Posts from the “Crave” Category

Devin Allen Awarded the Inaugural Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: © Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum

The Gordon Parks Foundation has named photographer Devin Allen as one of two inaugural recipients of a new fellowship program. Allen, who was born and raised in West Baltimore, catapulted to national fame when his documentary photograph of an unidentified black man running from a phalanx of police made the cover of Time magazine in May 2015 – only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had ever received such prominent placement.

The photograph was taken on April 25, 2015, as Allen documented the Baltimore uprising in the wake of the extrajudicial execution of Freddie Gray. Allen, who grew up just five minutes away from the site of Gray’s fatal encounter with the police on April 12, told Crave last year, “People don’t understand Baltimore. They only think of ‘The Wire’…it’s worse than that. But we have a strong community. My city is real. There’s no sugar coating. It’s a small city. In twenty, thirty minutes I can be anywhere. You see the issues the people face. That’s why I love it so much. If you’re from Baltimore you can make it anywhere.”

Indeed, Allen has shown the world he has what it takes to make it. Committed to his community, he established “Through Their Eyes,” a project that trains Baltimore students in underfunded public school in photography. The mission is to arm the youth of his city with cameras, not guns, and to show them how to spread “hope and love through art.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Meet Awol Erizku, the Man Who Photographed Beyoncé’s Maternity Pictures

Posted on February 3, 2017

Courtesy of Beyonce’s Instagram

Crave fave Awol Erizku has made headlines worldwide as the artist who photographed Beyoncé’s pregnancy photographs. The superstar wowed the world on the first day of Black History Month when she posted a portrait of herself on Instagram wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and veil, showing her bare belly swelling with life, with the announcement that she and Jay Z are expecting twins. That post, which set the internet aflame, now has more than 9.2 million likes.

Seated in profile in front of an enormous wreath, Beyoncé evoked the goddess of fertility and the rites of spring. Yesterday, ARTNews reported that a source close to Nina Johnson gallery, Miami, revealed that Awol Erizku confirmed via text that he took the photograph.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

“Vision and Justice,” Sarah Lewis’s bestselling issue of Aperture Magazine

Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing

Posted on January 31, 2017

Photo: (Triangle) “Pyramids” Courtesy of The Monacelli Press.

The human mind is a magical, mysterious place where things are (as much as they not) what they appear to be. Within the mind, layers are added to experience in the form of narration, translation, and interpretation in search of the great, vast overwhelming call for meaning in this majestic and monstrous world. There are so many questions we ask ourselves when we behold that which lays before our eyes. The desire to know can become a need, as our mind is inclined to require a structure upon which it can operate.

So we find ourselves in this curious space where we both seek and receive information that we do and do not understand. Most of us are disinclined to the rigors of critical thought, for it drains us of illusions and fantasies and replaces it with a state of ongoing doubt. It is far easier, and less unnerving, to skate along the surface of life–though invariably the ice is thin in places we may not foresee. Thus, the questions show themselves. Who the what now—and can someone tell please me why?

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave

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.

Read the Story at Crave Online

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.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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.”

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

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.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography