017, does just this, approaching the subject from the perspective of its aesthetic progeny. The exhibition presents the work of 60 contemporary artists including Romare Bearden, Sanford Biggers, William Christenberry, Thornton Dial, Sam Durant, William Eggleston, Jessica Ingram, Kerry James Marshall, Richard Misrach Gordon Parks, Ebony G. Patterson, Fahmu Pecou, Burk Uzzle, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others.

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Rachel Boillot, 38765 Panther Burn, MS from the series Post Script, 2014. Archival pigment print, edition 2/12; 20 x 25 inches (50.8 x 63.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Rachel Boillot.

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

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have

Posted on December 19, 2016

Artwork: Jaean-Michel Basquiat, Jack Johnson, 1982 © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, New York 2016.

Brooklyn’s finest Jean-Michel Basquiat first came to fame writing SAMO© on the streets of New York between 1977 and 1980. He came up with the name one day while he and high school friend Al Diaz (BOMB 1) were smoking weed they called “the same old shit.” They shortened to “Same Old,” which easily became “SAMO” and a character was born.

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SAMO© found his way on to the streets, a provocateur with a pithy yet poetic sense of humor. The name would appear alongside aphorisms, multiple-choice questions, or other turns of phrase that mocked the world at large. Anthony Haden-Guest reports in his book True Colors (1998) that Basquiat had told him, “Samo was sophomoric. Same old shit. It was supposed to be a logo like Pepsi.”

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Perhaps this is why it caught on and stood out from the flourishing graff scene that dominated to New York. Basquiat did not participate in the glorious “Wild Style” of the day; no masterpieces of color and line that made heads turn and tongues wag. Instead, he kept to simple, clean block letters and went about his day, dropping bon mots that captured the attention of the Downtown art scene as it was taking shape.

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

Cut That Out: Collage in Contemporary Design

Posted on December 14, 2016

ATELIER BINGO: BLUE FLORAL ABSTRACT for Wrap magazine. Handmade collage and screen print, 2014

Perhaps there is nothing quite so human as re-imagining the world as we wish it to be, whether to illustrate our hope and dreams or our aggression and fears. The work of art is a bridge between emotion, idea, and action, allowing us to manifest a vision of the innermost workings of the heart, mind, and soul that we may share with the sighted world so that they, too, may behold that which cannot be spoken with words but must be said in every language at the same time.

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The art of collage, a technique assembles different, disparate forms in order to create a new whole, dates back to the invention of paper in China around the second century B.C., reminding us that people have always possessed an innate desire to reshape reality to suit their desires. It found different forms over the years, but it wasn’t until 1912, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque introduced it to their oil paintings, that collage gripped the public imagination with limitless possibility.

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YOKOLAND: LEAP INTO THE VOID, personal project. Handmade collage, 2006

Categories: Art, Books, Crave

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