Posts from the “Crave” Category

Walton Ford: The Black Panther

Posted on May 17, 2016

Artwork: Walton Ford, Zürichsee, 2015 watercolor, gouache and ink on paper 41 ½ x 59 ¾ inches unframed, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York.

Picture it: Winter in Switzerland. The year was 1933. A black panther, held against her will inside the Zürich Zoo. Described as “Extremely timid,” she was had been captured in the will and brought in as the mate for a male already living in captivity. Within two weeks, injuries were discovered on her forepaw and right hind leg. On the morning of October 11, her cage was discovered empty.

According to the investigation, the panther squeezed her body through a break in the roof bars and out of the building through a partly open slatted ventilator. The panther had vanished without a trace. In the traps set for her, a few half-wild dogs were caught. For nearly ten weeks, this great creature of the tropics alluded capture, surviving by her wits and instinct in a foreign and hostile environment.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Secret Histories | Pete Brook: Prison Obscura

Posted on May 16, 2016

Photo: Anonymous, courtesy of Steve Davis, Incarcerated girls at Remann Hall, Tacoma, Washington, reenact restraint techniques in a pinhole camera workshop, 2002.

In the United States of America, there is a hidden one percent, the one percent the lives behind bars, incarcerated in the belly of the beast. One any given day, 2.2 million men, women, and children live within one of the more than 5,000 locked facilities located across the nation. Mass incarceration comes with a price tag of $70 billion per year that is thrust upon the taxpayers, while private corporations line their pockets with profits.

The prison industrial complex exploded in 1980, under the auspices of President Ronald Reagan, who reaped what Richard Nixon had sewn a decade before when he created the “War on Drugs” as a cover story to destroy minority communities. Over the past 36 years, the prison system has quadrupled in size, creating a crisis level event that is hidden from public sight.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Kansuke Yamamoto

Posted on May 1, 2016

Photo: Kansuke Yamamoto. Reminiscence, 1953/2015. Platinum and palladium prints on archival paper. Image size: 40.6 x 49.3 cm. Paper size: 50.6 x 60.7 cm

The son of an amateur Pictorialist, Kansuke Yamamoto (1914–1987) developed and interest in poetry as a teenager. After spending a year in Tokyo studying French poetry at the French Literature Department of Meiji University, he dropped out and returned to Nagoya, his hometown, where he acquainted himself with the poetry of Chiru Yamanaka. An important Surrealist artist who published Ciné, a magazine of Surrealist poetry, Yamanaka took Yamamoto as his protégé. Yamamoto embraced photography as a visual means to communicate ideas. He first began taking photographs in 1931 at the age of seventeen, creating an incredible body of work that speaks to the Surrealist impulse.

Yamamoto owed much to his father, Goro Yamamoto, who owned a photo-supply shop in Nagoya and cofounded the Aiyu Photography Club, the largest amateur photo-club in the town. Although Yamamoto did not embrace the Pictorialist trends prevalent in the Club and the salon style exhibitions of the day, the exposure to photography was invaluable.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan, Photography

Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931–1950

Posted on April 5, 2016

Artwork: San Francisco Night View, Bay Bridge and Battleship Searchlights and Lights of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda in Distance, 1938

The “good old days.” Everyone’s talking about ‘em. They exist as a hazy, faded memory of glory and gold, of a time when everything was shiny and new. The sky’s the limit, possibility’s infinite—all your dreams can come true. It is nothing short of heaven on earth. To tell people it’s a fantasy is just a hard way to go; people pin their hopes to the illusions life bestows. And they fuel this illusion with artifacts from the past.

Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931–1950 by Jeffrey L. Meikle (University of Texas Press) is the blueprint for the vision of the country at its greatest heights. Perhaps it was the fact that these images of grandeur were created during the height of the Great Depression and the early postwar years, that this these are the images held so near and dear to the country’s identity. It was do or die, survival was on the line, and every last bit counted.

It’s hard to imagine, but back then, the postcard was at the cutting edge of communication technology; at the same time, imagine getting beautiful cards with brief notes in the mail. What better way to say, “Thinking of you,” then to send an image to be shared? Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago understood this very need, establishing themselves as the originator of the linen postcard. Their designs featured vividly colorized landscapes and cityscapes taken across the nation, from sea to shining sea, even going so far as the Lava Fountains in Hawaii National Park. The result was a series of images that came to define America’s golden age.

