Posts from the “Crave” Category

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.

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….

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.

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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Photo: Havana, 2008. Photo by Rebecca Norris Webb

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

“Hip-Hop Evolution” Is One for the History Books

Posted on December 29, 2016

Photo: Still from “Hip-Hop Evolution”

On August 11, 1973, Hip Hop was born when DJ Kool Herc spun a back-to-school jam in the rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Entrance was 25 cents for the ladies, 50 cents for the fellas, and the spot could only hold 40 or 50 people—but from the footage shot, you could tell they put the Boogie Down in the Bronx.

So what made this Hip Hop and not a regular jam? Well, Herc was the first person to spin just the breaks, the drum (or drum and bass) solo on classic soul and funk records. He brought two copies of each record so he could set them up on the turntables and extend the break just as long as he wanted to. Herc not only created a style and a sound: he turned the turntable into an instrument all its own.

The thing about Hip Hop was, it was the sound of the streets. It was created, innovated, and updated by cats who had music in their blood and a need to dominate. Hip Hop’s formative years were an underground phenomenon; back in the days most stations wouldn’t play it on the radio let alone on MTV. But its isolation gave it strength and integrity—there was no selling out inside the community.

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Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Bronx, Crave, Manhattan, Music

In Memoriam | Remembering the Artists We Lost This Year

Posted on December 27, 2016

Artist Maria Sol Escobar, known as Marisol, photographed in 1968. (Photo by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

Back in grad school, I had a professor who wrote obits for the New York Times and I can still remember the way students denigrated this gig. I didn’t really know what to make of it until this year, when I found myself writing a few obits here and there.

But it wasn’t until I put together this round up for CraveOnline, honoring those we lost in 2016 from Marisol and Zaha Hadid to Bill Cunningham and Malick Sidibe, that I began to understand the sanctity of a beautifully penned obituary. But it was more than that (it always is). It’s that moment where you page through the book of life and tears well to your eyes with recognition.

You realize Muhammad Ali and Howard Bingham left the mortal plane the same year. You remember discovering the work of Zaha Hadid at your first job in publishing at Rizzoli, realizing architecture could go beyond your wildest dreams. You remember Bill Cunningham photographing you are parties here and there, but the only time you made the Times was from the ankle down for the “Shoes” show at FIT!

And you think: I don’t even know these people but I am so grateful to have shared the earth with them ..

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Categories: Art, Crave

“Surreal” is Named Word of the Year

Posted on December 24, 2016

Photo: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images

Iincredibly significant as they occur. But when we awake, if we are lucky enough to remember them, it’s often impossible to make sense of the snippets of information with any sort of logic or sense. Yet we know, from our gut emotional reaction, they were fraught with significance.

While we are apt to discard dreams for their diaphanous nature, we are quick to recognize things are amiss when waking life occurs as a dream. It’s a strange sensation, one that has earned its own word: surreal, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as: “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream; synonyms: unbelievable fantastic.”

On Monday, December 19, Merriam-Webster announced, “’Surreal is our 2016 Word of the Year.” In a statement, the company confirmed that that word was chosen, “because it was looked up significantly more frequently by users in 2016 than it was in previous years, and because there were multiple occasions on which this word was the one clearly driving people to the dictionary.”

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Categories: Crave

Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design

Posted on December 24, 2016

Photo: Omar Victor Diop Aminata, 2013, Photograph from the series The Studio of Vanities © Victor Omar Diop, 2014, Courtesy Magnin-A Gallery, Paris

Since its launch last year at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design, has been touring the world, showcasing contemporary African design in an extraordinary new light. Now on view at Kunsthal, Rotterdam, through January 15, 2017, this landmark exhibition features the work of more than 120 artists and designers working today, introducing a new generation of creators to the global stage.

Featuring object and furniture designs, graphic art, illustration, fashion, architecture, urban design, handicraft, video, film and photography, Making Africa reveals how design relates to and reflect the economic changes across the continent today. Many of the artists featured work in different disciplines and skillfully break with conventions to create an entirely new approach that is equal parts innovative and compelling.

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Vigilism, Idumota Market, Lagos 2081A.D., 2013 from the Our Africa 2081A.D. series, illustration for the Ikiré Jones Heritage Menswear Collection © Courtesy Olalekan [vigilism.com] and Walé Oyéjidé [ikirejones.com

Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting, Photography

Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight

Posted on December 23, 2016

Portrait of Carmen Herrera in front of Blue Monday, 1975, acrylic on canvas, as installed in “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” (September 16, 2016—January 2, 2017), Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. Photograph © Matthew Carasella (September 14, 2016).

At the tender age of 101, Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera is receiving her due with Lines of Sight, the first museum exhibition in New York City in nearly two decades. Currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, now through January 9, 2017, the exhibition focuses on the years between 1948 and 1978, when Herrera developed her groundbreaking style that revolutionized modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition features 50 masterworks including paintings, three-dimensional pieces, and works on paper that embody her signature hard-edged style, which she pioneered throughout the twentieth century. Following the Whitney, the show will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Oho (February 4-April 16 2017).

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

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.

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.

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

The Color Line: African-American Artists and Segregation

Posted on December 20, 2016

Artwork: David Hammons, African American Flag, 1990, 142.2 × 223.5 cm, © David Hammons, Courtesy of L’oeuvre de David Hammons prêtéedans le cadre de l’exposition est la suivante : U.N.I.A Flag, 1990, New York, Hudgins Family Collection

“Few evils are less accessible to the force of reason, or more tenacious of life and power, than a long-standing prejudice. It is a moral disorder, which creates the conditions necessary to its own existence, and fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction. It paints a hateful picture according to its own diseased imagination, and distorts the features of the fancied original to suit the portrait. As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate,” Frederick Douglass wrote in “The Color Line,” an essay published by The North American Review in June 1881.

In the essay, Douglass brilliantly traces a history of tribalism across Europe before it washed up on the shores of the United States where it took on a new corrupted form, using the construction of race to undermine and call in to doubt the veracity of every word written in the Declaration of Independence. Here, the expansion of tribalism projected onto race created psychopathic ideologies that provided a pretext by which the government could create of a nation founded on the twin engines of slavery and genocide.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

László Moholy-Nagy: Future Present

Posted on December 19, 2016

Artwork: László Moholy-Nagy, A 19, 1927. Oil and graphite on canvas, 80 x 95.5 cm. Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, MI.

“Designing is not a profession but an attitude’ László Moholy-Nagy asserted in his 1947 book Vision in Motion, which was published a year after his death, with the cool self-assurance that came from a life dedicated to the integration of technology and the arts.

Born in Hungary in 1895, Moholy-Nagy moved to Vienna in 1919, then Berlin the following year. In 1923 he began teaching at the Bauhaus, a celebrated German art school that became famous for utilizing design as the bridge between crafts and fine art. The schools influence was so strong it became a style in its own right, influencing Modern design, architecture, and art.

It was here that Moholy-Nagy perfected his approach, allowing him to work in media as diverse as painting, photography, film, sculpture, advertising, product design, and theater sets with the ultimate goal of putting art to use. Believing that “The experience of space is not a privilege of the gifted few, but a biological function,” Moholy-Nagy set forth to create work that served the people.

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Categories: Art, 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.

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.”

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