Posts from the “Crave” Category

Give Thanks: 7 Ways to Help the Water Protectors at Standing Rock

Posted on November 23, 2016

Photo: After a prayer march to Backwater Bridge, protesters are lead in a defiant cheer by an elder and descendant of Chief Sitting Bull (the gentleman in the white jacket) against North Dakota State Police, who have been permanently deployed on the north side of the bridge. This photo was taken on the south side of the Backwater Bridge, which has been blockaded by the police, and was the site of Sunday’s incident with the water cannon, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas assault. Photo © Matt Hamon

Although a Federal court ruled for a delay in the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on November 14, the police action against unarmed protestors gathered at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, continues to escalate with acts extreme force.

Most recently, on the evening of Sunday, November 20, as temperatures dipped down to 26 degrees Fahrenheit, law enforcement officials blasted hundreds of people with water cannons near Oceti Sakowin camp. Video can be seen at The Guardian.

Standing behind a barbed wire fence, militarized police dressed in riot gear also launch concussion grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas, injuring 300 people; 26 were taken to area hospitals, while 21 year-old New York resident Sophia Wilansky, who was air lifted to County Medical Center in Minneapolis, where she has been undergoing extensive surgery to save her arm from amputation after being hit by a grenade.

Since August 10 of this year, thousands of activists from across the United States have come together at Standing Rock to protest the construction of DAPL. Calling themselves “Water Protectors,” the activists are unarmed, using peaceful means of protest against the destruction of sacred lands and the environment. The response of the federal, state, and local governments have included a 12-day “No Fly Zone,” sound cannon blasts, tear gas and pepper spray, and hundreds of arrests on trumped up charges.

This Thanksgiving, we invite you to give real thanks to the people risking their lives to protect the water supply of 17 million Americans in four states. Here are some ways you can stand tall with Standing Rock.

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Categories: Crave

Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950

Posted on November 22, 2016

Dance in Tehuantepec, 1928, by Diego Rivera (Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr. Collection) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At the age of 80, after nearly 35 years of continuous rule, Mexican President General Porfirio Díaz gave an interview announcing he would not run for re-election in the 1910 elections. Then he changed his mind—sparking the Mexican Revolution (which has been traditionally celebrated on November 20).

For ten years the conflict raged, plunging the nation into a civil war between the Constitutionalists and the revolutionaries lead by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Foreign powers, most significantly, the United States, played a significant role in trying to protect their economic and strategic interests in Mexico. By the end of the revolution 10% of Mexico’s population of 15 million had died, while some 200,000 refugees fled, many going north of the border.

Read the Full Story at Crave Online

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Latin America, Painting

Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943-2016

Posted on November 22, 2016

Photo: Humberto Sandoval, Still from Sr. Tereshkova, 1975, sepia tone photograph on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

“One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom,” American actor Vincent Price (1911-1993). Best known for his distinctive voice, a somber and thrilling timber, and his performances in horror films, Price was also an aficionado of the arts, a collector and historian who donated 90 pieces from his personal collection to establish the first “art teaching collection” housed at a community college—East Los Angeles College, to be exact—in 1957. In recognition of his gift, the college renamed the art gallery the Vincent Price Museum.

Over the past 50 years, the collection has grown to include 9,000 objects and showcased more than 100 exhibitions designed to serve the community of some 35,000 students who enroll each year. Five months ago, Pilar Tompkins Rivas took up the mantle as Director of the Museum, and decided to create an exhibition that would speak to the history of the community over the past eight decades.

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

Legendary DJ and Club Innovator David Mancuso Dies at 72

Posted on November 15, 2016

Photo: American nightclub owner David Mancuso, owner of the Loft disco on Prince Street in SoHo, meets with the SoHo Artists’ Association to discuss their complaints, New York, New York, October 14, 1974. (Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)

With every passing, 2016 solidifies its place as one of the greatest times of transition in recent memory. Most recently, legendary New York City DJ and club innovator David Mancuso (October 20, 1944-November 14, 2016) died. His death marks the end of an era in many respects, reminding us that downtown New York has long ceased to be the hub of innovation and creativity.

Mancuso pioneered the “private party” at his home at 647 Broadway at Bleecker Street. Back then, the neighborhood was filled with raw, desolate space that was once the site of a bustling industrial companies. Into the void, artists came, willing to live and work in spaces that were not zoned for residential use nor up to code. The Do-It-Yourself of ethos of the time was taking shape, as visionaries worked with what they had, and in doing so, created an entirely new world.

Mancuso took up residence in 1965, throwing about half a dozen rent parties over the next five years. On February 14, 1970, he hosted an invitation-only party called “Love Saves the Day,” which he marks as the official beginning of The Loft, by which the space would later be known.

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

Before the Flood

Posted on November 15, 2016

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1480-1505, oil

Before the Flood, the new National Geographic documentary film by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens and Academy Award-winning actor and United Nations Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio, opens with an image of The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Heironymous Bosch between 1480-1505. The triptych, on view at the Prado Museum, Madrid, one of the most famous paintings in Western art history, shows the Fall of mankind, as we travel from the pleasures of the Garden of Eden through the complex world of virtue and vice, to a dark and devastating Hell that offers no respite from it all.

DiCaprio muses on this painting, a poster of which hung over his crib, becoming his first visual memory; indeed it leaves an indelible impression upon all who encounter it. We recognize ourselves in the second and central panel, finding our way in the world, overcome by the complex mixture of beauty and perversion, virtue and vice. Eden, while idyllic, seems impossible, but it is Hell that strains our imagination so much that we hope to never know what might befall us in this realm.

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Categories: Crave

Dawoud Bey: Harlem Redux

Posted on November 15, 2016

A Couple Walking, Harlem, 2015. © Dawoud Bey, Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery

Harlem. The name speaks for itself, eliciting images of African-American life in its many-splendored forms throughout the twentieth century. Harlem came into vogue as the Great Migration sent thousands of southern black folk up north beginning in 1905. By the 1920s, the neighborhood became a focal point for artists from all walks of life, giving birth to the legendary Harlem Renaissance.

Harlem, which had originally been developed in the nineteenth century as an exclusive suburb for the white upper class, was home to stately homes, grand avenues, and places like the Polo Grounds and the Harlem Opera House. With this backdrop, a new culture came forth, one that celebrated African Americans and Afro Caribbean arts and history.

But with the Great Depression and the deindustrialization of New York City after World War II, Harlem fell victim to de facto segregation practices like red lining, which denied services like banking, insurance, healthcare, mortgages, credit cards, and retail to the black community. Adding to this, there was an influx of drugs in a war waged by the Nixon White House designed to corrupt and criminalize African American communities.

By the 1970s, Harlem, like much of New York’s black and Latino communities, had been decimated, left as a shell of its former glory. Yet at the same time, it was a strong, committed community, one built by Mom and Pop businesses going back decades. This was the Harlem that photographer Queens-native Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) documented for his first completed project, Harlem USA, made between 1975-1979.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan

Empire: An Arturo Vega Retrospective

Posted on November 10, 2016

Artwork: Arturo Vega, Empire, 1989 Acrylic and Silkscreen on Canvas. 80 1/4 x 132 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches, Individual panels: 80 1/4 x 20 1/4 and 80 1/4 x 30 1/4 and 80 1/4 x 31 1/4 and 80 1/4 x 25 1/4

Arturo Vega: you may not know his name but you assuredly know his work, as the Ramones logo is one of the most replicated images on earth. The mastermind behind it all was a tireless workhorse who toured with the band for more than two decades and nearly 2,263 live shows as the art and lighting director. And when he wasn’t on tour he could be found in his loft at 6 East 2nd Street at Bowery in the East Village, producing artwork of his own, or on the scene, out supporting fledgling artists with advice, a place to work, or straight up purchasing their pieces to put money in their pocket.

Vega, who died in 2013 at the age of 65, hailed from Chihuahua, Mexico, where he was an artist and activist until the 1968, when he fled the country after being arrested en masse with 148 of the country’s most notable artists, poets, and intellectuals including filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. With the government carrying out disappearances, torture, and extralegal executions, Vega fled to New York, which he had already visited a few times, establishing a network with prominent figures including music publicist Jane Friedman.

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Photo by Miss Rosen

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting

Jamel Shabazz: Pieces of a Man

Posted on November 8, 2016

Photo: Untitled, East Flatbush, 1990. © Jamel Shabazz

Pieces of a Man (Art Voices Art Books), the newest monograph by legendary photographer Jamel Shabazz, is a tremendous undertaking, bringing us around the world and across time, yet always able to center on what we all share as human beings. The title speaks to the way in which each of us are so many things in this life and on this earth, with each photograph capturing a facet of our infinite complexity. The book, like the individual, proves that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, and yet sometimes we feel fragmented, or must only reveal one part of ourselves, and still remain authentic to our souls.

Pieces of a Man is a story of love and loss, of joy and pain, of life and death and rebirth with each page. It’s like listening to a classic album like What’s Going On—absolutely overwhelming and yet, you want to listen to it over and over. Shabazz talks with Crave, providing us with a treasure trove of insight and inspiration.

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Photo: Waiting, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 2012. © Jamel Shabazz

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Crave, Photography

Willy Spiller: Hell on Wheels

Posted on November 7, 2016

SUBWAY NEW YORK, 1977-1984 © by Willy Spiller 2016

Warm and faded colors of yesterday, oversaturated with blues and yellows, create a nostalgic haze enveloping with a warm embrace, reminding us of a time that has come and gone in just about every single way.

Willy Spiller’s photographs of the New York City subway system circa 1979 capture the feeling of the city at a crucial time. Two years after the brink of bankruptcy, the city struggled to come back from abject neglect and abuse under the federal government’s policy of benign neglect. As white flight took hold and the city was abandoned en masse, what remained with the True Yorkers who would not—or could not—leave the city that never sleeps.

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SUBWAY NEW YORK, 1977-1984 © by Willy Spiller 2016, courtesy of Sturm & Drang.

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

Make Art Not War

Posted on November 1, 2016

“Harriet Tubman lives!,” artist unknown, n.d. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,” Pablo Picasso observed, drawing attention to the fundamental cycle of existence: from nothing, something; from something, nothing—ad infinitum.

People, being creatures of habit as much as will, often find themselves leaning heavily towards one side or the other. We gravitate towards what is familiar, either to our character or to our experience, inclined to preserve that comforts of the known, trying to avoid the inevitable turn that must come. We may fight it within ourselves, longing to escape fate, or we may find ourselves in conflict with society and the power structure that initiates change.

Invariably, we struggle with the nature of life, this eternal cycle of creation and destruction that causes so much misery and strife—until we can come to terms with this duality and make peace with it. For some, this peace comes with integrating opposition into the creative process: this is the art of protest.

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Artwork: Reproduction of a poster by Jose Gomez Fresquet, printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective, 1967. Courtesy of the CWLU Herstory Project. Courtesy of Tamiment Library Poster and Broadside Collection. Tamiment library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Bronx, Crave

Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity

Posted on October 31, 2016

© Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/ Singapore; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; David Zwirner, New York, © Yayoi Kusama.

“I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland,’ Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama declares. At the age of 87, Kusama is one of the most famous living artists on earth, becoming known the world over for her mindblowing installations of the infinite.

With the polka dot as the basis for her work, Kusama has taken the most finite form and rendered it limitless. She explains, “A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots can’t stay alone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement… Polka-dots are a way to infinity.”

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Women