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Artwork: A Breaker on Atlantic Ocean, 1933

Categories: Art, Books, Crave

Border Cantos: Richard Misrach | Guillermo Galindo

Posted on April 3, 2016

Richard Misrach. Wall, East of Nogales, Arizona, 2015. Pigment print, 60 x 80 inches. Edition 1 of 5. © Richard Misrach, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

A barrier 1,969 miles in length runs through the southwestern desert separating Mexico and the United States, a physical symbol of the international politics of the new millennium. It is not one continuous wall, but rather a series of walls and fences strategically placed to inhibit the illegal border crossings. The barriers were built as part of three larger “Operations” in California, Texas, and Arizona enacted by President George W. Bush in 2006 with the intention to create a border protection/anti-terrorism/illegal immigration triple threat.

For the past decade, the wall has been a source of great debate, a subject that inflames the hearts of countless Americans on both sides of the issue. More recently, the wall has been invoked by Donald Trump, who cast it in a starring role in his campaign, stating, “I would would a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me —and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

The border wall is more than a symbol of the power to divide; it is a symbol of the ability to control minds. The United States is a country populated exclusively by the descendants of immigrants and survivors of genocide; when Trump invokes the creation of a great wall he overtly aligns himself on the wrong side of history.

In a curious confluence of events, photographer Richard Misrach and composer Guillermo Galindo have collaborated on Border Cantos, a new exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, California, now through July 26, 2016. The exhibition features 36 monumental landscape photographs by Misrach alongside 17 hand-crafted musical instruments created by Galindo from found objects recovered from the border. A discarded food can becomes the resonating chamber of an instrument modeled on a single-stringed Chinese erhu; empty shot gun shells are strung together to create a variation of a West African shaker. Accompanying the artwork is a sound installation featuring three pieces composed by Galindo made from the sculptures on view, bringing the experience of crossing the desert to life in a way that alternately be stills and overwhelms.

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Guillermo Galindo. Micro Orchestra, 2014. Found child’s tennis shoes. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions

Arlene Gottfried: Bacalaitos & Fireworks

Posted on March 21, 2016

Photo: Puerto Rican Day Parade. ©Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

Arlene Gottfried is a New York original. Hailing from Brooklyn, Ms. Gottfried moved from Coney Island to Crown Heights when she was just ten years old, living in the area during the 1960s, as white flight and Civil Rights changed the face of the neighborhood. In the 1970s, Gottfried lived in the Village while studying photography at F.I.T. After her father had died, the family moved to the Lower East Side. Back then, it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, rich in traditions native to the island, which, when combined with local influence, produced its very own style: Nuyorican.

Nuyorican is rhythms, horns, strings, and winds—or it is simply spoken word filling the air. Best exemplified by Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poet’s Café, it is a state of mind in the place to be. Nuyorican is a street vendor selling fried codfish fritters and fireworks on July 4, announcing his wares as he made his way up and down the street shouting: “Bacalaitos y Fireworks!”

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Communion. ©Arlene Gottfried, courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.

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

Carrie Mae Weems: Considered

Posted on March 16, 2016

A Distant View. Gelatin silver print . 20” x 20” © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

American photographer Carrie Mae Weems got her first camera when she was 21 as a birthday present from her then-boyfriend. She remembers, “At that point politics as my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.”

Over the past four decades, Weems has developed a complex body of art that employs photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video to explore the complexities African American life and history in her artwork. It is a mission she has chosen, and to which she has dedicated her life. Weems observes, “Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.”

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Mike Brodie: Tones of Dirt and Blood

Posted on March 14, 2016

Photo: Brontez. San Francisco, California. ©Mike Brodie, courtesy of Twin Palms Publishers

In the afterword of Tones of Dirt and Blood (Twin Palms), photographer Mike Brodie describes a moment so completely, it is easy to forget these are only words: “My first memory was when I was one year old. Imagine that? Lying by a river bed. Arizona is hot in the summer, and even worse when you have an earache. No pants on, screaming and crying like it would help or something, my face bright RED. The blanket I was lying on made of prickly pear green wool. If that cloth was still around it would tell you a story. But it’s long gone, underground somewhere, tired.”

Brodie’s words beautifully conjure an image in the mind’s eye that looks just like his photographs: coarse, vulnerable, and exposed to the elements, full of raw emotion and pure energy. The colors are both sharp and dull, the light bright, the dark murky, evoking a feeling of the undertow. The photographs in Tones of Dirt and Blood were made between 2004 and 2006 while Brodie traveled throughout the United States. They were taken with a Polaroid camera and Time Zero film, using a distinct color palette that evokes memories of late twentieth-century America in all its analog glory.

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Photography

Donald Ellis Gallery: Plains Indian Ledger Drawings 1865–1900

Posted on March 3, 2016

Artwork: Attributed to Bears Heart (Nokkoist) b. 1851 d. 1882. Southern Cheyenne. Executed at Fort Marion ca. 1875-78. watercolour, graphite and coloured pencil on paper, width: 11 1/4”, height: 8 5/8”.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the American West was transformed into a mythical landscape, a wide open frontier of flora and fauna populated by a native race that was all that stood between newly-arriving American dreams of Manifest Destiny. Many had the idea that they were pioneers, making a “discovery,” and in doing so a new era came to pass. Herds of buffalo were systematically exterminated and native peoples were forced on to reservations. In brief, America effectively began to erase itself.

Historically speaking, the term “Plains Indians” refers to tribal groups originating in the vast grasslands lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfoot, and Comanche, among others. Rich with traditions of oral and pictorial histories, the Plains Indians told their story as the environment demanded. The earliest records show petroglyphs and pictographic painting on rock walls; later they embellished buffalo hide tipi covers, shields, and personal garments with scenes bearing witness to major events. After the buffalo disappeared, they began to work on muslin, canvas, and commercial prepared hides, as well as on pages from lined accounting ledgers made widely available to Plains Indians peoples in the reservation period, roughly after 1860.

A selection of these artworks is currently on view at Donald Ellis Gallery, New York (Booth #238). This is the gallery’s first time at The Armory Show, and is indicative of an rising interest of the Plains Indian ledger drawings (1865-1900). Ellis, who established his gallery in 1976, is considered the foremost dealer of historical Native American art. He remembers his first encounter with ledger drawings was in 1996 at and exhibition at the Drawing Center. He recalls, “It set New York on its ear. People flipped out. That planted the seed. I consider this one of the most important aspects of American art history.”

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan

Builder Levy: Appalachia USA

Posted on February 22, 2016

Photo: Builder Levy. Sisters, Osage, Scotts Run, Monongalia, West Virginia, 1970. Gold-toned gelatin silver print.

Appalachia that stretches across the eastern United States, running from New York down to northern Mississippi. The former hunting grounds of the Cherokee and other indigenous groups, Appalachia became home to colonists seeking to escape oppressive British rule. Later, it was marked by the routes and hideouts of slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. Growing into a center of abolitionism, more than a quarter million southern mountaineers joined the Union army during the Civil War.

But it was after the war that things began to change, as Appalachia was recognized as a distinctive cultural region in the late nineteenth century. Large-scale logging and coal mining firms brought industry to the region, taking advantage of the abundant natural resources of the land. Miners were recruited from southern prison conscript labor, local subsistence farms, African American communities in the south, and even towns and villages throughout Europe.

Despite the profits made by the mining and logging companies, the people of Appalachia have long struggled with poverty, as health care and educational facilities failed to meet the communities’ needs. At the same time, the region became a source of enduring myths and distortions about its inhabitants. As the media began focusing on sensationalized stories like moonshining and clan feuding, Appalachia became seen as America’s white ghetto, home to an uneducated and violent underclass.

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

Chris “Daze” Ellis: The City is My Muse

Posted on February 18, 2016

Chris “Daze” Ellis, The Odyssey, 2015, Oil and spray paint on canvas, Courtesy of the Artist

The New York City of Chris “Daze” Ellis’s world is a beautiful, hypnotic siren singing the softest of lullabies or just as quickly drop a beat and rhyme on top of it. She’s demanding, but she gives as good as she gets. She’s the queen befitting a king, and has found herself the subject of Chris “Daze” Ellis: The City is My Muse, on view at the Museum of New York, NY, now through May 1, 2016. Ellis observes, “This exhibition is a testament to my love affair with New York as my muse. It is an endless source of subject matter and an inspiration for many years. A muse is someone or something that captures your attention and imagination in a way that presents endless possibilities. New York is like that for me.”

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